Many of you know about our cdXpo battle with Comdex. I have little to say about the history here other than that I wonder if Comdex will run again. Not a word from MediaLive since November. No news about the supposed November show! Why?

My guess is that MediaLive is waiting on Microsoft. Without Microsoft on the floor in a big way, there can be no show.

But times are a-changing. And this is where Gartner's ITXPO surfaces. Over the years this show (run annually in Orlando in the fall and San Diego in March) just might have become the "new" Comdex. Why?

The Gartner show is 100% pure Enterprise. It has a terrific seminar program. It gets all of the major Enterprise exhibitors (Gartner only allows modest booth space). AND now it has Bill Gates as a keynoter (after having had Steve Ballmer of Microsoft as keynoter last fall).

So I ask readers the following: "Does Gartner have THE Enterprise IT show for the present"?

And another trend to note: All major Enterprise organizations now run several of their own shows each year under a variety of names. These "big guys" build their events schedules and budgets around their own shows and then judiciously select a variety of vertically targeted shows to spend whatever else remains in the budgets. Thus the success of shows like our Search Engine Strategies or Wi-Fi Planet (and what I believe to be a certain success for our new Internet Planet show) or Pulver's VON shows.

So much for the future of Comdex, the future of CEBIT America, the future of CMP's TechX (formerly PC Expo). These are all truly tumbleweed shows. The action for the Enterprise IT set is now in Orlando and San Diego --- the action is where Microsoft resides.