Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the tech
Speaker 1: are you? It is time for a tech Stuff classic episode.
Speaker 1: This episode originally published March twenty second, twenty seventeen. It
Speaker 1: is titled the Story of Comdex. There are a few
Speaker 1: the tech related conferences and trade shows that have happened
Speaker 1: over the years. Comdex was a really important one for
Speaker 1: a while, and now we're going to learn more about it. Enjoy.
Speaker 1: This message is from Alex, and Alex said, I really
Speaker 1: enjoy listening to your episodes on CEES and also listening
Speaker 1: to the shows that you broadcast every year from CEES,
Speaker 1: and it got me to thinking about two decades ago,
Speaker 1: there was a popular trade show called Comdex, which is
Speaker 1: not around anymore. I've always wondered what happened to Comdex
Speaker 1: and why it failed as a trade show. I know
Speaker 1: that some famous things happen at Comdex. The blue screen
Speaker 1: of Death coming up on Bill Gates during a Windows
Speaker 1: ninety eight demonstration comes to mind. Thanks for making such
Speaker 1: a great show. Well, thank you, Alex for those kind
Speaker 1: words and for the suggestion. Guys, remember you can always
Speaker 1: write me to make suggestions for show topics or guests
Speaker 1: I should have on the show, or even if you
Speaker 1: just want to say hi. The email address you can
Speaker 1: use is tech stuff at houstuffworks dot com. I'll mention
Speaker 1: that again at the end of the show, but I
Speaker 1: know some of you tune out before I get to that,
Speaker 1: So that's what you can use as an email if
Speaker 1: you want to get in touch with me. Now, let's
Speaker 1: talk about Comdex and its impact on the tech industry.
Speaker 1: I can't just jump right onto condex though, I actually
Speaker 1: have to go back a little bit, and I also
Speaker 1: have to admit this was a surprisingly challenging topic. There's
Speaker 1: not a whole lot written about Comdex as a whole,
Speaker 1: apart from some articles in computer industry magazines from the
Speaker 1: time that usually focused on either an upcoming show, like
Speaker 1: you know, you might read an article in a magazine
Speaker 1: from nineteen eighty seven about Comdex eighty seven being around
Speaker 1: the corner, or you might see an article that is
Speaker 1: talking about just a show that just ended, kind of
Speaker 1: similar to how people cover cees. Right, that'll be an
Speaker 1: article that says, oh, hey, ces is over here what
Speaker 1: the big trends were. But you don't really find a
Speaker 1: whole lot of stuff about the life and death of
Speaker 1: the show as a whole. You have to find bits
Speaker 1: and pieces and then end up putting it all together
Speaker 1: and forming it into a meaningful narrative. So this episode
Speaker 1: is really the result of hours of research. I had
Speaker 1: to piece everything together myself. So typically for every hour
Speaker 1: of podcasts that I print, it takes about eight hours
Speaker 1: of research. That's typical. This one was way more than that.
Speaker 1: It had to be at least twenty hours of research,
Speaker 1: maybe more in order to get all of this. But
Speaker 1: that's enough stalling. Let's talk about comdex. So back in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy, which is, by the way, many years before
Speaker 1: comdex actually officially began, there was a group of entrepreneurs
Speaker 1: based out of Needham, Massachusetts, and they included Robert Bob
Speaker 1: Lively and Milton Burns, and they created a magazine covering
Speaker 1: the world of computers and data communications. And the name
Speaker 1: of that publication was The Data comm User, and datacom
Speaker 1: was one word and two ms at the end of comm.
Speaker 1: This was before the era of the personal computer. It
Speaker 1: was even before the era that you would be able
Speaker 1: to purchase a kit and make your own personal computer.
Speaker 1: This was the era of many computers and micro computers
Speaker 1: that were only meant for business or research purposes, so
Speaker 1: you didn't really see them in the home, but they
Speaker 1: were able to create a successful magazine. In two years
Speaker 1: after they launched it, the publishers partnered with a different person,
Speaker 1: a future casino magnate Sheldon Gary Adelson, to launch a
Speaker 1: new trade show that they were calling the Interface Conference
Speaker 1: and Exposition. Now Edelson is or Adelson is an interesting person,
Speaker 1: someone of great influence both in Las Vegas and in politics.
Speaker 1: He would eventually go on to build one of the
Speaker 1: premium casinos on the Strip, the Venetian. Anyway, after several
Speaker 1: successful years of running the Interface Conference and Exposition, the
Speaker 1: group saw another opportunity. So it's nineteen seventy nine. The
Speaker 1: computer industry was starting to gain some traction, with the
Speaker 1: home PC market mostly stuck in the world of hobbyists
Speaker 1: and early adopters. By seventy nine, it was starting to
Speaker 1: slowly emerge from that market, but it wasn't yet to
Speaker 1: the point where computers were becoming household objects. It was
Speaker 1: fairly rare to run into homes that had won. They
Speaker 1: were expensive, and there just weren't a whole lot out there.
Speaker 1: You're talking about early Apple computers, you're talking about the
Speaker 1: Commodore sixty four, the Tandy, that kind of stuff. More companies, though,
Speaker 1: were really looking into incorporating computers into the workplace. So
Speaker 1: the Interface Group organized a new event, and this was
Speaker 1: called the Computer Dealer's Exhibition, which was later shortened to
Speaker 1: the name Comdex. Now, that nineteen seventy nine show was
Speaker 1: modest by later standards, and modest is kind of overstating it.
Speaker 1: It was tiny compared to the show when it reached
Speaker 1: its peak. It took place in the MGM Grand in
Speaker 1: Las Veigs, I guess, and that was the MGM Grand
Speaker 1: at the time. The MGM Grand of today is not
Speaker 1: the same building as the one from nineteen seventy nine,
Speaker 1: two totally different places. Approximately four thousand people attended the show,
Speaker 1: with about one hundred and fifty seven exhibitors present. Now,
Speaker 1: in those days only industry representatives could attend, so you
Speaker 1: had to be inside the computer industry in order to
Speaker 1: be considered for attendance. So general public was not allowed
Speaker 1: to go into the show. It's very similar to the
Speaker 1: way CEES is run, and for many years E three
Speaker 1: ran that way. Although E three twenty seventeen, which is
Speaker 1: you know, I'm recording this in twenty seventeen. E three
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen is the first time in several years that
Speaker 1: the show is going to be open to the general public,
Speaker 1: assuming that you were able to get a badge in time.
Speaker 1: I'm going to be at E three this year, so
Speaker 1: that will be interesting. I can't wait to see how
Speaker 1: it's different from the years past that I have attended
Speaker 1: when it was industry only anyway, Condex when it started
Speaker 1: only allowed industry members and and it really didn't look
Speaker 1: at any of the personal computer stuff at all, because
Speaker 1: again that was such a young market. It was really
Speaker 1: looking at the business applications for computers. So if you
Speaker 1: visit Las Vegas and you go to the MGM Grand,
Speaker 1: like I said, that's not the same casino as the
Speaker 1: one that hosted the first Comdex. If you want to
Speaker 1: visit the building where the first Comdex took place, you
Speaker 1: actually have to go to Bally's because that's what the
Speaker 1: old MGM Grand turned into. So a walk through Bally's
Speaker 1: Casino is also a walk through computer history in a way,
Speaker 1: and they really did focus on many computers, which were
Speaker 1: named Many, but were honestly pretty huge machines to be fair,
Speaker 1: the original computers that came out, those were the ones
Speaker 1: that took up like an entire room or sometimes the
Speaker 1: floor of a building like. They were huge, huge machines.
