CompuTex is not Comdex

I started off the week writing that Comdex lives in Taiwan.

In fact CompuTex is not Comdex. This became clear to me over the last two days, while talking with CompuTex buyers.

(Leonard Nimoy called his first autobiography I Am Not Spock. He called his second, to the right, I Am Spock. Proof positive that you only learn when you change your mind.)

Many buyers in Taiwan this week were like the old Comdex crowd. They were looking for solutions.

The difference between Comdex and CompuTex is they were not finding solutions. Only parts.

Consider the Aussie I met in a cab today. He works for a reconstruction outfit. If a car runs into your house his guys come out, work up an estimate, then bid the job, saving the smaller ones for themselves.

What he wanted, he said, was a way to speed his process. Right now his estimators may go on six calls a day, talking into Dictaphones, taking photographs, working up gross estimates. Then they have to come in and spend a day finding bidders and getting the ball rolling.

We talked about ways you can speed things up. Ditch the Dictaphone and e-mail a sound file. Use tablets to complete forms that can also be e-mailed, with pictures as attachments. Then have the office collecting bids and starting work before the estimators get back. Cut the turnaround time in half.

Intriguing, he said, but what he has works. He is really just looking at gear that can improve things on the margins.

That's because transformation takes software. It takes systems. Someone has to write to the API, someone has to produce an integrated set of forms, or form-writing tools, that can be used to get the job done in a new way.

In the old Comdex days there were VARs who did this. Some exhibited, others did not. You could get your hands on software that would, in time, deliver your solution.

At CompuTex it's just pieces. It's hardware. It's like seeing tools without seeing the machine.

In America, this solutions business has moved online, with telephone support and real people coming out to the big accounts. But because so much of our hardware comes from Taiwan and China there is a disconnect between what the software people are doing and what the hardware is capable of.

Microsoft is taking advantage of this. Windows is about the only software system these OEMs understand. So Microsoft developers will, within a few weeks, be developing with CompuTex' hardware capabilities, and within some months will start selling the results.

After my cab ride I felt a bit like my Aussie friend. There are immense profits to be had in putting this hardware together with new concepts around software and networking. But all I'm seeing are pieces, and a few players walking away with all the margin.

This was the message Jim Zemlin had for CompuTex attendees. With open source new hardware combinations are possible. With open source new solutions can be written before CompuTex, with today's hardware makers becoming tomorrow's brand names.

In computing everything is about building new business models that squeeze out the margins of someone else, capturing them for new players.

Someone is going to figure out how to turn CompuTex into Comdex. That someone is going to make a lot of money.

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com