Comdex appears the latest victim of the combination of a recession, the terrorist attacks and fear of being a terrorist target itself. Two companies in Silicon Valley that design and build trade show booths said that all of their clients that had
planned to participate at Comdex, five in all, had decided to pull out. On the visitor side, the pullout rate is conceivable even higher.

Just how slow things will be at Comdex became clear this week in several telling ways. There were calls from sales agents from Strip hotels such as the Venetian, Paris and Mirage informing that not only are there plenty of rooms available for Comdex, but a under $150 (from the normal $270-$350 per night rate). Normally, these places are booked a year or more in advance. That probably means many big companies that usually book large blocks of rooms for the show are canceling out or sending a skeleton crew.

And when you call an airline and flights from San Jose to Las Vegas on Monday morning, the opening day of Comdex, are readily available, then you know that Comdex 2001 will be a totally dead event.

Of course, Comdex has been in a shrinking mode since its peak of 1997. This year for example, the slump in the high-tech industry already forced the Key3media group, which owns the show, to eliminate the Sands Convention Center and relocate the booths from that huge convention hall to the main Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). Four years ago, both floors of the Sands were completely sold out with exhibit booths. And the show also spilled over into the Hilton Hotel ballrooms as well.

But on the latest Comdex floor plan there were countless booth spaces in the LVCC that remain unsold just two weeks before the show. And that doesn't take into account the scores of companies that already paid for exhibit space but who simply will not show up. Two companies in Silicon Valley that design and build trade show booths said that all of their clients that had
planned to participate at Comdex, five in all, had decided to pull out. On the visitor side, the pullout rate is conceivable even higher. With companies laying off people left-and-right, the last thing any management can afford to do is send a bunch of people to Party Town even if they could afford it.

In addition to economic concerns and the expected low return on investment, many companies and people are pulling out of Comdex for an even more basic reason: Comdex itself may well be a target of terrorism.

Just consider the fact that five of the now dead terrorists that flew airplanes into the Pentagon and World Trade Center, including ring leader Mohamed Atta, met in Las Vegas on four or five occasions between May and August of this year, staying in a low-budget motel near the convention center. It is unlikely that they were in Las Vegas for pleasure as the city represents the epicenter of global sin in the view of Islamic fundamentalists. More likely, authorities believe, they were there on business, possibly planning a terrorist event on the American West Coast.

And in that context, what better target than Comdex where most of the high-tech industry that drives the American economy, gathers for the annual extravaganza. With a strike at Comdex, the terrorist would attack two major targets at once. Ideas of what such an attack could entail are anybody's guess. Speculation ranges from releasing a biochemical agent in the air flow system of the convention center, to someone sprinkling small amounts of anthrax around on the floor or on computer keyboards used by thousands. And what if some suicidal terrorist infected himself with a highly contagious disease and walked around the show for five days breathing a deadly poison upon thousands.

Just as easily terrorists could drive one or more explosive-laden trucks into the convention center or into the auditorium where Bill Gates, a prime target in itself, is giving a keynote address. If I was Gates, I would not make that keynote address without a bullet-proof wall in front of the podium where hundreds of photo journalists usually crowd to within 10 feet of him; a security nightmare if there ever was one.

There are an almost endless number of possibilities. But under the current conditions many companies and individual Comdex visitors are calculating the risk is simply too great.
And for these reasons, tens of thousands of exhibitors and show visitors have already canceled their trip to Las Vegas. If another terrorist strike occurs in the next week or so, as the FBI warned on Monday, Comdex might as well cancel itself.