Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

1999 all over again

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 4 Jan 07, 12:35 PM

November 1999 and the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ is finally persuaded to send me on my first trip to Las Vegas. It's the height of the dot com boom and the Comdex computer industry show is bound to provide some good stories.

But we're on a tight budget - the team is me and a producer rather nervously carrying a cheap camcorder, and outside the motel where we're lodged in a seedy part of town there's a drive-by shooting on the first night.

The big story revolves - as ever - around Bill Gates and Microsoft. Will the software giant be broken up by the US Department of Justice? Will its dominance at last be threatened as Linux emerges as a credible operating system?

We also chose to shoot a piece on the challenge posed by Britain's Psion which some believed was the David that could down Microsoft's Goliath, with its Symbian operating system for mobile phones.

We couldn't afford a satellite feed so had to take our material back to London to be edited and broadcast a few days later - and perhaps fortunately the main news bulletins chose not to run our Psion report.

Flash forward to January 2007 and we're back in Las Vegas in rather greater strength.

This time it's the Consumer Electronics Show - but now the computer giants are determined to move their products from the back bedroom to the living-room, I think it'll feel much the same as Comdex.

For one thing, the whole event kicks off with a Bill Gates keynote on Sunday evening - we're expecting more details on Microsoft's campaign to convince us that its new products will be at the centre of family entertainment.

This time, with CES receiving blanket coverage online and on radio and television, we will have to bring the news as it happens rather than shipping it back. But new technology now means we can shoot and edit more economically, and then send our reports via broadband at a fraction of the cost of a satellite feed.

To complicate matters, the other big noise of the technology world is making his play for the connected household. But Apple's Steve Jobs won't be in Las Vegas - his MacWorld keynote address is six hundred miles away in San Francisco on Tuesday morning.

So after a lot of head-scratching we've decided to take a day trip away from CES in the expectation that Mr Jobs will stride onto the stage in his black polo neck and neatly pressed jeans - and pull something shiny and exciting out of his pocket.

So Steve - and Bill - please don't disappoint us. Jobs v Gates makes a good story - and we're counting on both of you to come out fighting.