Is
The Conference Business Dead Or Merely Resting?
You may have noticed
that the conference business has been very quiet of late.
Or you may not have noticed at all, since most of your have
been avoiding conferences like the plague.
In fact, that’s the problem.
Even excellent and well-established events are running at
much diminished sizes and some are disappearing.
We
have crossed a few off our lists.
We do that in any case each year, trying to trade in some
new and interesting events for some old and faded ones, but we are
helped along the way by the natural cycle of the
conference/exhibition business.
These
big events just don’t last forever.
They have some natural cycle of their own. Once they’ve peaked they may hang around for a long time,
but it becomes very clear that they’ve lost the energy and
purpose that once made them vital events that everyone in an
industry attended.
COMDEX
used to be like that. I
attended it for nearly 20 years, speaking at it for perhaps 17 of
them, exhibiting sometimes, and writing a column for the show
daily toward the end, but finally giving it up a few years ago
when I discovered that software vendors were no longer using it as
an announcement platform.
COMDEX
was just sold in bankruptcy to a bunch of financial guys who will
try to resurrect it. In
the meantime, two other show groups intend to run shows in Las
Vegas in the same time period.
I suspect next year, mid-November in Las Vegas will be
crowded and noisy but not very profitable for any of these groups.
One of them will be the original “Mr. COMDEX,” its
inventor, Sheldon Adelson. You can see a write-up of the demise of the original COMDEX
and Adelson’s plans for a new show here.
http://www.expoweb.com/Headlines/Story.cfm?ID=835
What
we’d like to see is some insight into why people attend business
shows and why it might be sensible to understand their natural
cycle and play into it – never intending for them to last
forever, rather than trying to keep them going long after they are
interesting or profitable.
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