Telecom Conference SUPERCOMM Shelved For 2010

itwbennett writes "Once the largest telecom show in the United States, and arguably the world, SUPERCOMM has been shelved for financial reasons, the Telecommunications Industry Association announced yesterday. Blogger Tom Henderson speculates that the new emphasis on mobility rather than the landline infrastructure is partly to blame. (The Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and CTIA Wireless are the beneficiaries of this shift.) But part of the blame also has to go to the decline of multivendor conferences and trade shows, which Henderson attributes to vendors wanting their own shows where they can 'control the message.'"

Comments

what a shame.

[Anonymous Coward]

and nothing of value was lost.

Re:what a shame.

[Philip K Dickhead]

Spring was never waiting for us, girl,
It ran one step ahead as we followed in the dance.

Between the parted pages and were pressed
in love' hot, fevered iron like a stripe'd pair of pants.

MacArthur's park is melting in the dark
All the sweet green icing flowing down
Someone left the cake out in the rain.
I don't think that I can take it
'Cause it took so long to bake it
And Ill never have that recipe again!
Oh, no-o-o-o!

I recall the yellow cotton dress
Flowing like a wave on the ground around your knees.

The birds, like tender babies in your hands,
And the old men playing checkers by the trees

MacArthur's park is melting in the dark
All the sweet green icing flowing down
Someone left the cake out in the rain.
I don't think that I can take it
Cause it took so long to bake it
And Ill never have that recipe again!
Oh, no-o-o-o!

There would be another song for me, for I will sing it
There would be another dream for me someone will bring it
I will drink the wine while it is warm and never let you catch me looking at the sun.

And after all the loves of my life
And after all the loves of my life, you'll still be the one.

I will take my life into my hands and I will use it.
I will win the worship in their eyes and I will lose it.

I will have the things that I desire
And my passion flow like rivers through the sky

And after all the loves of my life
Oh, after all the loves of my life, I'll be thinking of you
And wondering - Why?

MacArthur's park is melting in the dark
All the sweet green icing flowing down
Someone left the cake out in the rain.
I don't think that I can take it
Cause it took so long to bake it
And I'll never have that recipe again!
Oh, no-o-o-o!

Oh, no-o-o-o!

Everyone wants to pull an Apple

[McNihil]

Canon doing it for PMA... and so on and so on.

Re:Everyone wants to pull an Apple

[eggoeater]

Very true. I am a telephony engineer, specializing in call centers.
I was at VoiceCon, a multi-vendor show, in SF in December; it was a joke. There were very few vendors there and attendance was very low despite /giving/ away passes.
(Note: the VoiceCon in Orlando is still pretty good though.)
Avaya, Cisco, Genesys (which are the big vendors I mostly work with) each have their own show. Cisco doesn't even show up at VoiceCon shows anymore.
SuperComm is a bit different from the world I work in but the point is still the same: Big vendors have their own shows so they can control the message.


...

Why not have a teleconference?

[IANAAC]

Because, well... it's kind of self-explanatory.

Seriously, I attended one this last fall with about 5000 attendees, and it worked out quite well.

Re:Why not have a teleconference?

[twidarkling]

was it an actual telephone conference, or was it using computers? Because I'm trying to imagine the logistics of 5000 attendees and someone wants to say something. Hell, even if no one wants to say anything, enough people with sensitive phones is going to crowd the line if they don't mute the phone.

Re:Why not have a teleconference?

[IANAAC]

It was done via the web, with bits of java. I can't remember who actually was responsible for the programming, but it was pretty slick.

You were basically placed in a virtual main hall, where you could then choose which sessions you wanted to attend. In each presentation, you looked at what you would normally see in a conference sesion - a slideshow-type presentation. There were no interruptions during the presentations, but after each session, there was a Q&A period where you could use either your keyboard and chat/ask, or actually use your microphone. You'd be placed in a queue with other questioners.

They also had other typical convention-type things, such as a networking room, etc, as well as the usual giveaways for "visiting" a vendor booth.

Re:Why not have a teleconference?

[twidarkling]

That's pretty damn awesome. Best I've seen is these cheezy little "webinars," where you've got maybe 100 people tops all watching a feed. Even then it wasn't exactly what I'd call "well handled" when it came time to ask questions and such.

