Five links to help us understand CES better, along with some information about why reading about it matters in the first place.
- “CES (formerly an acronym for Consumer Electronics Show[1]) is an annual trade show organized by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA). Held in January at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, United States, the event typically hosts presentations of new products and technologies in the consumer electronics industry.
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The first CES was held in June 1967 in New York City. It was a spinoff from the Chicago Music Show, which, until then, had served as the main event for exhibiting consumer electronics. The event had 17,500 attenders and over 100 exhibitors; the kickoff speaker was Motorola chairman Bob Galvin.[2] From 1978 to 1994, CES was held twice each year: once in January in Las Vegas known for Winter Consumer Electronics Show (WCES) and once in June in Chicago, known as Summer Consumer Electronics Show (SCES).”
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As always, let’s begin with Wikipedia.
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.. - No excerpt, but here’s the official website. Have fun clicking through the topics. Think of CES as the harbinger of what is going to come up in tech this year or in the near future.
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.. - A photo essay showing you what earlier CES’s looked like.
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.. - Steven Sinofsky, who is absolutely worth following if you are interested in technology, on his impressions of CES from the previous year. Also contains a very cool idea for doing away with editors!
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“Some years CES feels like a deep technology show with everyone talking about something that requires hardware, new software, and a lot of work to even do something (3D TV, WiFi, home disk storage). Some years CES feels like attendees are overwhelmed with one specific technology no matter which way we look (HD, 4K, internet). Over the past couple of years we have seen a lot of ingredients working to come together as products — virtual assistants, home automation, sensors to name a few. CES 2019 is a kind of year that sort of screams “we’re ready for the products that really work.” In that spirit, CES 2019 is a year where products are close, but seem a product manager iteration away from being a product that can reach a tipping point of customer satisfaction and utility. Products work in a “thread the needle” sort of way, but a lot of details and real life quickly cause things to become frustrating.”
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.. - I am scheduling this post on the 9th of January, and Dieter Bohn (another person you absolutely should follow if you are interested in technology) hasn’t as of yet written a post summarizing CES 2020. But he did write an excellent piece on how one should think about CES – this year, and perhaps in general.
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”“Every year, like clockwork, as tech journalists head to Las Vegas, some portion of them and some other portion staying at home will talk about how CES doesn’t matter anymore, how it’s awful, and how little that gets announced here actually gets released.
These complaints always frustrate me because registering a disagreement with them ends up sounding like you believe the exact opposite: that CES is very great and what happens here is very consequential.
For me, the opposite of “CES is bad” isn’t “CES is good” but rather “CES is not what you wish it was.””
EconForEverybody 