Speaker 1: Those first computers, the ones that date all the way
Speaker 1: back to like the forties and fifties, but the mini
Speaker 1: computers of the seventies were still pretty massive machines. And
Speaker 1: again they were meant for corporate use or manufacturing or
Speaker 1: things like that. They weren't meant to be on your
Speaker 1: table at home, so they're industrial computers. Almost all the
Speaker 1: interactions at Comdex were all about business to business, with
Speaker 1: computer manufacturers courting big corporations like insurance companies and law firms.
Speaker 1: So really, if you might represent a computer manufacturer, and
Speaker 1: what you're trying to do is get that representative from
Speaker 1: that big insurance company to come see your stuff and say, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know what, I'm going to put in an order
Speaker 1: for X number of machines for us to use at
Speaker 1: our corporate office. That was kind of the purpose for Comdex,
Speaker 1: So it wasn't the sort of convention that the average
Speaker 1: computer junkie would even want to attend that first comdex.
Speaker 1: If you are a big computer nerd, you probably still
Speaker 1: would not be too keen on that first Comdex because
Speaker 1: it just it was geared toward a different type of person.
Speaker 1: It's more for business now. Exhibitors also attended shows like
Speaker 1: Comdex for another reason, not just to connect with potential customers,
Speaker 1: They also wanted to see what the competition was up to.
Speaker 1: Keep in mind, these trade shows allowed companies to show
Speaker 1: off stuff that was in development, stuff that had not
Speaker 1: yet hit the market. That meant that if you were
Speaker 1: a competitor, you might get a look at someone's products
Speaker 1: before they actually hit store shelves, and if you are able,
Speaker 1: you might be able to suss out how those products
Speaker 1: are working and figure out your own version of that
Speaker 1: same product. It's not quite the same thing as copying
Speaker 1: someone else. It might involve some reverse engineering, not a
Speaker 1: little ethically questionable, but it certainly was something that happened
Speaker 1: all the time. If a competitor's computers incorporated a new
Speaker 1: feature that you saw, customers were really finding to be compelling.
Speaker 1: You might go back to your team and say, hey,
Speaker 1: competitor X has this new peripheral and people are going
Speaker 1: gaga over it. We've got to create something equal to
Speaker 1: or better than that for our products. So it's really
Speaker 1: just a fuel for competition. And just like CEES gives
Speaker 1: rise to certain trends each year, so did comdex. So
Speaker 1: another reason why companies would attend is to see what
Speaker 1: trends are starting to come up and should there be
Speaker 1: some that the company needs to get involved in, they
Speaker 1: could end up dedicating some resources to it and then
Speaker 1: become a player in that space. The worst thing in
Speaker 1: the world would be to be left behind and become
Speaker 1: obsolete and see your company's business failed because you weren't
Speaker 1: able to capitalize on an emerging trend. So some companies
Speaker 1: would send people out there just to see, all right, well,
Speaker 1: what's big this year and what do we need to
Speaker 1: pay attention to, So it really was all about business now.
Speaker 1: The event was a success, and the group planned a
Speaker 1: second event for nineteen eighty and this one took place
Speaker 1: in the Las Vegas Convention Center. It had outgrown the
Speaker 1: MGM Grand but a few attendees were staying at the
Speaker 1: MGM Grand. That's just that was the place where they
Speaker 1: had booked a room, but the show had already outgrown
Speaker 1: the conference rooms there. The new venue boasted twenty five
Speaker 1: thousand square feet of exhibition space, and more than seven
Speaker 1: thousand people attended the show, so they nearly doubled in size. Now,
Speaker 1: that was the first year for the show to use
Speaker 1: Comdex as a name, and it was also a tragic year.
Speaker 1: Something really disastrous happened that year. On the very last
Speaker 1: day of the Comdex conference, a fire broke out in
Speaker 1: the MGM Grand overnight, and it was a serious fire,
Speaker 1: and more than eighty people died, most of them from
Speaker 1: smoke inhalation because the smoke went up into the rooms
Speaker 1: and a lot of people were asleep and they never
Speaker 1: woke up. Out of those eighty people, eight of them
Speaker 1: were attending Comdex, and the tragedy marks the worst disaster
Speaker 1: in Nevada history and the third worst hotel fire in
Speaker 1: US history. The cause of the fire was ultimately traced
Speaker 1: to an electrical ground fault in a wall socket. They
Speaker 1: had a nearby cooling unit for a pastry display case
Speaker 1: that had a pair of copper pipes that were exposed.
Speaker 1: The insulation had worn down. The copper pipes had been
Speaker 1: vibrating at times, and that vibration had caused the pipes
Speaker 1: to rub together. The insulation protecting the pipes worn away,
Speaker 1: which meant that they could rub against each other, and
Speaker 1: this eventually caused the short, the electrical short, which then
Speaker 1: caused a fire. The fire spread very quickly and it
Speaker 1: was a huge story both in Las Vegas and in
Speaker 1: the computer industry. Now, despite this tragedy, the conference continued
Speaker 1: and grew. It was on that last day of the conference.
Speaker 1: The following year it was even bigger. You would actually
Speaker 1: see Comdex expand to two shows in that year. So
Speaker 1: in the springtime, the organization launched a Comdex show in
Speaker 1: New York. The fall show stayed in Las Vegas. So
Speaker 1: they were splitting up to two shows a year, with
Speaker 1: one on the East Coast and one in Las Vegas.
Speaker 1: The New York show was a big success. It was
Speaker 1: more than twice as big as the first Comdex show
Speaker 1: in Vegas. It had eleven thousand attendees and two hundred
Speaker 1: and thirty seven exhibitors. That Vegas show happened in the fall,
Speaker 1: and this was huge business, not just for the exhibitors
Speaker 1: and the attending professionals, but also for the organizers themselves.
Speaker 1: They were making a huge amount of profit. At its peak,
Speaker 1: Condex could command fifty nine dollars per square foot of
Speaker 1: exhibit space, and when it was the biggest trade show around,
Speaker 1: there was more than one point three million square feet available,
Speaker 1: and Comdex staffers were really really pushing for companies to
Speaker 1: end up leasing that space, so they were making bookoos
Speaker 1: of dollars serious cash just so they a company can
Speaker 1: rent some carpeted floor. Yeah, if you want to read
Speaker 1: some vitriol about Condex, just do some searches about how
Speaker 1: much money the organizers were making back in these days,
Speaker 1: and how a lot of the exhibitors felt that they
Speaker 1: were being almost like extorted in order to rent larger
Speaker 1: and larger spaces year over year, like they were being
Speaker 1: pressured by staffers who were acting like salesmen to rent
Speaker 1: more space each successful year. It's one of the reasons
Speaker 1: why some companies said that they ultimately abandoned the show.
