CES 2020 Part 3
I’m like a little kid, thrilled to kick off another decade at CES with this same group
So why bother? Why attend every year? It’s expensive, sometimes a hassle, and it’s flat exhausting. My feet hurt every day, and by the time the week is over, I want nothing but time with my dog and complete silence.
CES has never been about gadgets for me. As much as I love them, it’s rare that I go home and want to buy something I saw at the show that I just can’t live without. The show for me is about the human condition. The believe that we can do more. This is our human evolution. More importantly, CES puts some relevance into my day-to-day world. The first show I ever attended had a huge impact on the course of my life, and what I see each year continues to influence how I think about the future in all that I do.
Through the year, I’ll be in a meeting somewhere and a topic or decision will come up, something that has no connection to CES. Yet knowing what I saw at the show, it somehow does have relevance and I am persuaded in some form. I’ll either agree or disagree with something observable and how it is trending, and I can trace it all back to what I saw first-hand at CES
In my hotel room was a plastic cover over what was intended to be a telephone wall mount when the hotel opened in 2009. The mount was obsolete before it was installed. In total the Vdara has 1,495 rooms. If likely cost about $100 to pull wire, put in the necessary box, etc., this was roughly a $150k spend for a technology that was dead by the time these boxes were added. There is no chance they will be used in the future for anything. Yet, this is a micro example of why learning about the future matters so much.
Remnants of an old technology, never to be used again.
We still can’t predict the future of some technologies, yet others are showing a trend right under our noses. We just have to pay attention. At CES, we’ve watched technologies that were expected to impact our lives both rise and fall. We saw 3D TV come and go, and virtually reality die as fast as it arrived and the press predicted it was the next big thing. Both were missing that oh-so-important component, I make again and again, about the importance of convenience.
You need a big room for VR, that and a place to puke. 3D required glasses that cost more than the TV and were equally disorienting, and not convenient. You see this with various hardware that hits the market, if it’s not convenient, it’s dead. We saw remarkably few wired devices this year at CES outside of HDMI 2.1. There was a time when a big piece of the show was switch boxes and the like. Cord management was a thing. Now even power sources are in search of wireless solutions.
Digital Voice Assistant
One of the biggest battles, sort of a quiet civil war is underway at CES. It’s the fight over the digital voice assistant. Amazon Alexa is fighting Google’s “Hey Google” and Apple’s Siri. Amazon won the race a long time ago, but the others are not willing to give up the fight so easily. Google knows full well that if Amazon combines Alexa with a good search engine, it’s going to be bad for Google and a battle to the death.
Four years ago, you didn’t see any sign of Google, Apple, or Amazon. Then last year Google showed up in mass. Amazon had been quietly sending a thousand people to CES for years and three years ago, about half the electronics were marked “Alexa enabled.” Google saw this and freaked!
Then in 2019 Google showed up in mass with people wearing “Hey Google” clown outfits. This year I counted at least seven small “Hey Google” booths. Apple spoke at this year’s CES marking the first time they were officially back in over 30 years. Expect them to be here in a big way in 2021 along with all the others.
Amazon finally has a booth!
Personal Transportation Devices
Electric scooters, bikes, trikes, skateboards, and powered something were everywhere. Having used a small Segway to get around downtown Seattle, they make a lot of sense. Some are safer than others. I believe in this category because of the range and utility. I also own an electric scooter and two electric bikes. I definitely believe this market is still in the very early stages. For those of us who live in the Seattle, electric bikes are the great equalizer, making hills something non-existent.
One of the many electric bike/motorcycle solutions at CES
There is no way I could write about everything there is to see at CES. It’s something every business leader should experience if they worry about their own company’s future. It’s not an activity you can do with a large group. You end up spending more time just trying to keep track of each other than immersing yourself in the direction of technology.
A few notable points before I wrap this up. 3D printing continues to evolve and the resolution, speed and utility is greatly improved. It’s not going away. In fact, many finished products were produced in a finish that mimicked 3D printing to make it harder to know when something was or wasn’t 3D printed to meet a production run. I thought that was clever.
Death to “Smart”
Finally, after well over a decade of overuse, we finally saw an end to the word “Smart” attached to anything. It was by far the most beaten to death term ever used at CES and was a favorite among foreign corporations. I should be common sense that if everyone is smart, then nobody is smart. For years the term meant nothing more than more than one purpose, yet it was everywhere. It was refreshing to finally see it gone.
Also gone were “IoT” (Internet of Things) or the steep reduction in the term “wireless” as it’s now kind of assumed.
I didn’t see as many phones, laptops, or pads this year, yet small devices are still everywhere. Impressive camera solutions were big and that remains an endless category. Video is heading towards record everything at all times and edit later. It’s just a matter of time.
In closing, it’s always a show I hate to see end. There was always that one thing I didn’t get to see or that hall somewhere that I missed somehow. Yet, the second I’m home, I begin to think about CES next year. Getting that hotel room in June when they open to begin the process all over again. For those of you who have never been, I hope you make the effort. For me it’s something I wouldn’t miss for anything.