The joke at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was inspired by the freak weather. When cold rain switched briefly to flurries, people started saying, "Look at that, hell really does freeze over."

But snow in Vegas wasn't the only surprise. Hiding in plain sight amid the consumer electronics and home and vehicular entertainment vendors were button-down business vendors. When I asked the rep from Corda Technologies, which makes data presentation (graphing) software, why his company was there, he grinned and said, "Hoping to see you here," meaning Network World.

Others, like start-up Anthology Solutions, tried to please everybody with its new Yellow Machine, a 1.6T-byte network-attached storage box with an eight-port switch that does RAID 0, 1 and 5. When I asked about the target market, the rep said, "Oh, this box is perfect for small offices, corporate branch offices, remote offices and ..." almost as an afterthought, "for home entertainment and digital pictures."

Vendors weren't only trying to target every segment with one product, they also offered products for every segment. Everybody, for example, has a media player. Microsoft, which puts the Media Center PC at the heart of the digital home, showed a DVD-Recorder built on Windows CE that it's co-developing with LG Electronics. A DVD-R from Microsoft? Would you buy a plasma TV from Dell?

Zetera, a start-up with promising IP-based storage technology that scales to the enterprise, debuted its SANS box first for consumers and small offices by partnering with Netgear. Zetera says because "the technology is unproven," it wants to start on the low end and trickle up. RAID for consumers?

Another prevalent theme was the idea of going from "time shifting" - using a DVR to record programming to watch when you want - to "place shifting" - accessing home network content from a portable or mobile device such as a handheld player, cell phone or friend's PC. TiVo, Orb Networks, Sling Media, Archos and surely others have some play on the idea.

Of course, for place shifting, you need digital rights management (DRM). But between Microsoft's Windows Media DRM 10, DTCP-IP, which is supported by Intel and many CE players, and RealNetworks' Helix DRM 10, we're covered. And most agree we can avert a DRM standards war by including enough processing power in player devices to support them all.