Speaker 1: Well back in nineteen eighty one, the show was still growing,
Speaker 1: just as the computer industry was growing and holding two
Speaker 1: shows ended up working out with the Spring Show in
Speaker 1: New York and the Fall Show in Las Vegas. So
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty two they expanded again, and this time
Speaker 1: there were three shows. The Spring event occurred in Atlantic
Speaker 1: City aka the Las Vegas of the East Coast, and
Speaker 1: the Fall Show happened in Las Vegas. But there was
Speaker 1: a third show that happened in Europe and it took
Speaker 1: place in Amsterdam. That marked the beginning of Condex expanding
Speaker 1: beyond the United Stas States. Now that trend would continue
Speaker 1: and snowball over the following years. So you start looking
Speaker 1: at the number of shows Condex was holding year over year,
Speaker 1: and it kept on increasing. In two thousand and two,
Speaker 1: there were eighteen Condex shows scheduled throughout that year, eighteen
Speaker 1: different events across the globe in two thousand and two. Now,
Speaker 1: one of those, the one that was scheduled for Mexico City,
Speaker 1: ended up getting canceled, but that still means there were
Speaker 1: seventeen shows in two thousand and two. I mean, that's
Speaker 1: think about how many resources you would have to dedicate
Speaker 1: to hold that many events around the world. All right,
Speaker 1: But back to the nineteen eighties, So after those first
Speaker 1: few years when everyone was concentrating on many computers and
Speaker 1: business to business type stuff, personal computers began to play
Speaker 1: a role in shows because they were starting to take off.
Speaker 1: People were starting to purchase personal computers at a larger rate,
Speaker 1: was going beyond the hobbyist and beyond the early adopter,
Speaker 1: and so it became part of comdex history. He started
Speaker 1: seeing computers like the Apple two E and the first
Speaker 1: IBM compatible computers. First you saw the IBM computers, and
Speaker 1: then shortly after that you saw the IBM clones that
Speaker 1: were making their way to market. And you also had
Speaker 1: other computers like the Commodore sixty four, the Tandy computer,
Speaker 1: and the Amiga line of computers which originally came from
Speaker 1: Commodore as well. And one of these days I'm gonna
Speaker 1: have to do a full show about Tandy, I think,
Speaker 1: because it's hard to believe that a company that started
Speaker 1: off as a leather goods company got into the personal
Speaker 1: computer business. And for that matter, I should probably talk
Speaker 1: about IBM compatibles and clones too, as that was a big,
Speaker 1: big deal early on in the personal computer age and
Speaker 1: one of the reasons why IBM got out of the
Speaker 1: consumer computer market. Entirely for many years. But the important thing,
Speaker 1: the important thing to remember in this part of the
Speaker 1: Comdex story is that these companies were becoming important enough
Speaker 1: to warrant a spot on the show floor. By nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty three, Condex started holding a show in Atlanta, that
Speaker 1: is the city where I am in. I'm from Atlanta, Georgia,
Speaker 1: so I remember Condex being talked about. I was a
Speaker 1: kid in the eighties and I never attended a Comdex,
Speaker 1: but I remember people talking about them, and the show
Speaker 1: in Atlanta would continue yearly until nineteen ninety six, and
Speaker 1: at that point Condex began to alternate between Atlanta and
Speaker 1: Chicago every year. So I probably would have been pretty
Speaker 1: bored if I had gone to one of the comdexes
Speaker 1: in Atlanta. I mean, these shows were huge, and there
Speaker 1: were lots of booths and everything, but again it was
Speaker 1: mostly about like productivity machines and software, and not really
Speaker 1: the kind of stuff I was interested in, which was
Speaker 1: namely computer games. You didn't really see a whole lot
Speaker 1: of that Condex because that's just not what the focus
Speaker 1: of the show was about. Also, in nineteen eighty three,
Speaker 1: I love this Bill Gates gave his first speech at
Speaker 1: a Comdex in nineteen eighty three, and that would become
Speaker 1: a regular event over future shows, and Gates would end
Speaker 1: up getting larger audiences every year. He would command a
Speaker 1: bigger room every year. It obviously became a much more
Speaker 1: important event in future comdexes, but back in nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: three it was rather modest in comparison, so much so
Speaker 1: that the projectionist for Bill Gates's presentation was his own father.
Speaker 1: I just think that's kind of a charming little bit
Speaker 1: of information. Well, I've got more to say about what
Speaker 1: happened to Comdex in the nineteen eighties, but before I
Speaker 1: get into that, let's take a quick break to thank
Speaker 1: our sponsor. All right, So a couple of big events
Speaker 1: happened in the early nineteen eighties that rippled through Comdex.
Speaker 1: For one thing, the Macintosh debuted in nineteen eighty four,
Speaker 1: and that's when the graphics user interface, or GUY, became
Speaker 1: big in home personal computers. The Windows system Microsoft Windows
Speaker 1: also made a big splash around that same time, and
Speaker 1: Microsoft and Apple had worked together developing a GUY. It
Speaker 1: wasn't exactly you might hear stories about, Oh well, Windows
Speaker 1: was just copying the mac os. It's not entirely true. Actually,
Speaker 1: the two companies were working together to develop Guy's and
Speaker 1: to be fair, the graphic user interface wasn't developed out
Speaker 1: of Apple or Microsoft. The graphic user Interface originated as
Speaker 1: a project out of Xerox Park, But that's another story
Speaker 1: for another time. The graphics user Interface, however, was changing
Speaker 1: computers because it was seen as a much more intuitive,
Speaker 1: easy to understand system than command line systems. So in
Speaker 1: the old days, if you wanted to run a program
Speaker 1: on your computer, you had to type in run in
Speaker 1: the program name, and then the computer would know to
Speaker 1: execute that command and start that program. You might have
Speaker 1: some programs that had an auto startup based upon the
Speaker 1: disc that you were using, and that would make things
Speaker 1: a little more smooth. But until the graphics user interface
Speaker 1: came along, you couldn't just click on an icon and
Speaker 1: have something start. You actually had to type stuff in,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't exactly user friendly for people who weren't
Speaker 1: already interested in computers, so it was sort of a
Speaker 1: barrier to entry. The graphic user interface lowered that barrier,
Speaker 1: and that's really when we started seeing personal computers take off,
Speaker 1: not just for homes, but in schools and all sorts
Speaker 1: of places. So the Macintosh and the Windows system were
Speaker 1: really important, and they dominated the show floor. By nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty five, everyone was talking about Windows based systems and
Speaker 1: graphic user interfaces. And it's funny because if you look
Speaker 1: back on these early comdex shows, you can see the
Speaker 1: debut of stuff that we all take for granted now,
Speaker 1: stuff that you know well of course that exists. Sometimes
Speaker 1: we're looking at debuts from stuff that's completely obsolete at
Speaker 1: this point. So if you are able to find videos
Speaker 1: from that era and you watch them, it's almost comical
Speaker 1: to see them debut because it's ancient history now in
Speaker 1: the computer world. One of the resources I used when
Speaker 1: researching this show was an episode of The Computer Chronicles
Speaker 1: from nineteen eighty six. So at the beginning of that episode,
Speaker 1: the CEO of Digital Research talked about how applications had
Speaker 1: suddenly become important, So he was referring to programs like
Speaker 1: desktop publishing software or spreadsheet management programs, things like that,
Speaker 1: and that they were taking center stage because they were
Speaker 1: taking advantage of this graphic user interface. It's really similar
Speaker 1: in a way to how smartphone apps have become a
Speaker 1: major focus in the tech industry. Today. The hardware is
Speaker 1: still important, but a lot more attention is going towards
Speaker 1: the software running on top of the hardware. Well. Condex
Speaker 1: was also where companies could show off new products like
Speaker 1: laser printers, which in the eighties were super super new
Speaker 1: and exciting, or computer peripherals, or computer systems and software packages.
