It's the end of COMDEX as we knew it

CNET RAN a story yesterday of a 'postponement' of COMDEX this year to next.

Some want to bury COMDEX, and there's a lot on the surface to say that COMDEX is ready to take the biscuit, but I don't think it'll happen. I watched COMDEX as a conference advisory board member from 1989-2003. And, I ended up marrying one of its employees - in fact its director of publications. And I watched a lot of people come and go through seven different ownership titles, and an ugly bankruptcy.

Sheldon Adelson grew the COMputer Dealers EXpo into COMDEX. Shelly's not a geek, but he's an astute if controversial businessman. His Boston-based empire grew COMDEX into a machine. What attracted people to COMDEX was a combination of an accident in time (the burgeoning viability of personal computing replacing mainframe/centrist models of computing), populism (we like to do computing on our own and not wait on someone else), as well as dances with wolves (Windows World's success).

COMDEX's brand was sold to Softbank, which in turn, married it in different ways to its Ziff Davis media acquisition. Then it was spun off to Key3Media, the invented name given to it by Fred Rosen (the ostensible mastermind of TicketMaster fame). Rosen, in my belief, wanted to be a Hollywood mogul, and indeed even attempted an acquisition of the House of Blues to somehow fit with the most successful tech trade show in North America.

The reason you went to COMDEX was partially the fear factor - you might miss something new and truly colossal - and partially for the myriad and unbridled long list of gadgetry and software. More products were launched by more companies surrounding the COMDEX event than any other place. People would gather 18 hours ahead of what became the traditional Bill Gates keynote, and indeed COMDEX successfully co-opted the concept of a keynote by having them not only every day, but sometimes twice and even three times per day.

You had bragging rights when you returned. There was a mix of intellectual overload, great new stuff for every discipline and geek fancy, and the sheer success of having survived Las Vegas, incredible people saturation problems (overbooked everything, long taxi lines, and jacked-up hotel prices designed to suck wallets dry of all extra cash because geeks don't tip, or so it was said). The conference programmes read like the who's who in international computing, and people nearly fought to get positioning within the conference programmes with tenacity. Some of the programs were truly visionary, while others entertained and taught execs the difference between a web page and a live hand grenade.

At its peak in 1999, nearly 300,000 people made the trek to Las Vegas for the show. All your friends were there, and your enemies, too. Linux got an early boost at COMDEX, as did networking, web computing, Java, and so on - the list is long. COMDEX had worked its way around the world, having difficulty only in the non-Scandinavian parts of the European Union. COMDEX went to Singapore, Korea, India, Saudi Arabia, and so on - not to mention Chicago, Atlanta, Miami, and even Los Angeles, Vancouver BC, Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa.

What's wounded COMDEX is what's wounded several industry trade shows: shrunken travel budgets in scary times, a sense that competitive computing can evolve more slowly, and the success of vendor vanity shows along with more effective Internet information interaction. But COMDEX had a special sort of problem, the combination of an executive body that sucked the corporate coffers dry in my opinion, then like many US corporate executives, had no clue how to deal with the economic downturns after 9/11. A huge run rate, coupled to a sudden evaporation of post Y2K capital expenditures that caused exhibitors to dry up marketing dollars, caused COMDEX to shrink into bankruptcy. Many enemies were made, and Thomas Weisel Partners picked up COMDEX through US Bankruptcy Court approval.

COMDEX isn't dead. It's in hibernation. It's one of the strongest gatherings in computing, and it has enormous international cache. What it doesn't have is that mass of paranoia that was once present. You went to COMDEX or lost considerable ground in a highly evolving tech marketplace. Now CES has captured much of the consumer ground, while broadly cast and even 'enterprise' IT shows have had a very difficult time of it. CeBIT is holding its ground, while Computex has become the hatching ground for hardware innovation. What will 2005 bring? COMDEX will rise again, but my bets (this is a Las Vegas show, after all) is that someone else will be behind it. The industry is upshifting again. Perhaps that'll propel COMDEX to partner with others that can make a whole greater than the sum of its parts. But somehow, I think that Alan Meckler won't be the partner. Shelly, want to come out of retirement? Call me.

Caveat: I was the longest serving member of the COMDEX Conference Advisory Board (1989-2003), and am married to the ex-director of publications for COMDEX. µ