CES Shows Consumers in Charge

Computerworld - Like many of you, I've attended more Comdex trade shows than were probably necessary. And, like many of you, until a few weeks ago, I'd never traveled to Las Vegas to check out the annual Consumer Electronics Show. While the CES has become increasingly tempting in recent years, it always seemed too far removed from the "real" issues to be justifiable for those of us focused on enterprise computing.
Perhaps I was wrong all along, but I got more out of this year's CES than I would have imagined. There's no better place to see how the energies of the IT business have shifted away from corporate IT and why the consumer market has become the main focus of computer industry innovation. Comdex is struggling to survive, and the CES is now the main speaking platform for IT leaders such as Bill Gates, Craig Barrett and Carly Fiorina - even if they did look painfully out of place yukking it up with Conan O'Brien, Steven Tyler and Vanessa Carlton.
Looking back, it's easy enough to understand why this shift occurred. Word processing, spreadsheets and databases are fundamentally much easier for computers to handle than audio and video. Thus, the computers and networks of the 1980s and '90s could effectively manipulate business information, but handling sound and images required improvements in storage, processors and networks. Contrary to our enterprise instincts, consumer applications are in many ways the high end of the IT marketplace today.
The consumer market is only now reaching its takeoff period, equivalent to the early stages of the business PC market. Things such as MP3 players, digital recorders, integrated PC/stereo/TV systems, digital cameras, large displays, Bluetooth headsets, portable game players and all of the supporting networks and software should be seen as the driving applications of this new phase of IT industry expansion. Each capability opens up whole new fields of opportunity.
An important consequence of this is that the technologies consumers use at home will evolve more quickly and in many ways will surpass those used in the office. It's easy to imagine that knowledge workers of the not-too-distant future might well prefer to work in a home office that features a large plasma screen, voice and video instant messaging, free long-distance voice-over-IP telephony, a 40Mbit/sec. Internet connection, surround-sound audio, and a wireless LAN that works in the kitchen, on the sofa or in the backyard. Who could blame them, especially when company offices increasingly feature ever more anonymous and dreary cubicles?
These changes in the balance