Speaker 1: And because the industry was heating up, the show just
Speaker 1: kept getting larger and more grandiose every year. And it
Speaker 1: wasn't long before companies began employing young women to entice
Speaker 1: people into booths. And I saw one journalist's account of
Speaker 1: an early nineteen eighties Condex that dismissively referred to these
Speaker 1: women as demo dollies. Now at cees, you tend to
Speaker 1: hear these women being referred to as booth babes, and
Speaker 1: I just like to take a moment to address this
Speaker 1: because it bugs me. So as I get older, I
Speaker 1: get more uncomfortable with these terms. And that's because they
Speaker 1: ignore the fact that these women are human beings. Many
Speaker 1: of them may be hired because of their appearance. You know.
Speaker 1: It might be that they have a modeling agency and
Speaker 1: a company hires them because of their profile and the
Speaker 1: modeling agency, and so it's completely based on their appearance.
Speaker 1: But it doesn't change the fact that we're talking about
Speaker 1: actual people here. I'm not a fan of companies using
Speaker 1: sex appeal to get people to pay attention to their stuff,
Speaker 1: particularly if we're talking about products that have nothing to
Speaker 1: do with being sexy in the first place. But the
Speaker 1: women and men too, because we see male models also
Speaker 1: being pulled in for this duty, especially for things like
Speaker 1: wearables and sports type of technology. At places like ces,
Speaker 1: we see both women and men who are you know,
Speaker 1: chiseled from marble showing these off. But that makes sense,
Speaker 1: you understand, right, all right, This person is fit and
Speaker 1: the product is promising to help you get fit, so
Speaker 1: you see the connection there. It's a little more tough
Speaker 1: if you're like, this is a case for a smartphone
Speaker 1: and this woman wearing barely anything is holding the case.
Speaker 1: It's a little harder to justify. I don't hold it
Speaker 1: against the models. They're doing a job. They were hired
Speaker 1: to do a job, and that's what they're doing. And
Speaker 1: I also realize that my opinions are just my own,
Speaker 1: and that I'm probably being a bit too old fashioned
Speaker 1: but my main point is just to remember these are people,
Speaker 1: not just a walking, talking display. So I hate terms
Speaker 1: like booth babes or demo dollies, which I think is
Speaker 1: even somehow worse than booth babes because it is so dismissive.
Speaker 1: It's treating a person like an object. It truly is objectification,
Speaker 1: and I don't care for that. So old man lecture
Speaker 1: is over. But seriously, demo dollies come on anyway. By
Speaker 1: the mid nineteen eighties, companies creating IBM compatible machines had
Speaker 1: pretty much run IBM out of the consumer PC business.
Speaker 1: The clones of IBM's machines were perfectly legal as long
Speaker 1: as the company's making them could demonstrate that they didn't
Speaker 1: steal IBM's approach but rather reverse engineered it, which seems
Speaker 1: like a pretty fine detail, but it's one that made
Speaker 1: the production of IBM clones completely legal. More on that
Speaker 1: if I ever do a full episode about IBM compatible
Speaker 1: computers now. Watching the Computer Chronicles also reminded me how
Speaker 1: the industry at that time was dominated by dudes. You know,
Speaker 1: in the nineteen eighties, if you looked at the show
Speaker 1: floor for Comdex, men outnumbered women, by an enormous percentage.
Speaker 1: Apart from the women who were hired to lure people
Speaker 1: into booths, you hardly saw any females on the floor
Speaker 1: at all. But as the industry would make sured, we
Speaker 1: saw more women taking roles in the industry, including leadership roles.
Speaker 1: But I'm pretty sure those early CONDEX shows saw really
Speaker 1: long lines at the men's room and like almost completely
Speaker 1: empty women's restrooms, so an interesting juxtaposition and other compared
Speaker 1: to other arenas. The same thing was true of Consumer
Speaker 1: Electronics Show, and in fact, I would argue it's still
Speaker 1: largely true. We're seeing more and more women on the
Speaker 1: show floor at cees, both in leadership positions and attendees
Speaker 1: that kind of thing, but I think it's still far
Speaker 1: more men than women. But the early days of CONDEX,
Speaker 1: it was ridiculous that imbalance. One of the most amusing
Speaker 1: elements of the Computer Chronicles episode I watched was the
Speaker 1: segment dedicated to portable computers. So back in the nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: this was nineteen eight those devices were huge, largely because
Speaker 1: they had to have five and a quarter inch floppy
Speaker 1: disk drives, because that was the main media of choice
Speaker 1: in the mid eighties. The laptops, even the light ones,
Speaker 1: weighed somewhere around twelve pounds or more, so they were
Speaker 1: hefty enough that you wouldn't want them on your lap
Speaker 1: for very long. You'd also probably chuckle at hearing some
Speaker 1: of the processor speeds being promoted back in those days.
Speaker 1: You hear something like this processor has sixteen mega hurtz
Speaker 1: processor speed, and that's probably not going to impress you
Speaker 1: very much today, but you know different time. Another interesting
Speaker 1: product that was introduced and featured in that show was
Speaker 1: from Phillips. It was a data storage system that consisted
Speaker 1: of twenty different discs arranged in a case. The discs
Speaker 1: were in cartridges, and a mechanical arm could go up
Speaker 1: or down the rack of cartridges and retrieve or insert
Speaker 1: discs to access the information on them. Now, each disk
Speaker 1: was twelve inches in diameter, and each disc could hold
Speaker 1: two whole gigabytes of information on it, which meant that
Speaker 1: the entire apparatus could hold forty gigabytes. So think about
Speaker 1: that for a moment. They're smartphones right now that can
Speaker 1: hold more than three times that amount of information, and
Speaker 1: those will fit in your pocket. So we've really come
Speaker 1: a long way since the nineteen eighties. We're going to
Speaker 1: take a quick break in the story of context to
Speaker 1: thank our sponsors, but we'll be right back. The nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty six condext show also had some of the earliest
Speaker 1: devices that we would put into the wearable category today.
Speaker 1: Puma showed off a gadget that snapped onto their running
Speaker 1: shoes and it had a microprocessor inside of it that
Speaker 1: could detect whenever your foot made impact with the ground,
Speaker 1: and it acted as a step counter, so you could
Speaker 1: use it on a run and you could do your run,
Speaker 1: and then after you were done running, you would have
Speaker 1: to go back home and you would have to use
Speaker 1: a cable to hook the gadget up to your computer
Speaker 1: and pull the data off of the device so that
Speaker 1: you could look at it through the software running on
Speaker 1: your computer. That would give you a visualization of the data,
Speaker 1: and then you could see how far you ran and
Speaker 1: how many calories you burned. It's not quite as easy
Speaker 1: as connecting everything via Bluetooth, which is typically how it
Speaker 1: happens today, but it was a hint of what would
Speaker 1: follow almost thirty years later. Other emerging technologies that began
Speaker 1: to pop up at Comdex in the early to mid
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties included voice recognition, optical discs so CDs, and
Speaker 1: things like that, three and a half inch floppy disks
Speaker 1: and others, and we began to see the interesting seesaw
Speaker 1: relationship between hardware and software. So if you read articles
Speaker 1: from the nineteen eighties about Condex, you'll see journalists point
Speaker 1: out out that these incredibly powerful computers that were hitting
Speaker 1: the market didn't have any software that took advantage of
Speaker 1: all that raw power. They'd say like, well, yeah, you
Speaker 1: can get this super fast machine, but what good is that.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's no software that really takes advantage of
Speaker 1: this machine's capabilities. We're never going to see that happen.
