Rooting For Comdex

I was reminded of that old saying while I was waiting on a taxi line at the Hard Rock Hotel at Comdex last week. Truth be told, the queue actually consisted of me and a blue-haired lady from Minnesota who had come down to try her luck and exercise her elbow at the slots, but drew the line at heavy metal, which we could both hear blaring from the hotel's casino. What'd she expect? It's the Hard Rock, for heaven's sake. The joint's jumping and its Comdex week. The same could not be said of the once dominant trade show.

Cab lines are a thing of the past at Comdex -- and not because Las Vegas' new monorail system is relieving the traffic. That hasn't even gone into effect yet. It's that the bloom is decidedly off the Comdex rose and has been for the past couple of years. That was understandable when the IT market was suffering through the long economic slump, but with business rebounding one might have expected that this year's Comdex would be the coming-out party, or at the very least an industry revival meeting celebrating good things to come.

Seems like just yesterday when crowds in excess of 200,000 descended on this neon oasis in the desert and crammed the Las Vegas Convention Center. That was when the mere attempt to try and get to a meeting on time was an exercise in futility, and life-long friendships and business deals were struck on the two-hour cab lines. Getting shoe-horned into a craps table was refuge from the crowds, and your hotel room was the only sanctuary.

Back then, the overwhelming majority of attendees began dreading Comdex weeks in advance and groused long and hard about the $250 hotel rooms that during any other week sold for $99 plus a ticket to the all-you-can-eat buffet. And any stab at walking the show floor made you think that spawning salmon had it pretty easy. How many times did we all wish that Comdex would just go away as we grabbed a cell phone to cancel a meeting we were never going to make?

Not anymore. Officials from MediaLive International estimated that Comdex drew no more than 50,000 attendees this year and questions about the viability of the event in the future were rampant. Let's all hope that the rumors of Comdex's demise are exaggerated. Because without a major international event of the stature that Comdex once was, we as an industry will be left wanting.

The issue is that all of the inconveniences of the old Comdex, along with the rampant price-gouging of former owners, pushed exhibitors into hotel suites where they could hole up and munch cheese and crackers while waiting for a meeting to arrive. This exodus from the show floor undermined Comdex's economic foundation while probably proving far more economically palatable for the vendors.

But what happens if Comdex really does go away? How will the industry actually come together? Consider the cost effectiveness of Comdex as a meeting of the IT industry tribe. In less than three days this year, I had nearly 25 meetings. In T&E expenses alone, you're probably talking $10,000 in costs if I had to visit each one of those 25 customers.

What needs to happen is that the industry must recognize that it needs Comdex, and vendors must step up to ensure its viability moving forward. Does that mean another multithousand-square-foot booth? Maybe. But why not consider Comdex as a venue for partner events? After all, Comdex began as the "Computer Distribution Expo." Let every vendor invite its top 200 solution providers to an annual conference built around a single trade show. Spend a day talking about your plans for the following year and then let the partners loose to attend the trade show.

Whatever the solution, Comdex not only needs to survive, but to thrive. Without a single industry event capable of bringing together the breadth and depth of this marketplace, the IT industry will be the loser.