Wednesday, September 17, 2003
Will The Real PC Expo Please Stand Up?
Posted by Janak Parekh in "THOUGHT" @ 06:30 PM
As some of you noticed, I was hoping to bring back lots of good nuggets of information and pictures from this year's PC Expo. However, I failed at this goal. Miserably. :cry: If you're wondering why, take a look at my panorama shots of the two sides of the show floor. (If you have image resizing, you'll want to turn it off when you click on the images, so you can scroll and see the details.)
I didn't get a perfect pair of panorama shots, but it illustrates the point. Yes, all that grey you see is an empty show floor. Take a look at the people to get a sense of scale. I'd say 35% or thereabouts of the show floor was occupied. Compare this to the mid-90s, when the entire main floor was occupied, and they had exhibits on two supplemental floors (they had a Mac pavilion upstairs, and specialty pavilions downstairs). It was noticeably smaller than CeBIT America, and in fact there was also a Textile show running on the lower floor at the same time.
One more problem compounded all of this: the show floor wasn't particularly good. There was no representation from names like Intel, Apple, Sony, Microsoft, Palm, or IBM. It used to take two whole 7-hour days to cover most of the exhibition booths. It only took me about two hours this time, and that was only because I was taking my sweet time -- only HP and Olympus had substantial booths (apart from CMP, who organizes the show). About 30% of the floor dealt with international outsourcing, which might be useful except it was sparsely attended -- some of the booths were abandoned. To salvage the trip, my coworkers and I did take a few pictures, which I'll post this weekend, but overall this was by far the worst PC Expo I've ever attended.
I'm not quite sure what to make of this. Is the Internet (and sites like this) making it unnecessary for expositions like these? Is it a function of the economy? What do you think?
I didn't get a perfect pair of panorama shots, but it illustrates the point. Yes, all that grey you see is an empty show floor. Take a look at the people to get a sense of scale. I'd say 35% or thereabouts of the show floor was occupied. Compare this to the mid-90s, when the entire main floor was occupied, and they had exhibits on two supplemental floors (they had a Mac pavilion upstairs, and specialty pavilions downstairs). It was noticeably smaller than CeBIT America, and in fact there was also a Textile show running on the lower floor at the same time.
One more problem compounded all of this: the show floor wasn't particularly good. There was no representation from names like Intel, Apple, Sony, Microsoft, Palm, or IBM. It used to take two whole 7-hour days to cover most of the exhibition booths. It only took me about two hours this time, and that was only because I was taking my sweet time -- only HP and Olympus had substantial booths (apart from CMP, who organizes the show). About 30% of the floor dealt with international outsourcing, which might be useful except it was sparsely attended -- some of the booths were abandoned. To salvage the trip, my coworkers and I did take a few pictures, which I'll post this weekend, but overall this was by far the worst PC Expo I've ever attended.
I'm not quite sure what to make of this. Is the Internet (and sites like this) making it unnecessary for expositions like these? Is it a function of the economy? What do you think?