Speaker 1: I mean, it'll run existing software faster, so if you've
Speaker 1: got like a huge spreadsheet, it won't take as long
Speaker 1: for it to load. But other than that, I mean,
Speaker 1: why would you need all that power? Now, it's kind
Speaker 1: of funny to think that a three eighty six processor
Speaker 1: computer from the mid nineteen eighties was thought to be
Speaker 1: more powerful than anything you would ever need, because a
Speaker 1: three eighty six computer compared to today's smartphones would see
Speaker 1: clunky and slow in comparison. Since those days, we've seen
Speaker 1: a lot more tech journalists agree to what is called
Speaker 1: Worth's law, which is named after Nicholas Worth, who observed
Speaker 1: that software speed was decreasing at a rate faster than
Speaker 1: hardware speed was increasing. So, in other words, software is
Speaker 1: getting bloated and requires more resources to run faster than
Speaker 1: we're seeing improvements in those resources. So year over year,
Speaker 1: it feels like computers are going slower rather than faster.
Speaker 1: It's not that the computers are less powerful than they
Speaker 1: were before. It's that the software requires more power than
Speaker 1: the previous generations software. And that's because we get bloat
Speaker 1: software bloat over the course of many versions of the
Speaker 1: same program. So take take a word processor program. Well,
Speaker 1: every successive version of that word processor program is likely
Speaker 1: to be larger and more resource hungry than the version
Speaker 1: before because a company has to start including more and
Speaker 1: more features to convince you to upgrade to buy the
Speaker 1: newest version. Otherwise, you would just buy one version and
Speaker 1: you'd stick with it until, you know, until it just
Speaker 1: literally could not measure up to what you needed it
Speaker 1: to do. I mean, why would I need to buy
Speaker 1: a new word processor program if I've got one that
Speaker 1: works just fine. So to convince me to buy a
Speaker 1: new one. Companies are going to add more and more features. Well.
Speaker 1: As software gets more complex, it becomes less efficient and
Speaker 1: therefore it requires more power to run. And even to
Speaker 1: this day, there's still a temptation to declare a machine
Speaker 1: that has a screaming fast processor and cavernous storage capacity
Speaker 1: as being more than what you are ever going to need.
Speaker 1: But the more seasoned computer users among us know that
Speaker 1: eventually software is going to use up and maybe even
Speaker 1: exceed that hardware's capabilities. So if you build it, the
Speaker 1: software will fill it. It's kind of like if you
Speaker 1: build it, they will come. Now. The show in Vegas
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty was just one of seven. The other
Speaker 1: six shows happened in Tokyo, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Amsterdam, Nice,
Speaker 1: and Sydney. And the show in nineteen eighty six in
Speaker 1: Vegas lasted five days. That was the longest conference up
Speaker 1: to that point. So things were still on the rise.
Speaker 1: Everything was still growing every year. More money was being
Speaker 1: poured into the show, and each show meant that there
Speaker 1: was more square footage to lease to companies, and the
Speaker 1: organizers were making some serious bank in those days. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: exhibitors were enjoying the benefits of connecting with customers and
Speaker 1: getting an eye on what the competition was up to,
Speaker 1: and a lot of ideas were launched at Comdex, not
Speaker 1: all of them successfully. There were plenty of examples of
Speaker 1: products that never went anywhere, and vaporware became a common word. Vaporware,
Speaker 1: by the way, is when you announce a product that
Speaker 1: never actually comes to market. It just remains vapor. It's
Speaker 1: the kaiser SoSE of the technological world. Now, some Comdex
Speaker 1: shows also became vapor aware. In nineteen eighty seven, and
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty eight, the planned Comdex event in Tokyo
Speaker 1: was postponed, essentially canceled. It never really happened. The nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety one event for Paris was canceled outright now, things
Speaker 1: were not dire, not by a long shot, but there
Speaker 1: were some growing pains as the organizers kept trying to
Speaker 1: increase the show's reach. Sometimes they did it faster than
Speaker 1: they could actually support, and typically the reason these shows
Speaker 1: would get canceled is because they weren't. The show organizers
Speaker 1: weren't able to sell out enough space on the show
Speaker 1: floor to justify holding the trade show, so they couldn't
Speaker 1: get enough vendors to agree to come to a show,
Speaker 1: they'd postpone it or cancel it rather than lose money
Speaker 1: on throwing a show with a small number of exhibitors.
Speaker 1: By the late nineteen eighties, Comdex was looking to grow
Speaker 1: some more, so it changed its attendance policy and started
Speaker 1: to sell it admission to the general public. So for
Speaker 1: the first time, people unaffiliated with the industry or people
Speaker 1: who were not in the media could actually come to
Speaker 1: the show, and no big surprise here, Attendance numbers exploded
Speaker 1: as a result. Now, this was not necessarily welcomed by
Speaker 1: all the other attendees. Some people were complaining that it
Speaker 1: was becoming too difficult to navigate the floor because it
Speaker 1: was just there were just too many people. There are
Speaker 1: too many bodies in the way. And other people were
Speaker 1: worried that the show would turn into an enormous marketplace
Speaker 1: with the general public purchasing products directly from manufacturers rather
Speaker 1: than retailers. You know, like, why bother packing this device
Speaker 1: back up and shipping it back to your headquarters. I'll
Speaker 1: just buy it off of you right here. Even though
Speaker 1: it's not scheduled to launch for another three months. You
Speaker 1: also heard a lot of people say the show was
Speaker 1: starting to lose its focus. It was it was starting
Speaker 1: to incorporate too many things outside of the core computer
Speaker 1: and computer peripheral industry, and as a result, there were
Speaker 1: a lot of people worried that the show was starting
Speaker 1: to spiral out of control. Now, the early nineteen nineties
Speaker 1: saw the rise of a new, very important player in
Speaker 1: the computer space, and that is the Internet. While the
Speaker 1: mainstream public was still getting a handle on what the
Speaker 1: Internet was back in the early nineteen nineties, condext began
Speaker 1: to feature more exhibitors promising the information super Highway would
Speaker 1: change everything, and in many ways they were right, though
Speaker 1: not all of their predictions would turn out to be accurate.
