WITH more than 3,100 high-tech companies showing off 20,000 new products over 1.9 million square feet of exhibit space, and 153,000 visitors attending, the Consumer Electronics Show this year in Las Vegas seemed as vibrant as ever.
So why did Jason Perlow of ZDNet predict the show’s death by 2015?
His reasons are compelling.
“This week, a number of my industry colleagues are in Las Vegas covering CES, which for the past 45 years, has been an annual showcase of products from all aspects of the consumer electronics industry,” he writes.
“However, plenty of other folks have chosen not to attend, essentially because the show over the past several years has been victim of MOTSS (More Of The Same Stuff) syndrome. There are too many players showing too many of the same exact things.
“Much of which looked exactly like the stuff they showed us the year before.
“Many of us in the media are simply content to be on vendor e-mail press release lists and will arrange calls by remote if something crosses our path that legitimately piques our interest.
“But the honest truth is that few truly interesting and disruptive products are being shown, and quite frankly with the economy being what it is, the annual expo for the consumer electronics industry has reduced itself to a race to the bottom for many of what were once traditionally very strong brands.”
A quick perusal of the “news” coming from the CES seems to support Perlow’s view, not only of the lack of innovation in the consumer electronics industry, but about the technology press that more often than not an unfiltered pipeline for product releases.
So what big stories did come out of this year’s CES?
More smart phones and tablets. Windows Phone, Windows 8, Android, and 3D TV.
Yawn. This was the same stuff coming out of the 2011 International CES.
Then Intel made a pitch for “ultrabooks” without really defining what they are, except that they had to be thinner, lighter and faster than traditional laptops —hmmm, much like the MacBook Air which was—oh wait, introduced three years ago. And this counts for innovation?
The Consumer Electronics Association said this year’s event generated 2,000 news articles about innovations at the event, a 33 percent increase over 2011, but number says nothing about the quality or variety of those stories, much less the percentage of PR pap over honest-to-goodness technology news and product reviews.
This year’s show started with an extra reason for pessimism. Microsoft, which has opened the show with a keynote address since 1998, announced that this would be its last time to do so, and that it would no longer be joining the show next year as a major exhibitor. The announcement was reminiscent of Apple’s pullout from Macworld in 2008.
As you might expect, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer did a lot of shouting and talking, but everyone who covered the event agreed: he said nothing substantial in Microsoft’s final CES keynote address. He talked instead of Windows Phone and Windows 8 projects that had already been announced.
In yet another sign that Microsoft and perhaps the industry at large has run out of new ideas, the software giant kicked off its final keynote with a two-minute, video montage of its 15 previous CES presentations, featuring a bizarre “auto-tuned” Bill Gates repeating key phrases like “all devices,” “69 million hours,” and “revolutionary software.” Then CES visitors were treated to Ballmer clapping and pointing like a maniac and leading a cringe-inducing hip-hop cheer for “Bing! Bing! Bing!”
I was at a loss for words when I watched the streaming video on YouTube, but Jason Gilbert, who blogs for the Huffington Post, summed it up perfectly when he wrote: “Hide your kids, hide your wife. Seriously.”
