Let me declare right up front: I didn’t attend this year’s International CES in Las Vegas primarily due to my wife and I having to attend an important family event in New York. Even though I didn’t attend in person, I have some important thoughts and opinions about the future of one of the world’s largest tradeshows.
Over the past 65 years, there have been three major conference series that have addressed the computer market:
1) The Joint Computer Conferences (or JCCs). These ran in various forms from 1953 through 1987 first as the Eastern/Western (EJCC/WJCC) which were coordinated by the ACM and IEEE. In 1962, the American Federation of Information Processing Societies (AFIPS) took over ownership and renamed them Fall Joint Computer Conference (FJCC) and Spring Joint Computer Conference (SJCC). In 1973, AFIPS merged the two conferences into a single annual National Computer Conference (NCC) which ran until discontinued in 1987. I attended the FJCC/SJCC conferences occasionally was a speaker mostly on panels starting in the mid-1970s and have attended most of the major computer shows since then.
2) COMDEX (an abbreviation of Computer Dealers’ Exhibition). This was a computer expo trade show held at various locations in Las Vegas each November from 1979 to 2003. It was the first ‘mega’ computer show that operated out of Las Vegas. The Interface Group ran the event. Its organizers included Sheldon Adelson, Robert Lively, and Richard Katzeff. In 1995, they sold it to the Japanese technology conglomerate Softbank Corp headed by Masayoshi Son. Sheldon Adelson now owns the Venetian and companion Venezia hotels both in Las Vegas and Macau, China. He’s now worth approximately $37 billion and gave $25 million to the Trump campaign. Masayoshi Son, primary owner of Softbank, has grown his empire via mobile network operators (in Japan and Sprint in the US) and by investing in many high tech startups in both Japan and the US including Uber.
3) International CES operated by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA). This was first held in Chicago in 1997. It had some other regional shows but has been an annual event with now over 170,000 attendees in Las Vegas annually in early January. It is now one of the largest trade shows focused on technology along with the CeBit in Hanover and GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as European counterparts.
I see CTA soon sitting at a crossroads in the next few years although they may not yet realize it. Those running large trade shows have so much momentum that they can’t see an upcoming fork in the road. Part of the needed change is around brand and part is around what the show covers. The brand issue is easy to address: the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) was formerly the Consumer Electronics Association or CEA. For many years, that was a reasonable name for a trade association since the exhibitors were electronics companies making stereos, TV sets and car radios. But the CTA saw that their trade association was not dealing with electronics but a myriad of fancy technologies including self-driving cars, computers, software, and services. In 2015, the CEA became the CTA.
The CTA organization realized that their association members were all about technology, so the association brand name change was both necessary and appropriate. As for the show and what it covers, it’s a little harder to figure out what to do since the CES brand is so well-known. At first blush, it would seem that changing CES to something like CTS would be the natural thing to do in line with the change to the association and its members. But, wait a minute. What is the “CES” event going to do to address the market 10 or 20 years from now? The show can’t get much bigger as there isn’t a lot of tradeshow exhibition space or hotel rooms to enable CES to, say, double in size to host over 300,000 people.
What CTA has done over the past ten years is to segment the show into areas around a specific themes or functions such as having North Hall focus on automotive, the Westgate concentrate on Asian manufacturers, the Sands Convention Center focus on health and fitness. Thus, CES is now a number of miniature trade shows within a bigger show – CES. See some of my insights below in Strategic Insights.
Products
While it’s impossible to review the thousands of new products that were announced at CES, I would like to offer the following as a few good examples of how innovation is changing right before our eyes:
- In-Display Fingerprint Reader. Vivo and Synaptics (Clear ID) have both announced technology to add a fingerprint reader to a smartphone display. This allows smartphone manufacturers to include a biometric fingerprint scanner/reader into the display of a smartphone like the iPhone X and Samsung Galaxy 8. It’s uncertain at this time if the facial recognition sensors and software in the iPhone X are more accurate than the fingerprint sensor. However, users appear to like and appreciate that it works and is easy to use. Certainly, smartphone manufacturers are going to implement this as either a replacement for or in addition to facial recognition. And, it appears certain that biometric sensors are now an accepted way to identify someone better than passwords.
- New Ultrathin Laptops. It’s interesting to note that most of the laptop manufacturers introduce new products at CES. And, this includes devices planned for both the consumer and enterprise market. Case in point: Dell introduced a number of new laptop products including the next version of their popular XPS 13 line that is on par (or better) than systems from HP or Apple. The specs: (more detailed excellent review from Laptop Magazine).
- 8th Generation Intel® Core™ i7-8550U Processor (8M Cache, up to 4.0 GHz),
- Standard (1920 x 1080) graphics and 4K Ultra graphics (3840 x 2160)
- 128GB to 1TB PCIe Solid State Drive
- 8-16GB of memory
- Dell Cinema with optimized display and audio
- 67 lb.
The reason these companies introduce new laptops at CES is simple: there are over 20,000 members of the press attending. And, it’s the beginning of the year when enterprises have budgets to allocate to new products they intend to buy. Notice how laptops (especially thin ones) are all migrating to solid state Flash storage and higher resolution graphics and, yet, weight under three pounds and have performance almost equal to desktops. I’ll be writing more about this during 2018.
- Sensing People’s Emotions. Everyone knows what people’s emotions are. However, trying to sense fatigue, stress, sadness, and happiness is difficult to do. Sensum Corporation in England has set up definitive ways to measure people’s emotions and are now taking that capability to a broader range of environments from movie theaters to selecting cars to the reaction to using all kinds of software, particularly mobile apps. I find it interesting that there are exciting new areas in digital technology that were not even in existence a few short year ago.
Strategic insights
The conundrum for CES is that even if it does change the brand to CTS (which might be difficult to do since it’s a popular brand already used by Cadillac), the underlying content for technology is going to continue to expand. For a while, the current show will continue to make small changes to accommodate evolutionary developments, e.g. “Visit the AI Show at the Aria” or “Visit the Baby Technology Show at the Wynn.”
What I see happening is the evolution of some smaller, more focused shows growing to become large tradeshows themselves. Look at what’s happened with the IoT Evolution show that operates with partners TMC and Crossfire Media. IoT Evolution was part of the IT Expo show for many years and, in fact, started as a single room event. I recall seeing less than 50 people attending when I chaired a session at one of the early IoT Evolution events. Now, it has separated off from IT Expo to become its own show in Orlando in late January. IoT is a very hot area, and IoT Evolution will likely continue to grow to become a significant tradeshow in its own right. Then, vendors who have products that focus on IoT may find it more productive to exhibit at IoT Evolution than at CES especially if they cannot afford to exhibit at both shows.
This could also happen with the Informa’s Auto Tech R&D Summit show that focuses on technology in the automotive market. With autonomous driving heading our way, this area is set to explode with many startups and mature companies able to participate in a show focused on the auto tech area.
I recommend that the CTA management pull together a panel of vendors and a few consultants to think through how best to deal with the future of CES including the possible rebranded CES as CTS. If they don’t, it could very well be that CES will start to see attendance drop and then disappear as the focused shows take over.
Yes, I have some specific thoughts on what the CTA should do. But, unfortunately, I’m not at liberty to share those recommendations in this column. That’s why organizations pay me big bucks to help them figure out what to do to best solve $100 million problems like this (smile). What do you think CTA should do? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