Speaker 1: For one thing, in the early nineteen nineties, no one
Speaker 1: really had an idea of how the Internet could become
Speaker 1: a massive tool for commerce. It was more like a
Speaker 1: point of contact for people. So companies might have a website,
Speaker 1: but it was meant to give information about a company
Speaker 1: or to allow a potential customer or an existing customer
Speaker 1: to contact the company. But there wasn't a whole lot
Speaker 1: beyond that in those early days, especially since the World
Speaker 1: Wide Web didn't really debut in until ninety two ninety three,
Speaker 1: So before that you're just talking about stuff like email
Speaker 1: and some other functions that were mainly used in the
Speaker 1: academic world and were just barely getting a foothold in
Speaker 1: the corporate and then public world. Now over the next
Speaker 1: several years, more exhibitors would show off systems designed to
Speaker 1: make accessing the Internet more intuitive and seamless, all the
Speaker 1: way from operating systems to web browsers. In early nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety five, news broke that a suitor to Comdex would
Speaker 1: be taking over the show, and that suitor was a
Speaker 1: Japanese software company called soft Bank. The company made an
Speaker 1: eight hundred million dollars deal with the Interface Group to
Speaker 1: acquire the trade show. Now in nineteen ninety four, soft
Speaker 1: Bank had already purchased a publishing, exposition and conference division
Speaker 1: from the company's Zif Davis. They had tried to buy
Speaker 1: Ziff Davis outright, but Ziff Davis were used and then
Speaker 1: instead settled on buying this division within Ziff Davis. So
Speaker 1: Ziff Davis spins out of division sells it to SoftBank.
Speaker 1: This division was an events planning division for publishing expositions.
Speaker 1: Then soft Bank goes and buys Comdex from the Interface
Speaker 1: Group for eight hundred million dollars. Now, these two purchases
Speaker 1: made SoftBank the largest name in the trade show game,
Speaker 1: and it also gave some prestige to the CEO of SoftBank,
Speaker 1: who is a Masayoshi's son, who was sometimes called the
Speaker 1: Bill Gates of Japan, and his story is really interesting too.
Speaker 1: Sun had overcome poverty and also social stigma to become
Speaker 1: a successful businessman in Japan. He was the son of
Speaker 1: two Korean immigrants, and in Japan at the time, Koreans
Speaker 1: were sometimes the victims of racial prejudice, so his story
Speaker 1: is pretty interesting. Maybe I'll do an episode about him sometime.
Speaker 1: At this point, Comdex was enormous. The nineteen ninety four
Speaker 1: show in Vegas had almost two hundred thousand people in attendance.
Speaker 1: That's a huge jump from that four thousand from nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy nine. Now, keep in mind they also opened up
Speaker 1: the doors to the general public, so part of that
Speaker 1: growth was just from people curious to learn more about
Speaker 1: the latest computers, but they had no connection to the
Speaker 1: industry itself. Now, along with the growth in attendance was
Speaker 1: a growth of complaints among exhibitors. Some companies were protesting
Speaker 1: what they considered to be unfair fees and rental rates.
Speaker 1: But even though they felt that perhaps things were becoming
Speaker 1: a little unfair, most companies also felt that the show
Speaker 1: was too important to skip. They couldn't skip out on it,
Speaker 1: or else they would be left behind by their competitors.
Speaker 1: So they would show up and they would pay. There
Speaker 1: had been talks of launching a competitor show, like a
Speaker 1: bunch of groups saying, you know what, forget this, We're
Speaker 1: gonna go out and make our own trade show, but
Speaker 1: they hadn't really gone far beyond just some big talk. Now,
Speaker 1: in the next section, I'm going to really concentrate on
Speaker 1: how the show got to its largest point and then
Speaker 1: what happened to make it disappear over the next few years.
Speaker 1: But before I get into that, let's take another quick
Speaker 1: break to thank our sponsor. All Right, So it's nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety seven. Comdex hits its peak, It gets the largest
Speaker 1: it will ever get. In nineteen ninety seven, the number
Speaker 1: of exhibitors was more than twenty four hundred and eighty
Speaker 1: and they were taking up one point thirty five million
Speaker 1: square feet of space on the show floor in the
Speaker 1: primary Vegas show of the year, the number of attendees
Speaker 1: was about two hundred and forty thousand. I mean a
Speaker 1: huge number of people, like a quarter of a million
Speaker 1: people almost at nineteen ninety seven Comdex Las Vegas. This
Speaker 1: was a monster of a show, but it also marked
Speaker 1: the beginning of the decline of Condex. Exhibitors were complaining
Speaker 1: even more about predatory practices of Comdex staffers, pressuring companies
Speaker 1: to invest in larger booths year over year. They were saying, well,
Speaker 1: we want to be part of the show, but every
Speaker 1: year we're making the arrangements. Everyone's pressuring us to make
Speaker 1: our booth bigger than the year before, which means we
Speaker 1: have to spend more money in order to be part
Speaker 1: of this show. And it's getting ridiculous. It got so
Speaker 1: ridiculous for some companies that began to drop out, including
Speaker 1: big names. IBM withdrew from Comdex because of these practices,
Speaker 1: and according to a CNN Money report from two thousand
Speaker 1: and three, Condex became a quote magnet for dumb money
Speaker 1: end quote. Now what they meant by that is that
Speaker 1: if you participated in Comdex year over year, that was
Speaker 1: just a recipe of diminishing returns. You were going to
Speaker 1: see fewer and fewer benefits of being part of the show,
Speaker 1: and ultimately it would become a drain on resources, meaning
Speaker 1: you're losing more money attending the show than you're making
Speaker 1: out of business because of the show. So more exhibitors
Speaker 1: were starting to drop out following nineteen ninety seven. They
Speaker 1: were saying, well, I'm spending money, but I don't see
Speaker 1: the return on investment. This is like putting a big
Speaker 1: time commercial out on a channel that no one is watching.
Speaker 1: What's the point now? Behind the scenes, in a series
Speaker 1: of moves so complicated, I don't even understand them, SoftBank
Speaker 1: reorganized its divisions and departments. So it took the division
Speaker 1: that owned Condex and that publishing conference I talked about before.
Speaker 1: It was essentially known as ZD Events at the time,
Speaker 1: and transformed this into a new and a publicly traded
Speaker 1: entity called Key three Media. That's key the numeral three
Speaker 1: and media all is one word. And this was a
Speaker 1: holding company. It was just existed to hold these assets.
Speaker 1: That's all it did. Now SoftBank held about half of
Speaker 1: the ownership of Key three Media, but eventually it would
Speaker 1: spin it off completely. Now that happened after SoftBank tried
Speaker 1: to auction off the events division. So why was it
Speaker 1: trying to sell something the company had only purchased a
Speaker 1: couple of years before. Perhaps organizing and running the events
Speaker 1: was too far outside the wheelhouse of the software corporation.
Speaker 1: The acquisition of Condex and Ziff Davis's publishing conference didn't
Speaker 1: necessarily include the people with the knowledge and experience of
Speaker 1: organizing those events. At any rate, the auction did not
Speaker 1: result in any satisfactory offers. Apparently, the largest offer on
Speaker 1: the table was for six hundred forty million dollars, which
Speaker 1: is way less than the eight hundred million soft Bank
Speaker 1: paid for Comdex alone, never mind the Ziff Davis deal.
Speaker 1: So Key three Media would eventually become an independent spinoff
Speaker 1: and the sole owner of Comdex. Now. The head of
Speaker 1: Key three Media was a guy named Fred Rosen, and
Speaker 1: Rosen had made a fortune growing and then selling Ticketmaster
Speaker 1: Boom Ticketmaster. That's my own personal bias coming through. I
Speaker 1: have an issue with Ticketmaster. I have many issues with Ticketmaster.
