July 6, 2004
TechnoVegas... Let's take five with Moira Gunn. This is "Five Minutes."
I'll always remember Las Vegas and the days that I spent there with 200,000 of my closest friends.
Comdex, the mother of all technology conventions, was a wild and wooly affair - back in the day. And that day was as recent as last November. From its rise in the eighties and its explosion in the nineties, it's has suddenly come to a pause in the new millennium.
With little fanfare and a brave display of confidence, this uber-trade show for the Information Technology sector has announced that it will skip a year. Instead of making plans for Vegas this November, we've been asked to reset our Palm Pilots to 2005.
Of course, lots of spin was released:
"We believe Comdex would have been profitable".
And you don't want to make a profit?
"We decided to postpone it because it didn't benefit the IT industry."
Exactly how long has that been going on?
Well ... actually ... who cares? Where is my invite to the Lyle Lovett party? Do we have dinner reservations? Did you get our tickets to Celine Dion? I repeat, do we have dinner reservations?
Oh, the important techno-business was never-ending.
--
Yes, Comdex was always a zoo. A wonderful zoo. There was no place to sit and eat your $12 sandwich. People who normally hang up before the third ring developed the forbearance to stand in a taxi line for over an hour. It was perfectly acceptable to stay at a hotel with five restaurants, and no one would feed you.
It took a few years, but eventually I honed my skills. For one thing, I had multiple dinner reservations in varying numbers at different restaurants. Just the two of us? We'll go here. There's four? Over there. 10? Not a problem. I had my ways of getting the reservations in the first place, and I also had strict policies on cancellations. The larger the group, the earlier I would release them. And while Las Vegas offers continual challenges to good sense and personal values, I can honestly say I have pristine "restaurant reservation karma."
Still, I am somewhat dismayed that these boutique skills may never be of use again, but that presumes that Comdex - as a conference and an experience - is over. But what else has taken a year off and come back in recognizable form?
--
While smaller conferences have sprung up everywhere, like Indian casinos breaking free of the mother ship, scale is not on their side. There can only be one annual speech from Bill Gates debuting his and Steve Ballmer's custom-produced video with inside techno-jokes.
And there is the only-in-Vegas experience. Like the time we pooled our hotel vouchers at the Luxor and got one of the suites at the top of the pyramid. Our four-seater Jacuzzi nestled into the slanted glass and hovered like magic over the lights of the strip. Of course, there was that tiny mistake with the bubble bath and the water jets ... but talk about a hole in the technical operating instructions!
The last time I was there I asked a cab driver if the big technical conferences were any different from the other big conventions which came to Las Vegas. "Oh yeah," he said, without skipping a beat. "These geeks come to town with a folded twenty dollar bill in their shirt pockets. Four days later, they leave with the same twenty dollar bill."
Oh, I'll miss Comdex. At least, a little.
I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.
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