Monday marked the end of an era at the Consumer Electronics Show, the tech industry’s gigantic annual gadget fest in Las Vegas.
Steve Ballmer’s keynote speech that evening was the
last one scheduled by a Microsoft CEO after a 13-year run. And after
this year’s show, the company is pulling out of CES entirely.
Some will say Microsoft’s departure is long overdue.
With the shift away from PCs and Windows as the center of the tech
universe, the company’s influence has been on the wane for years.
Ballmer’s speeches of recent years have often offered little news or
insight.
But Microsoft’s departure says more about the state
of the giant trade show than it does about the software company. Its
move underscores that the show isn’t as important as it once was. And I
think its departure will mark the beginning of the end of CES as the
tech industry’s major annual event.
CES’s importance as a venue for showing where
technology is going and what hit products are in the pipeline has long
been overstated. There’s often little correlation between the products
that garner attention at the show and those that end up being commercial
successes.
That disparity has been most visible in those years
when Apple, which has famously shunned CES, made a product announcement
around the same time as the show. Products such as the iPad and the
iPhone — both announced at January Apple-only events — became smash
hits, household names and industry-changing devices. Bonus points if you
remember any products announced at CES the years those products came
out.
But even when Apple hasn’t served as a distraction,
CES often hasn’t been able to deliver the goods in terms of hit products
or industry influence. Much of the buzz at last year’s show, for
example, focused on new tablets, such as Research In Motion’s PlayBook
and Motorola’s Xoom, that would rival Apple’s iPad. But those devices
ended up being commercial busts. So, too, have 3-D televisions, which TV
manufacturers have been flogging at CES for years.
Part of CES’s problem is the disappearance of the
annual product cycle. The show was established back in the days when the
electronics industry had a simple ritual. Manufacturers came to the
show to pitch to retailers the products they would be selling in the
fall.
These days, manufacturers introduce products
throughout the year and often refresh individual product lines multiple
times during a year. Products shown off in January may no longer be on
store shelves come the crucial holiday season. And products that end up
being holiday hits often are those that reach store shelves just before
the season starts.
Take Amazon’s Kindle Fire. The new tablet was
Amazon’s best-selling product this holiday season. But Amazon didn’t
unveil it until late September, eight months after CES was held.
Tech companies have learned that they don’t need CES
to draw attention to their products. It’s not just Apple that holds its
own events. Amazon did the same trick when unveiling the Kindle Fire.
And one reason Ballmer’s keynotes have included little news is that
Microsoft typically announces its products at other venues, whether its
own developer conferences or industry-specific trade shows such as the
E3 video game conference.
Indeed, such tailored conferences — big and small —
now dot the calendar throughout the year. Such events give companies the
chance to unveil products when they’re most likely to draw attention
from those most interested — rather than at CES, where they stand a good
chance of being lost in the cacophonous din.
A still bigger problem for CES is that it focuses on
hardware, whether speakers or televisions or phones. That made sense
when the most important things about electronics were their design and
technical specifications and how they looked or sounded.
But times have changed. As devices have become
“smart,” the most important thing about them is not what they look like
or the parts inside them but the software they run, particularly their
operating system or software platform.
Unfortunately for CES, with Microsoft’s departure,
the show will be virtually devoid of the most important software
platform makers in consumer technology. Not only is Apple absent, but
so, too, is Facebook. Google and Amazon have only a small presences.
Without such companies, CES’s ability to showcase the
future of technology is limited. Sure, you’re still likely to see cool
tech demos and lots of accessories for hit products. You may even see
some neat hardware.
But the real action — the debut of truly
game-changing products and the unveiling of the cool software that
powers them — won’t be found in Vegas.
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©2012 the San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.)
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