Slashdot Mirror
CES 2009 Shrinks With Dwindling Economy
nandemoari writes "Not long after we first heard murmurs Microsoft may be ready to lay off as much as 17 per cent of its workforce, the popular Consumer Electronics Show, held every year in Las Vegas, is rumored to be shrinking alongside the global economy. The Consumer Electronics Association, host of the CES, estimates that the numbers of both exhibitors and visitors will be down in 2009. The CEA expects about 130,000 people will attend this year, down 11,000 from last year. And about 2,700 exhibitors are expected to attend, down from 3,000 in 2008."
People have that attitude because it has almost always heralded the downfall of the thing that has ceased to grow. Face it, our society is all about 'progress' and that means newer and better goods. If a company stops producing better goods, it'll have fewer customers. It's all downhill from there. Very few companies manage to recover after that.
As for the 'media' attention and craziness about it, I'm sick of it, too. I don't need journalists or bloggers telling me what I can already see. They seem to have forgotten that their job is to bring new information to people, not just talk about obvious information constantly. (Journalists, that is. Bloggers have always existed just to talk about themselves incessantly.)
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Down 11000 from last year does not mean down from 11000 last year.
Either this article is wrong, or (more likely, as per usual), the Slashdot editors are asleep. :/
I vote the third option!
Apple releasing a large laptop with a non-user-replaceable battery is a sign of desperation on the battery front, not success. LED backlighting is no longer an expensive technology and has found its way into netbooks, so a new technology is needed there to create significant improvement. And e-readers are just too small. Everything else really works well enough. Consumer electronics is getting to be like plumbing, or refrigerators, or cookers. You don't have Whirlpool fanboys or people who endless post on the Internet on the virtues of push fit versus compression joints. Perhaps it's a sign of maturity of the industry.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The lack of unabated growth in everything we do is not necessarily a sign of some impending doom.
It often is for publically traded companies.
If a company announces a 10% drop in earnings, you think the investors won't expect that to be made up by cost cutting (i.e., layoffs)? Management can't afford their share price to drop, so they're only too happy to accommodate.
What's more problematic is that investors demand ever-increasing numbers. If a company's performance is flat, investors are only too happy to take their money elsewhere.
That last point, incidentally, is one of the fundamental problems in the newspaper industry. Most newspapers have had (and continue to have) regular and respectable earnings. That's fine if the company is privately held, or owned and run by an enlightened and wealthy family, but it isn't good enough for Wall Street. Those newspapers that decided to go public have since discovered that painful truth.
So while you see no impending doom, others may. And if you don't think a drop of just a few points is no cause for worry, consider how you'd react if your boss decided to meet his budget by cutting your paycheck a few points every quarter and said, "No worries, mate. You're still employed and making money."
But you've got to remember, if you're seeing the economic slump from inside the US, you're seeing the worst of it by far.
Canada is sluggish, certainly, but not at all in the virtual free fall that the US seems to be getting. Parts of Europe are the same. The only two countries that really seem to be getting hit hard are the US and UK, although China's taking a bit of a beating, too.
Let's see...all the surveillance states are getting the worst of the economic fallout. Wonder if that means anything?
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
Don't let it worry you - I used to put GBP30,000 per annum into the US economy through business and pleasure visits. After getting detained by the idiot gestapo for actually following the rules, I stopped doing that. The business money now generates far more return, and my vacations have taken me to more diverse places as a result.
Sure, the US economy and its victims have lost over $100,000 from me, but at least I'll never have to deal with the TSA again :)
To clarify why I was stopped and separated from my wife on her birthday, then kept away from her for several hours while she was not told anything, read on... I applied for a new passport because the US visa waiver programme requires that you have at least 6 months validity on your password on the date of entry. Mine would have had just under 6 months validity left for this trip, so 2 months before travelling I applied for a new passport.
When I finally got someone from the SS to talk to me about why they were detaining me, we cleared it up pretty quickly:
Hitler: Why did you apply for a new passport when your old one was still valid?
Me: Huh?
Hiter: Your previous visits were on a different passport. That one would still have been valid. Why did you get a new one? What are you trying to hide?
Me: Uh, the old one would have only had 5 and a bit months left on it. Your visa programme says it has to be valid for at least 6 months
Hitler: What?
Me: Well, my old one wouldn't have enough months left valid to qualify for the visa waiver programme
Hitler: fx: looks at papers and wanders off
About 30 minutes later they finally cut me loose. And that's how the US economy lost $100,000 to date.
Let's see...all the surveillance states are getting the worst of the economic fallout. Wonder if that means anything?
That correlation is not causation?