Reflections on 2008 CES

This was my first visit to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, NV. I spent everyday wandering through the endless displays of gadgetry goodness but was hard pressed to find any truly innovative products. I found the presentations to be the most useful for understanding how the industry thinks and what they can realistically deliver. Paul Otellini’s presentation was a good show but couldn’t deliver details on how or when the translation and GPS capabilities could be incorporated into real products because the whole thing was a simulation run on servers located backstage. Jerry Yang’s keynote was exciting but I doubt that the full platform will be released on time as presented. After a depressing presentation by several private equity investors, I realized that no one is interested in building a consumer centric company which is why Apple will probably continue to succeed in the consumer electronics space despite their rushed product life cycles and lack of respect for early adopters. It seems that consumer electronics firms succeed more on marketing and management capability than technological innovation.