Why You need to (and Shouldn’t) Care about CES [Ces2011]

It’s an orgy of consumption. A showcase of next year’s last year’s models. Where silicon meets silicone. Las Vegas without the entire gambling, booze, or sex. It’s the shopper Electronics Show, and it is usually pretty awesome. Relevant, even!

Don’t let the ” consumer” inside the title fool you-CES is equal-parts business show, where buyers from large retail chains swap spit with executives from electronics manufacturers, jockeying for deals and colluding to develop mid-tier, high-margin products. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that many discussions are occurring to devise next Christmas’s biggest deals-the items so as to populate Christmas lists internationally.

But it’s also a place for us to snatch a peek at the imminent products from electronics companies and get an all-too-brief fondle of products that will not actually be available for purchase for months-if they even make it out onto shelves at all. (There’s been an amusing trend over the past few years of blustering CEOs making grand, sweaty pronouncements in front of thousands of media and industry people during CES keynotes, only to slink away within the following months after they don’t follow through on their plans.)

The thing is, despite the thousands of SKUs hitting the floor, we are able to’t remember the last time a game changer was announced at CES. Everything this is derivative, and anything important enough to the sector gets its own launch event-Google and Apple and Microsoft all know this. So will we.

But the basics of electronics are here. Sometimes in clever evolutions. The TVs people will buy recuperate once a year, besides the fact that they’re too derivative to get any but probably the most obsessed and wasteful to upgrade after a year or two. The mindset necessary to realize CES-and through it, the arrival year in gadgets-is achieved by realizing that the right of CES from 10 years ago could be put to shame by the gadget spam heap from 2011. Baby steps develop into miles.

Also, more than anything, what makes CES worthwhile are the little guys; the undiscovered entrepreneurs from all over the world who scrape their pennies into a pile and rent a tiny booth in one of the most less tony Vegas convention centers and literally bark out to passers-by that their product. Their livelihood is worth a minute of our time. Those are this kind of products and folks we live for: the person with an excellent idea who just needs just a little exposure to sell the following must-have product.

Las Vegas is a town built on the mythology of fortunes lost and gained in a night; that’s the dream that attracts within the farting tourists, thewy dancers, and celebrity chefs. There’s a reason that the patron Electronics Association brings CES back to Las Vegas year after year, and it’s not just as a result of sweet deals Clark County provides to verify the millions of greenbacks of hotel revenue. It’s because the captains of the bleep-blorp industry actually do make and lose fortunes in a night for per week each January. And there’s no better setting than Las Vegas to provide them the courage to roll the dice.

Source

This post is tagged: business show, christmas lists, electronics companies, electronics manufacturers, high margin products, pronouncements, retail chains