I'd actually go so far as to say that the significance of Computex is greater for the business buyer of computers than the individual. I don't mean that individual computer enthusiasts wouldn't have a great time here. As a matter of fact, it's a heck of lot more interesting than Comdex is these days, and I know that show has its fair share of enthusiasts visiting it.

For business buyers of computers the importance of Computex is based on a number of factors:

A business buyer has to be looking at the value of his or her investment in a PC installation for at least 3 years. That means, commiting to products and specs that you have to live with for a while, and more importantly, support. Computex is great for getting the kind of lowdown on technology trends in PCs that brand name OEMs don't give you. Brand name OEMs will just sell you on their systems plans. Computex gives you the same options as the buyers at the OEMs, the systems integrators, and computer distributors. Knowledge is power. I guess, that same information is as useful to an enthusiast looking to build a new system this year, or upgrade an old one in the next few months. However, I think non-trade buyers are at some disavantage because they have to have access to supply, and they certainly won't have access to everything that is on offer here. Some distributor, or vendor determines how this stuff gets distributed. It used to be that the brand name PC OEMs would drive developments. They would invest in defining the platform, but as margins on PCs shrink, and they become commodities, the real innovation is coming from the component vendors, who hand over their ideas and designs to the Taiwanese board manufacturers, who build the products that eventually end up in your hands. So, if you are planning your IT strategy for next year, you might do well to learn from what is going here because, it is going to be more applicable to your future plans then the word out of a Compaq or Dell. I don't mean that a Compaq or Dell doesn't know what is happening down the line, but they have an obligation of getting rid of existing inventory. Taiwanese vendors at Computex are betting that there choices today will pay off in the next year, and invariably are the ones taking a risk on future supplies of chipsets, and components. Which brings to me to final point, and this is very important in understanding the kind of issues we are covering here from our less-than-healthy convention expedition: there's a lot of posturing and positioning in product announcements, and show floor displays. What you see here is not necessarily what you are going to get your hands on down the line. Products on display may not end up as products; specs and board designs change; some motherboard and chip vendors use the show to position themselves in the market rather than try and promote the sales of a specific product (I'll kind of address that issue when I talk about nForce later on). If you are a Taiwanese manufacturer, you are surviving on slim margins which means that a product that you have on your roadmap may only make it to manufacturing, or volume production once you have sufficient orders for it. Your R&D doesn't compete with that of an Intel, or AMD, for instance so, you are going to be careful about how your products are perceived or even presented. That means that we really don't have any idea what an announced motherboard today is going to actually do when it ends up in a box on the shelf of some distributor, or computer store. So, I think we are going to be revisiting the benchmarks of every product that we review here in the next couple of months, and we'll probably find that there will be a lot of revisions of our views as products make it on the market (I'll address this issue in my discussion of AMD's 760MP later in this article).

Therefore, the most important thing about Computex is that it is a harbinger of things to come, and not a definitive roadmap. You have to look for trends from the show floor, the press launches, and the hurried product previews. Time will separate the wheat from the chaff.