What about CES?
Ok, so here’s a post that caught my eye earlier about CES:
The annual Consumer Electronics Show is going to be so boring this year that even Bill Gates is not showing up. He gave his farewell keynote (and his 13th) last year. This year, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will try to rouse the crowd.
Ballmer is a high-energy guy who can be entertaining to watch
, but Microsoft just doesn’t have anything exciting to announce this year. (Who does, right?). When Ballmer takes the stage at the Venetian in Las Vegas on Wednesday night it is going to be hard for the audience
to stay awake no matter how much he yells at them.
Ballmer entertaining to watch? Well if you like meltdown and insanity, I suppose. In my experience, if Ballmer’s on stage, I’ll read about it later and get a nutshell synopsis rather than listing to his rantings and ravings. He’s one of the most appalling speakers I’ve ever heard and someone I go out of my way to not listen to live.
For me, there’s a couple of thoughts that stand out here.
We had hoped to get to CES for a couple of reasons. The past few years it’s been a whopper of a show, and we thought it would be nice to step into the CES space with GeekSpeakTV and do some interviews and test/explore some of the new gadgets coming.
Also,our good friend Jeff Pulver is running Social Media Jungle @ CES 2009. When we had dinner with Jeff in Minneapolis a couple of months ago, we were really jazzed at the prospect of speaking at this new conference series Jeff is kicking off. Unfortunately, schedule and finances just make it impossible for us to be there.
I’m not sure how Sheryl feels, but for me CES feels like it’s becoming a big non-event in many ways. I think it’s going to be a sleeper for news, so maybe it’s appropriate that the keynote be a yawn-fest too. I wish we could find a way to go for a single day to get to the Social Media Jungle, but I’m not sure I’d even be inclined to deal with any of the CES madness.
How about you? Are you going? Why? What do you think will come out of the event that’s important, newsworthy or notable?
And given the state of conferences in general, how many more times do you think CES will run before they too join the legacy past of conferences that once were the center of all news?
Technorati Tags: CES, Jeff Pulver, Social Media Jungle, conferences