Speaker 1: I should do an episode about them, but it will
Speaker 1: be the most unbiased, unforgiving episode of tech stuff. Ever,
Speaker 1: so maybe I should just keep a trap shut anyway.
Speaker 1: Rosen reportedly ran Key three as if it were a
Speaker 1: massive corporation rather than an events production company. He moved
Speaker 1: the headquarters to an expensive part of Los Angeles, not
Speaker 1: too far from his own mansion, and he would end
Speaker 1: up taking company trips on a private jet across the world.
Speaker 1: His salary was one and a half million dollars in
Speaker 1: two thousand and one. That's a big salary for a CEO,
Speaker 1: especially considering most CEOs get the majority of their compensation
Speaker 1: and benefits as opposed to a direct salary. Million and
Speaker 1: a half in two thousand and one is no chump change.
Speaker 1: Former employees said that his managerial style was incredibly confrontational
Speaker 1: and off putting, so much so that he was driving
Speaker 1: away staffers who had been working in the trade show
Speaker 1: industry for decades, which meant that, as a result, Key
Speaker 1: three was depleting its company's talent pool. You had fewer
Speaker 1: and fewer people around who knew how to handle trade shows,
Speaker 1: so it was a mess, to put it lightly. Now,
Speaker 1: this takes us to nineteen ninety eight, and this was
Speaker 1: the year that featured that infamous blue screen of death.
Speaker 1: During a demonstration of an early build of Windows ninety eight.
Speaker 1: You heard our listener Alex refer to this earlier. So
Speaker 1: what happened? Well, Bill Gates and Chris Capocella were on
Speaker 1: stage during the keynote event to talk about Windows ninety eight,
Speaker 1: which had not yet launched. It was still in development,
Speaker 1: it had actually been delayed, and Capaseella was trying to
Speaker 1: show how Windows ninety eight could download drivers. Drivers are
Speaker 1: these components that are needed for software and hardware to
Speaker 1: work with the operating system, and he was explaining how
Speaker 1: seamless this operation was when the computer crashed and went
Speaker 1: to the blue screen of death, at which point Bill
Speaker 1: Gates started chuckling and Caposeella was like doing a little
Speaker 1: bit of a shuffle. He was very quickly trying to
Speaker 1: switch away from the monitor screen and it could have
Speaker 1: been an embarrassing disaster, but I think they actually handled
Speaker 1: the problem really well with humor. So the audience started laughing,
Speaker 1: and Capaseella, who was responding to the audience's laughter at
Speaker 1: the blue screen of death, said moving right along in
Speaker 1: a very self deprecating way, like he wasn't angry. He
Speaker 1: seemed a little chagrined. But not completely thrown off. And
Speaker 1: then Bill Gates said this must be why we're not
Speaker 1: shipping Windows ninety eight yet, to which Capisella said, absolutely, absolutely,
Speaker 1: So it was a moment that reminded everyone that sometimes
Speaker 1: stuff just goes wrong. And I actually like watching this clip.
Speaker 1: I was afraid to watch it. I never watched it
Speaker 1: at the time, And I tend to feel a lot
Speaker 1: of empathy for people who are giving a public presentation
Speaker 1: because there are enormous pressures on you when you are
Speaker 1: giving a live speech in front of a big crowd
Speaker 1: of people. Keep in mind, we're talking condex when the
Speaker 1: attendance is like two hundred thousand plus people. You could
Speaker 1: have thousands of people in that audience all focusing on
Speaker 1: you and something goes wrong. I feel nothing but empathy
Speaker 1: because I've been in those kind of situations at a
Speaker 1: much smaller scale and it feels like torture. But I
Speaker 1: liked watching this clip because it didn't feel awful. It
Speaker 1: felt like they handled this pretty well as it feels
Speaker 1: actually pretty natural. So for one thing, it's not a
Speaker 1: presentation that fools you into thinking a product as completely flawless.
Speaker 1: If you've ever been to any product demonstration where it's
Speaker 1: clear everything has been pre recorded and rehearsed so that
Speaker 1: nothing goes wrong. It doesn't feel genuine, and you might
Speaker 1: even feel when you get your hands on the real
Speaker 1: thing that you were given a misrepresentation of what it
Speaker 1: was all about. Seeing something kind of fail and people
Speaker 1: acknowledge it and move on was a little refreshing. So
Speaker 1: it's just a kind of a funny moment, and something
Speaker 1: that Microsoft presentations frequently had, that is funny moments, not failures.
Speaker 1: And some of those funny moments were intentional, and some
Speaker 1: of them were not intentional. Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers. Nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety eight was also the first year to see a
Speaker 1: major decline in attendance. So I said two hundred thousand,
Speaker 1: but actually it was fewer than that. At that point,
Speaker 1: this was the big beginning of the end for Comdex,
Speaker 1: though at the time no one could see that. It
Speaker 1: did just appear to be a blip in the growth,
Speaker 1: and the following year saw another dip, and the number
Speaker 1: of exhibitors in two thousand, or in nineteen ninety nine
Speaker 1: rather was a one nine hundred and eleven, so more
Speaker 1: than twenty four hundred in ninety seven. In ninety nine one,
Speaker 1: nine hundred eleven, we start seeing fewer exhibitors showing up.
Speaker 1: More people are irritated with the way Comdex is running things,
Speaker 1: or rather the way Key three Media is running things,
Speaker 1: and are not coming back. Now. There was a little
Speaker 1: bit of a rally in two thousand, a few more
Speaker 1: exhibitors signed up, mostly new companies, but that was not
Speaker 1: to last. Also in nineteen ninety nine, Comdex organizers shook
Speaker 1: things up by changing the requirements for mass media, and
Speaker 1: a lot of major outlets that had been covering Condex
Speaker 1: since the beginning found themselves turned away, and that really
Speaker 1: shook things up. I mean, you had big, big names
Speaker 1: in mass media total that they were not going to
Speaker 1: be allowed to attend Comdex, and that did not help
Speaker 1: the organization at all. I mean, making sure that you
Speaker 1: alienate media is a good way to have some pretty
Speaker 1: negative coverage about your organization. And in two thousand and
Speaker 1: two thousand and one, there was another problem. This was
Speaker 1: outside of Comdex. This was a huge problem that had
Speaker 1: global implications, and I'm talking about the dot com bubble burst.
Speaker 1: So the dot com bubble, that's when you had all
Speaker 1: these web based companies popping up getting huge amounts of
Speaker 1: investment capital, whether it was private investment or the company
Speaker 1: had gone public very early, the value of the company
Speaker 1: was inflated beyond what it could actually do, and then
Speaker 1: ultimately many of these companies failed to show any real
Speaker 1: value and the bubble, this investment bubble burst. Dozens of
Speaker 1: companies went under, and companies in the computer industry in
Speaker 1: general suffered, even if they weren't directly tied to dot com,
Speaker 1: because they were in the computer industry, they were hit
Speaker 1: pretty hard because there was a ripple effect that came
Speaker 1: outward from the dot com companies to all the other
Speaker 1: computer companies that were, you know, kind of in that
Speaker 1: same pool, even though they weren't necessarily themselves a dot
Speaker 1: com company. Well, that meant that that ripple effect continued
Speaker 1: to hit comdex. And another event also ended up really
Speaker 1: setting comdex back, and that was the terrorist attack on
Speaker 1: September eleventh, two thousand and one in the United States
Speaker 1: that affected trade shows. Because it ended up affecting international travel.
