Tokyo Business Show '94 : mini report

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

Date: Thu, 19 May 94 11:45:13 +0900
From: Bruce Hahne <bruce () jise isl melco co jp>
]
Yesterday (Wed. 5/18) I attended Business Show '94 in Tokyo, so I thought
I'd write a few comments on what I saw (or didn't see).  The show filled
7 exhibition halls and I only had time to see 3 of them, so I had to
skip a lot.


The focus of this show is (mostly) on information technology for
businesses, though there did seem to be a lot of companies there pushing
lamination machines, stationery, package-binding machines, and even one
booth advertising ball-point pens.  However, the bulk of the booths were
advertising computers, software, or computer peripherals.


I saw gobs of personal computers, plenty of portables, and a lot of Unix
workstations.  Almost everything was either running Windows or Unix
(usually X/Motif as the GUI), and I only saw one Macintosh other than
the 3 at the Apple display.  Sorry to say this to anybody who works for
Apple, but it doesn't look as if your machines are catching on in the
business sector they way they've caught on in the U.S.  I'm a bit
surprised, since my suspicion is that Apple's Japanese Language Kit is
friendlier to use than Windows/J; this is not based on personal
experience, but simply on my opinion that Apple's system/finder is
friendlier than Windows 3.1 and that I think Apple has a tradition of
being better at user interface design than Microsoft.  (Flames to email
or /dev/null, please... :-)


I also saw lots of fax machines, printers, fancy telephones, pagers, and
quite a few PDA's.  Maybe everyone's in a hurry to clone the Newton.
Client-server was also a big buzzword in a lot of displays, especially
from the big guys like Toshiba, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, etc.


The big question I have is:  where was all of the routing equipment??
If I were at a similar show in the U.S., I would hope I'd see a lot of
ethernet hubs, token ring hubs, routers, gateways, wireless routers,
etc.  The show suggested to ME, at least, that right now Japan is big on
selling computers to business people but not nearly so big on connecting
computers together.


I was keeping my eyes out for the magic word "Internet" in katakana, but
I saw it almost not at all.  I did manage to find one AT&T SPIN/JENS
handout, not from an AT&T booth (AT&T did not attend, though NTT was of
course there), but rather from the table of a small business software
consortium hiding in obscurity in the back of one of the exhibition
halls.  The brochure is almost content-free; just a single fold-out with
a brief mention of Gopher, email, WAIS, netnews, and a few other
services inside.  It's all text; no pictures of Mosaic or anything
interesting at all, for that matter. If I were trying to sell Internet
to Japanese businesses, I think I'd push  "internationalization" and
"globalization", two nice buzzwords here in Japan.  And at least show
some pretty pictures of NTT's Japanese WWW home page, or something
similar.  Maybe AT&T still needs to figure out how to advertise SPIN.
On the other hand, they do have at least 50 SPIN participants already; a
full list was recently posted to one of our local newsgroups.


The "display worth the most giggles" award goes to Panasonic for trying,
with a straight face, to present 3DO as a business system. (By the way,
is 3DO now widely available in the U.S.?)  They suggested using it for
interactive staff training and a couple of other possible business uses,
but most of the businessmen at the 3DO display seemed more interested in
trying out the video games.


Immediately adjacent to the 3DO display, NEC stole the show by
presenting a real-time unrigged demo of their outlook on interactive
multimedia.  They had a large stage with a central multi-panel screen
about 8 feet by 8 feet, plus other smaller monitors mounted high up so
that you could see even if you were in back.  The real star of the show
was their 10-channel ATM video switcher (total bandwidth over 1Gbps, I
believe) which sat prominently at center stage.  As the hostesses gave
their spiel, video cameras mounted in the ceiling of the stage were
broadcasting them in real-time onto the central screen along with a lot
of prerecorded PR graphics.  I know all of this is not too hard to do
with today's technology, but every time in the past that I've seen a
demo of "real time video", what I end up seeing is either a very tiny
image, a very sluggishly-updated image, or a very fuzzy image, with
things getting worse if you start mixing in computer-generated graphics
with the camera view(s).


We also got to see a demo of NEC's view of the future of home shopping
coupled with interactive video; Ichiro calls his girlfriend Maiko and
they talk over their real-time video phone, then they click on the
shopping menu, go searching through a list of dresses, bring up a video
clip of a (western) model showing off Maiko's favorite dress, and
finally cut to an operator to place an order.  Both Ichiro and Maiko
were played by a live actor and actress, so this was no prerecorded
demo; as they spoke, you saw them talking on the central screen.  I
didn't find the home shopping example to be a very good one, though; do
you really want to buy an expensive item of clothing when you haven't
even tried it on?


So, whether it's old hat technology to some of you or not, the above was
a welcome change from the large numbers of presentations selling yet
another 486DX66 box, Unix box, or color printer.  Even though I may not
agree with NEC's vision of the future, I was glad to see that they're
thinking about it.


Bruce Hahne
hahne () acm org
No, I don't work for NEC. :)
I speak only for myself.