The Four Phases of CES: I, Consumer, Am Electronic

CES is a huge event, one that almost everybody in our industry has been to at least once, if not multiple times. I’ve been going for the better part of 25 years, so I’ve seen a lot of change. And after my first day here, the biggest takeaway I’m getting is a sense of deja vu.

Back in the early days, CES was mostly about exciting new televisions, clock radios, and stereo components. Call that the first incarnation of CES – literally, electronics for consumers. Stuff you plugged in, stuff that “electrified” your life with sound and video.

But starting in the mid to late 1908s, a brash new industry was starting to take over the “buzz” on the show floor – personal computers. PCs were becoming a “consumer electronic” and for the next decade or so, PCs were the “it” industry at CES. The PC era of CES was its second incarnation, and it brought our industry onto the show floor in a big way.

By 2000, CES morphed yet again, and the brash new industry at the center of buzz was the consumer Internet. Yahoo, AOL, and myriad now-dead startups competed for headlines and hot-party tickets. The Consumer Internet marked CES’s third phase change.

A fourth phase came in the last five to ten years – the mobile wave. Nokia and Blackberry, then Samsung, Apple, and Google became major players at the event.

The funny thing is, as each of these waves have hit CES, none of them have eliminated the wave before. CES was always a crazy quilt where you’d find cheesy aftermarket car stereo folks right next to the slickest new laptop, or the latest robotic toy for your kid.

But this year, I think the biggest trend is how these once-separate parts of CES are getting mashed together. In a way, CES is once again all about consumer electronics, but they are all computers now, they are all connected through the Internet, and they are mobile and location aware.

The two biggest stories here are the rise of the connected car, on the one hand, and the Internet of Things, on the other. The auto industry has always been here, but mostly represented by after-market players who did massive car stereo installations. Now every major auto maker is here in force, touting their cars as mobile, Internet-connected experience machines with app stores and serious computing power. Auto makers know their future lies in the marriage of their “platform” – the car itself – with the digital fabric of our lives.

Meanwhile, the other big story is how everything – from babies clothes to the machines that wash them – has become a “consumer electronic” – thanks to the Internet of Things. (Stephen Wolfram has even announced a computable database of “connected devices.”) Autos are simply one more connected device – albeit one of our most prized and expensive ones.

I’m left, after one day of meetings and chance encounters, with the sense that four massive tectonic plates – consumer devices, PCs, mobile platforms, and the Internet – are crashing up against one another, causing chaos, opportunity, and more change than we’ve seen in any previous era. There are few standards or touchstones for how this will all work out, but one thing is clear – at the center of this stands the individual – the “Consumer.” And the essence of who that person is is described by data – data that is computed through devices, platforms, and Internet services. We have a long, long way to go before our industry creates a seamless experience across all consumer electronics, based on that data. But to me, that’s probably the biggest opportunity there is. I’ll unpack this idea in a later post, but for now, it’s off to more CES madness.