C.E.S. Laments

In case you haven’t heard, the Consumer Electronics Show is going down right now in Las Vegas, Nevada. And I couldn’t be less interested.

It’s not because I don’t care about gadgets and HDTVs and all the fancy-schmancy doohickies that are being unveiled. It’s not because Apple isn’t there - really, it’s not. It isn’t even that I’m burned out from the holidays and have too much work to catch up on (which I am, and I do).

The reason is that there’s too much going on for any of it to be important. This is why the announcement of iPhone at last year’s MacWorld (which ran the same week as C.E.S.) overshadowed the entire conference. Zillions of new gadgets and best-ever versions of the same old TVs and mobile phones and media players (now with GPS!) compete for attention, and blogs like Engadget and Gizmodo publish post after post with little more than lists of features, and a couple passing comments on the look of the device being “reviewed.” Even for someone like me, who has a handle on RSS reading, these dozens and dozens of posts cancel each other out. How can you tell what is actually cool, actually worthwhile, actually has a life beyond the 15 seconds of fame and hype that they paid scantily-clad booth babes to create for them?

You can’t - at least not for awhile.

I’ve turned off my Gizmodo and Engadget feeds for the time being. I can’t imagine I will miss anything. Call me next week when they’ve figured out what actually matters.

Matt Ritchel of Bits blog (NYTimes) writes this gem:

Mr. Shapiro said that last year the C.E.A. did a comparison of the media coverage accrued by the iPhone and the entirety of the coverage given to C.E.S. Guess what? All the other gazillion products and companies got more coverage than iPhone and Apple. Take that, Steve Jobs.

No kidding?! You mean the sum of the coverage of an entire industry somehow managed to be larger than the press coverage for a single company and the announcement of a single product?

This kind of thinking (which, to clarify, is not Ritchel’s), is just deadly.

Leaving aside the general absurdity of the statement comparing the publicity for one product to that of thousands, the larger point is this: It’s not how much, but how good.

How many of those thousands of products were on any Best of 2007 lists? How many were sold on Amazon? How many of them can you recall?

Why would it be any different this year?