Tech Show Loses Clout as the Place for Product News

The International Consumer Electronics Show, which will open on Tuesday in Las Vegas, is impossible to ignore. It will smother the city’s gigantic convention center with gadgets and those who make and promote them; more than 140,000 people are expected to attend for a frenzy of old-fashioned social networking with other members of the tech set.

But once again, the show is unlikely to be where any blockbuster products of 2012 are introduced. Many of the hottest new gadgets in recent years — including Apple’s iPad and iPhone, Microsoft’s Kinect and Amazon’s Kindle Fire — were first announced at other events, even though C.E.S. remains the world’s biggest consumer technology convention.

This reflects the changing nature of the technology industry — particularly the fact that the most important developments in the electronics business are no longer coming from the makers of television sets and stereos that have been most closely identified with the show since it started in 1967.

And as the industry and its trade show have grown, the need for buzz and branding has become more acute. The most innovative players — like Apple and Amazon — need to stand out from the crowd and so have chosen to introduce their products at smaller, more narrowly defined conferences and company-only events.

In December, the significance of C.E.S. was further called into question when Microsoft said the 2012 show would be its last for exhibiting. Microsoft also said its chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer, after this year would no longer deliver the opening night keynote address for the event, which a Microsoft executive has done 14 times since 1995. And executives at the wireless carriers are not delivering keynote speeches on their own this year, which means they too are unlikely to make big announcements at the show.

“For the larger guys, the show has become less important,” said Phil McKinney, who retired recently as the chief technology officer for the computer division at Hewlett-Packard, which stopped having a booth at the show in 2009. “The challenge for C.E.S. is when you start losing more and more of these anchor-type brands, does it cause a tipping point?”

Gary Shapiro, president of the Consumer Electronics Association, the industry trade group that produces the show, said that he was sorry to see Microsoft’s departure, but that it would have little impact on the popularity of the show.

The group said it was expecting more than 2,700 exhibitors at this week’s event, compared with 2,800 the year before, although it does not have a final number yet because it is still selling space. Attendance for the show last year was more than 149,000, but it’s too soon to tell whether this year will exceed that figure. Some companies that have stopped exhibiting on the floor still hold private meetings at the event because so many people attend it.

In an interview, Mr. Shapiro said exhibitors come and go from the show all the time. He said C.E.S. has no rival in its ability to attract top-tier executives in the tech industry, media, retailers and others from the around the world. “C.E.S. is the dominant show in consumer technology by any measure,” he said.

Mr. Shapiro disputed the idea that companies no longer make major news at the show, though he said the technology industry is so much larger than it once was that it is now in a “continuous news cycle” throughout the year.

“We are very positive about C.E.S.,” said Hiral Gheewala, director of marketing at Intel, a big exhibitor at the show.

There was a time, though, when it seemed that every major gadget had its debut at C.E.S., including the videocassette recorder in 1970, the camcorder in 1981 and the Xbox from Microsoft in 2001. While the show’s sheer scale — its exhibit space is more than 1.7 million square feet — makes it a desirable place to network, it also means news can easily get muffled.

“It’s not the best place for product announcements,” said Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst at Forrester Research. “You get lost in all the noise.”

Instead, companies like Apple and Amazon tend to hold their own product presentation where they can have a “captive audience all to themselves,” Ms. Rotman Epps said.

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