Show
Biz
The
Death Of COMDEX
After
25 years of shows – and crowds of more than 200,000 at its peak,
it looks like the COMDEX show may be over.
Think of it as the end of an era.
COMDEX
was a child of the PC industry, originally a place for PC HW and SW
vendors and their reseller channel to meet and make deals, brought
to life by entrepreneur Sheldon Adelson, whose company sold the show
to SoftBank for about $800 million, at close to its height.
Shelley always had impeccable timing and he had decided to
become a hotel builder (The Venetian) in Las Vegas for his next act.
But
shows have their moments and Comdex’s seems gone, lost in an
industry where endless consolidation means many fewer companies to
buy booth space, the Internet has disintermediated much of the
channel COMDEX meant to serve, and newer, more focused shows attract
the celebrity CEO’s who once spoke at COMDEX. The press who once
thronged to COMDEX from all over the world is more likely to be fond
at LinuxWorld, at international shows from Tokyo to Germany to
Brazil, or at CES. Big
exhibitors often prefer to invite customers and potential customers
to their own, tightly managed events.
I
spoke at COMDEX nearly every year (twice a year in its middle
period) from about 1982 through the mid-nineties.
When we couldn’t find any major announcements on the floor
and the major vendors melted away, we decided it was time for us to
go, too. Apparently, we
were in the mainstream.
I
shall miss COMDEX, but it isn’t the COMDEX of the end, or even the
tumultuous COMDEX of 2000, before the bubble broke, but rather the
COMDEX of the late eighties and early nineties when everyone in the
computer industry gathered for a few days to decide where all of us
were going next.
A
Comment On Supernova
At
Kevin Werbach’s superlative SuperNova conference (a kind of
insiders’ free-for-all on things up-and-coming, especially things
wireless and communications oriented), I had the good fortune to sit
next to John Patrick, a former IBM VP and an old friend.
We had a wonderful time whispering comments and passing notes
(these days we’d normally do that electronically, except that all
of us were having a bit of trouble with the wireless).
During
the conference, John and I both were seriously exercised by a
session theoretically on Beyond Email where the chair clearly
thought the way to get beyond email was to just replace it was IM.
He argued passionately for that point of view; many of his
panelists disagreed. John,
I, and some others in the audience went (I fear) somewhat beyond
polite discourse in our disagreement.
After
the conference, John was kind enough to send me a link to a note
from John Dvorak, about the fact that a column of his, about how
email had revealed the dense layers of bureaucracy at NASA and the
underlying truths about the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster.
It tells the tale of how valuable email can be in both
looking for information, building support, and documenting what’s
happening. You might
enjoy it, too. My
thanks to John Patrick, for bringing to my attention, and to John
Dvorak, for writing it. You will find the column at http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,909778,00.asp.
