Overall, the Comdex experience this year left me with a bad taste in my mouth.
The show is getting unwieldy, spread out in three venues around Las Vegas and leaving visitors spending more time moving between venues than in the exhibit halls.
But what hit me immediately was how vendors are unashamed to cast the battles in the technology industry as holy wars between believers and infidels.
The first show I sat down to watch was in the Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) booth. The x86 microprocessor market has long been one of the most hotly contested segments of the computer industry, with users explicitly choosing AMD or Cyrix in favour of Intel to make a statement, with industry analysts and the media defining the issues in terms of a religious battle.
Even so, the companies themselves have been careful not to cross the line in such bold, holy-war terms - but AMD did just that at Comdex. The firms product show started with a gospel choir singing a range of songs which extolled AMD in the same glowing terms one might hear Jesus Christ, God or the Divine Spirit glorified in a church.
This was followed by a sermon delivered by a protagonist character cast as a Southern Baptist minister reminding us that 'He believes in the Power [of] AMD!' to be joined in song by the choir on repeated occasions.