Twenty thousand people spent this week walking a convention centre in Las Vegas and the only product anybody wants to discuss was announced four hundred miles away by a company that has never exhibited at CES.
That is not a criticism of the show, exactly. It is an observation about what happens when one company controls its own timing and everybody else agrees to share a week. Apple put its announcement on the Tuesday, in its own room, with no competing noise, and took the entire news cycle from an event with two thousand exhibitors. Every hardware company that spent six figures on a Las Vegas booth this week has now watched a demonstration of why that model is in trouble.
Which is a shame, because there were genuinely interesting things on that floor.
LG showed a player that reads both high definition disc formats, which is either the most sensible product of the show or a white flag depending on your view. My reading is the second one. A dual-format player exists because the industry has failed to resolve something it should have resolved before either format shipped, and passing that failure to the customer as a more expensive box is not a solution, it is a surcharge. I wrote in December that the sensible move was to buy neither, and a machine that plays both at a premium price does not change that.
The Sony panel is the thing I would actually queue to see. An eleven inch OLED, a few millimetres thick, with black levels no LCD can produce because the pixels that are off are genuinely off rather than being blocked imperfectly. It is a prototype, it is small, and it will be absurdly expensive if it ever ships. It is also the first display technology in years that looks like a step change rather than an increment, and after a year of watching flat panel prices collapse it is strange to see something that expensive generate real excitement.
Everything else was Vista. The consumer release lands at the end of this month and every PC manufacturer on the floor has built its entire message around it, which produced the peculiar spectacle of dozens of companies enthusiastically announcing that their laptops will run an operating system they have no control over. The differentiation problem in that industry has rarely been more visible.
What the week actually demonstrated is that the trade show model is under pressure from both ends. The games industry has already decided that its enormous annual gathering costs more than it returns. CES has not reached that conclusion and this week it got a preview of what the alternative looks like when a company with sufficient gravity simply refuses to participate.
I do not think CES dies. It is too useful as a place for the supply chain to meet, and most of the business done there happens in meeting rooms rather than on the floor. But the era where it was the moment consumer technology announced itself is ending, and it ended on a Tuesday morning in San Francisco while the show was still setting up.