By the time you read this, I’ll be in Las Vegas attending the Consumer Electronics Show, the 45-year-old extravaganza that stuffs the Las Vegas Convention Center and most of the hotels on the strip to the bursting point with new technology products.
For tech journalists like me, it’s the craziest, most exhausting week of the year. But it’s also one of the most useful.
And despite its name, the Consumer Electronics Show has become a yearly reminder that there’s no such thing as consumer electronics anymore — at least if you define “consumer electronics” as “technology that doesn’t matter to business customers.” From Ultrabooks to Windows 8 to a bevy of smartphones and tablets, most of the products making news at the show are relevant whether you’re at work, at home, or somewhere in between.
That wasn’t always true. Back in the era of VCRs and boom boxes and “giant” 27-inch cathode-ray TVs, CES was nearly devoid of business-oriented products. It was a different Vegas tech show, COMDEX, that catered to the corporate crowd, just six weeks or so before CES. There was very little overlap between the two conferences.
The stark contrast reflected the way the industry thought about its customers. When the archetypal technology device was a desktop computer, hardware makers were able to get away with acting like there were home PCs and work PCs, and never the twain would meet.
Even then, they weren’t entirely correct. People always took work home and performed it on their home machines. They always snuck games onto their work systems, too.
More important, insisting that business technology and consumer technology were fundamentally different forced buyers into unsatisfying decisions. Work PCs placed an emphasis on dependability and solid support policies. Home PCs tended to look good and have the latest technologies. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that consumers might also want a reliable computer, or that businesses would prefer one that wasn’t bland and boxy.
For all these reasons, many of the small business owners I know always resisted being pigeonholed. Sometimes they’d choose products aimed at small companies. But they’d also buy ones meant for consumers, and ones intended for large enterprises. And they’d fearlessly mix and match items in ways that the companies that made them never envisioned.
Little by little, the tech industry has caught up with the attitude that small business has had all along. One helpful factor has been the degree to which mobile products — laptops, phones, tablets, and related items such as Bluetooth headsets — now dominate. When a device can go anywhere, it makes far less sense to insist that it can’t be a business product and a consumer one.
And even large companies are behaving more like little ones when it comes to intermingling personal technology and corporate technology. Instead of forcing BlackBerries and Lotus Notes on employees that don’t want them, many IT departments are now figuring out how to welcome iPhones and Gmail and the like into the workplace — a hot trend known as theconsumerization of IT.
Today, COMDEX is no more. (It withered away early in the last decade and vanished altogether after the 2003 edition.) CES is now a humongous one-stop showcase for hardware of many kinds, plus associated software and services. The further you venture off the show floor — into hotel-suite meetings and night-time events scheduled to coincide with CES — the more likely you are to see products with a strong business angle.
It all makes for some odd juxtapositions, as 3D TVs and robots vie with laser printers and networked storage for the attention of attendees. But it works.
And when representatives of major manufacturers show me new products, they’re nowhere near as bullheaded as they once were about their intended audiences. Sure, a new laptop might be targeted primarily at enthusiasts — but the person demoing it to me will cheerfully admit that it may also appeal to executives. Or someone telling me about a high-performance engineering workstation will say that demanding consumers will find it attractive as well.
That always makes me smile. If you like to select and use technology based on your own real-world needs rather than hardware makers’ preconceived notions about what small businesses want, it should please you, too.
