It was the busiest, most exciting week of the year for technology.
In Las Vegas, the hugely hyped International Consumer Electronics Show offered a look into the industry’s future.
As always, CES was a spectacle. Thousands of products were introduced by thousands of companies exhibiting across about 1.6 million net square feet of show space–that’s 35 football fields. Estimates for attendees ranged between 140,000 and 300,000, depending on who was counted.
But CES is much bigger than that. Because the events are spread across the city’s many hotels, conference rooms and parking lots (lots of white tents in town last week), the “football fields” are actually not at all near each other.
In four days there, I probably walked 15 miles. The trip from my room at the MGM Grand to the hotel’s front door alone felt like a mile and took about 10 minutes.
Rob Enderle, a high-tech analyst from San Jose, Calif., estimated midweek that he was up to 25 miles.
“I am so tired,” Enderle moaned. “I can hardly stand up straight, and my legs are pretty much shot. It’s just simply too much.”
Steve Koenig, senior manager of industry analysis for the Consumer Electronics Association, the trade group that runs CES, guessed that he walked about 50 miles in all.
At another high-tech trade show in San Francisco, nobody had to walk anywhere to get the big news. Instead, at last week’s MacWorld, which is Apple Inc.’s annual show and tell, Chairman Steve Jobs presented the news during his keynote speech.
With a hugely anticipated product called the iPhone, Jobs announced that Apple was entering the wireless phone business.
The next day, most major U.S. newspapers ran the iPhone story on their front page.
Which is how one company’s trade show trumped the entire industry’s trade show.
“People were able to sit and focus on what Apple was doing,” said Enderle. “At CES, everybody is lost. Even Microsoft, which kind of owns CES in terms of booth size, was overwhelmed by the sheer size of CES.”
Microsoft’s “booth,” like a good museum, would have taken an entire day to really see. Pioneer’s booth rose two stories into the air. The second floor was fully functional. As a result, industry leaders like Microsoft might begin to consider taking an approach similar to Apple’s.
“It can cause more companies to look at what Apple did and say, `Hey, maybe we should do our own thing too. We can do our own show and focus on our own products,'” Enderle said.
It happens in the fashion industry, he said, “where some of the big companies have their own shows.”
Koenig has been hearing that CES is too big for years.
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“A lot of people who think it’s big are probably only here for two days,” he said. “To really take the entire show in, you need three or four days. Or you just have to pick your area of interest.”
He said that his group is considering many of the many suggestions it receives from members, exhibitors and attendees, including adding an extra show day and splitting the annual show into a “summer and winter CES.” That’s the way it used to be, with the summer show in Chicago.
Enderle admits that “the CES folks are really doing a wonderful job trying to adjust to criticism.”
But the two analysts disagree on one thing: Apple’s hotly received iPhone announcement.
“I think it’s a shrewd move by Apple,” Koenig said. “It’ll help insulate them from any competition or loss of market share from media-enabled [phones]. They’ve been working on this for a very long time, and they clearly thought this was the right time to do this.”
The iPhone is a sleek, thin unit that plays music and videos, surfs the Internet, does e-mail and makes calls via a touch-screen interface that runs the Apple’s elegant Mac OS X operating system. It’s due out in June in 4 gigabyte ($500) and 8 gb ($600) models.
Will many people buy it?
“At a more attractive price point, sure,” Enderle said. “But it’s an expensive phone in a market that hasn’t really liked expensive phones.”
Such an early introduction also puzzles Enderle.
“Apple almost never announces a product in advance of shipment,” he said. “It’s starting to look like Apple is getting desperate, and they’re announcing things before they’re ready for the market.”
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Alex L. Goldfayn is host of “The Technology Tailor Show” on WGN-AM 720 on Saturdays from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.