I recently returned from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Well, actually, I got back over a month ago, but it feels like I just got back. My ears are still ringing.
CES is a phenomenon. It’s big. It’s loud. It’s crowded and inconvenient. Come to think of it, the experience of being an attendee at CES is a lot like the experience of buying and using consumer electronics. In several ways, CES gives consumer electronics manufacturers a taste of their own medicine.
For example, CES is way too big—much like the number of products in a given consumer electronics category is often just overwhelming. Have you tried to buy a television lately? Amazon.com lists 324 models of LCD televisions in the 40 to 49 inch screen size category. Need an HDMI cable? Amazon has 11,163 to choose from. Sorting through those options would probably take slightly less time than visiting all 2,700 exhibit booths at CES. The CES show floor is so huge, so spread out, and so congested that simply getting from one exhibit-floor meeting to the next can take the better part of an hour. Not only is the show floor crowded, the whole city is crowded, due to the 140,000 people attending CES. You can easily burn half an hour waiting for a taxi or a shuttle bus. One enterprising analyst rents a bicycle so he can bypass the crush and zip from meeting to meeting. Of course, he takes his life into his hands by venturing onto the Las Vegas streets on a bike during CES.
Congestion at CES extends into the virtual world as well. Do you sometimes struggle to get adequate wireless bandwidth for your smartphone? Well, at CES even the big-wigs get stuck. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, showing off his company’s latest high-performance mobile processors during a press conference, couldn’t get a wireless connection, and had to resort to asking the audience to imagine a web site loading. Maybe next year he can do an interpretive dance.
While just about anyone with a credit card can obtain a badge to get onto the CES exhibit floor, the really cool stuff is typically out of view, hidden away in private, invitation-only suites. I certainly understand companies’ desire to control who sees their latest, unannounced products. But sometimes the industry gets carried away by its control-freak tendencies. One of the greatest benefits of an event like CES is the spontaneous discovery and interaction that can take place when people and organizations with common interests come together. But by segregating big swaths of technology in private suites, companies virtually guarantee that a large amount of valuable interaction (and resultant innovation) won’t happen—because the people who can best use that technology won’t see it.
This trade-off is similar to the one that faces consumer electronics companies in deciding whether to embrace or fight unintended uses of their products. Microsoft, for example, initially resisted the desire of developers to adapt its Kinect vision-based game controller for new applications, but quickly realized that there was far more upside than downside to embracing such activity. Sony, on the other hand, is fighting this type of activity tooth-and-nail. In doing so, Sony risks falling behind competitors like Microsoft—who I predict will be big beneficiaries of spontaneous, community-based innovation on their platforms.
Las Vegas, of course, is easily the most commercialized city in the United States. And when CES comes to town, it’s commercialism on steroids. I’ve got nothing against companies tastefully promoting their products, but in Las Vegas during CES, it gets overwhelming. It seems that every surface carries gigantic advertisements—from whole buses to entire buildings. The unrelenting promotional barrage is reminiscent of what it can be like to watch a DVD these days.
Finally, there’s the random factor. Like when you unpack your new consumer electronics purchase and inside the box you find offers for magazine subscriptions and all kinds of other unrelated stuff. In that same spirit, wandering the CES exhibit floor, one gets handed all kinds of random stuff. You can see two of my favorite examples here and here. (One of them actually came in handy while I was at CES. Like everything else, the restaurants were very crowded.)
So, consumer electronics manufacturers, take heed: You know how you feel after five days at CES? The headache? The sore feet? The fatigue? That’s how we, your customers, often feel when buying and using your products. You can do better!
Add new comment