Speaker 1: It scaled back international travel to a huge degree in
Speaker 1: the wake of those attacks, completely understandably. I mean, there's
Speaker 1: there's there's nothing else to say about that, but it
Speaker 1: did affect the trade shows at a time when Comdex
Speaker 1: was already having problems. So the Las Vegas Condex show
Speaker 1: in two thousand and one had one hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: five thousand attendees. That's still a large number of people,
Speaker 1: you know, one hundred and twenty five thousand, but still
Speaker 1: very short of that two hundred forty thousand the show
Speaker 1: had at its peak. In two thousand and two, Key
Speaker 1: three Media was in dire straits and not the band.
Speaker 1: With three days to go before the Las Vegas Trade
Speaker 1: Show opened, the company announced in its quarterly earning statement
Speaker 1: that it might have to enter Chapter eleven bankruptcy protection
Speaker 1: if it could not raise more capital, or sell the
Speaker 1: company off or find a merger partner. Key three Media's
Speaker 1: revenue had plummeted in two thousand and two, so in
Speaker 1: two thousand and one, the third quarter revenues were at
Speaker 1: fifty one and a half million. In two thousand and two,
Speaker 1: third quarter revenues were down to thirty eight point four million.
Speaker 1: That's a big drop over the course of the full year.
Speaker 1: The company had lost nearly three hundred million dollars in
Speaker 1: two thousand and one, it was in the black. It
Speaker 1: had made a profit of fourteen point one million. It's
Speaker 1: a small profit relatively speaking, but the loss of three
Speaker 1: hundred million that's a huge, huge downturn. Things were looking
Speaker 1: pretty awful. On top of that, the company had an
Speaker 1: upcoming interest payment on a debt it owed, and no
Speaker 1: one was really sure if they the company would actually
Speaker 1: be able to sign the check to pay off that
Speaker 1: interest payment, which is why they were looking at the
Speaker 1: possibility of entering Chapter eleven bankruptcy protection. Shares of Key
Speaker 1: three Media were down to a measly one point four
Speaker 1: cents per share. It's pretty ugly, folks now. In February
Speaker 1: two thousand and three, the Key three Media filed for
Speaker 1: Chapter eleven protection. When it finally emerged from Chapter eleven,
Speaker 1: so they were able to get their act together and
Speaker 1: come out of Chapter eleven bankruptcy protection. They also rebranded themselves.
Speaker 1: They were no longer Key three Media. Now they were
Speaker 1: called Media Live, and there was some hope that this
Speaker 1: new brand would be able to recapture the glory days
Speaker 1: of comdexes in the past, but it was not meant
Speaker 1: to be. The two thousand and three show drew only
Speaker 1: fifty thousand attendees. Fifty thousand still a lot of people,
Speaker 1: but not compared to two hundred forty thousand. In two
Speaker 1: thousand and four, In a move that shocked very few people,
Speaker 1: Condex Las Vegas was canceled. The struggles of Media Alive
Speaker 1: were well known. They were pretty public. People knew that
Speaker 1: the company was in trouble. Attendance had dropped significantly over
Speaker 1: the past few years, so many large companies had pulled
Speaker 1: out of the show, expressing their exasperation of dealing with
Speaker 1: the policies and high pressure sales tactics of the organizers.
Speaker 1: There was still some hope along Media Live lines that
Speaker 1: two thousand and five would be different, that they would
Speaker 1: be able to come back in two thousand and five
Speaker 1: and two thousand and four would just be a year off.
Speaker 1: But in two thousand and five, all of the company's
Speaker 1: planned Comdex events were canceled except for one so it
Speaker 1: was supposed to happen in Las Vegas, but it didn't.
Speaker 1: The only Comdex event to happen in that year was
Speaker 1: in Greece in Athens, but all the other ones were canceled.
Speaker 1: Analysts said that the implosion of Comdex came about due
Speaker 1: to a mix of mismanagement, depletion of talent, bad marketing choices,
Speaker 1: and also just that exhibitors weren't willing to play ball anymore.
Speaker 1: So the problem was that they couldn't get enough companies
Speaker 1: to agree to be part of the show. To have
Speaker 1: a show, It's kind of like throwing a huge party
Speaker 1: advertised as a star studded event, but the only celebrities
Speaker 1: who show up are a couple of folks from one
Speaker 1: of the later seasons of MTVS. The Real World doesn't
Speaker 1: really work. You can't really fuel a celebrity party that way.
Speaker 1: No offense to anyone who's ever been on MTV's The
Speaker 1: Real World. It didn't help that shows like the con
Speaker 1: Suomer Electronics Show, now known just as CEES, had become
Speaker 1: more popular. Some of the big names that had been
Speaker 1: regulars at Comdex had withdrawn and now were attending cees instead.
Speaker 1: Comdex would see a bit of a revival, a strange
Speaker 1: revival in twenty ten. So it had gone dead between
Speaker 1: two thousand and four and twenty ten, but in twenty
Speaker 1: ten we saw Comdex Virtual, so instead of a physical
Speaker 1: trade show that you would go and attend, featuring thousands
Speaker 1: of people walking around the convention center. Condex Virtual was
Speaker 1: a website you would go to and it simulated a
Speaker 1: trade show. You could watch keynote speeches, and you could
Speaker 1: virtually visit vendor booths. And it showed up again in
Speaker 1: twenty eleven and one more time in twenty twelve, and
Speaker 1: then it faded away. If you were to go to
Speaker 1: the Condex Virtual website today, you would get an under
Speaker 1: construction page, which seems charmingly out of date if you
Speaker 1: ask me. And that's the story of Condex from its
Speaker 1: birth to its death. Trade shows still exist. Some of
Speaker 1: them are as large or larger than Condex was at
Speaker 1: its height. Others are a bit more modest. And we're
Speaker 1: seeing some companies like Apple and Google concentrate on holding
Speaker 1: their own events rather than abiding by an annual trade
Speaker 1: show schedule. So instead of saying we're going to hold
Speaker 1: off on announcing something until someone else's schedule lines up,
Speaker 1: they say, no, we'll hold our own events, and we don't.
Speaker 1: That way, we don't get lost in the shuffle. And
Speaker 1: that was the story of Condex, a show that originally
Speaker 1: published on March twenty second, twenty seventeen. It's funny because
Speaker 1: other trade shows can certainly join the ranks of Condex
Speaker 1: of shows that used to be important in tech and
Speaker 1: now no longer exist. Arguably E three could be on
Speaker 1: that list because they've had to cancel it a couple
Speaker 1: of times. But as I'm recording these intros and outros, uh,
Speaker 1: the the death knell for E three has not yet rung,
Speaker 1: so maybe it's just mostly dead. It'll come back after,
Speaker 1: you know, Miracle Max gets a gets a whack at it.
Speaker 1: We'll have to wait and see. But Comdex, no, it's
Speaker 1: really most sincerely dead. It's like the wicked Witch of
Speaker 1: the East. I hope all of you are well, and
Speaker 1: I will talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff
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