Maybe online/social networking as well...

[ghostis]

Instead of participating in a conference, companies seem to be using Facebook pages, client email campaigns, and the like. The customers that call/email/post back they visit directly to do demos.

Important message from the vendors

[syousef]

Dear Peasants er we mean customers,

Please overpay more for your home phones, mobile phones and Internet so we can resuming having our annual junkets. You can do this easily by failing to be clairvoyant about your future usage of our products and services. At the boy's club er we mean SUPERCOMM conference we've had disagreements on the detail of the propaganda err we mean exciting information we wish to brainwash you err we mean inform you about. So we have decided to part company - each of us will be having lots separate shows from now on. However more junkets er we mean trade shows means more money is needed, so expect all your charges to go up errr we mean expect new and exciting value added offerings in line with the current environmental conditions.

Signed,

Those turkeys that make moving between handsets or providers a time consuming ordeal from hell....err we mean your friendly phone communications providers.

Now pass the vintage scotch, and call my drug dealer and pimp, I'm having a party tonight!

Re:Important message from the vendors

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, and buy more WorldCom, LDDS Metromedia, UUNet, MCI stock while your at it.

Oh wait.....

Decline due to internet

[vlm]

But part of the blame also has to go to the decline of multivendor conferences and trade shows, which Henderson attributes to vendors wanting their own shows where they can 'control the message.'"

I've found the largest reason for the decline is internet websites.

In ye olden days, if you wanted to learn about a new product, you had to go to a trade show, and get the hard sell from the salespeople. Now a days everything you'd ever want to know is in a downloadable PDF or on the website. If I want the hard sell, they've got sales phone numbers on the website.

Re:Decline due to internet

[Itninja]

Well that...or the largest economic decline in several generations. But let's go with websites.

Re:Decline due to internet

[vlm]

Well that...or the largest economic decline in several generations. But let's go with websites.

Eh, its trendy to be all depression-centric, but trade shows have been dying for a decade or more. COMDEX croaked in 2003, right in the early years of the credit/housing bubble.

Re:Decline due to internet

[ckaminski]

Right on the heels of the collapse of the computing industry in 2000/2001. Totally makes sense.

Re:Decline due to internet

[Itninja]

COMDEX failed, not because they ran out of money per se, but because all the major players wanted to 'do their own thing' and just pulled out. However SUPERCOMM is failing because not enough people and/or corporations can afford to go.

Re:Decline due to internet

[vlm]

ran out of money per se

can afford to go.

Well, all those absolutes. Companies are not like college students with an empty wallet. The world wide marketing budget and world wide travel budget for all corporations has not declined to zero.

If trade shows were the most useful way to spend the marketing budget, and were also the most useful way to spend the R&D / purchasing budget, people on both sides would participate. But they're obsolete and replaced by websites, suprbowel commercials, facebook pages, spam, whatever 2.0, because those give more bang for the buck.

The modern trade show is a way to get journalists to write complimentary copy, although its cheaper to pay them directly via cash or "free" samples. On the purchasing side trade shows are kind of like a company paid for staff party or team building off site exercise, its just for fun no decisions are made. A long way from the dark ages when contacts were made and real business was transacted at trade shows... Trade shows are a dying tradition, like newspapers, or "real TV news reporting" (as opposed to infotainment), or magazines...

Re:Decline due to internet

[butlerm]

Many vendors have alarmingly thin information about their products on their web site and in their brochures, unfortunately. Alarmingly thin as in doesn't answer some of the most basic questions any technical person would ask about the product.

In cases like these I can't decide whether the marketing people are lazy, ignorant, or incompetent.

Nobody to blame but themselves.

[Jane Q. Public]

The telcos had just as much opportunity to see internet and mobile communication coming as anybody else. More, really.

If they had invested the Federal (read, "taxpayer") money given to them to bring fiber to the home on that instead of squandering it on other things, plus a bit of their own money, then THEY would be the ones giving us all high-speed internet and VOIP now, instead of companies like Comcast and Time-Warner.

Re:Nobody to blame but themselves.

[poopdeville]

Indeed! The telcos have whined for years that the problem giving people high speed internet access was the "last mile". Suddenly, in the last 10 years, 22MB/s cable and DSL have shown up (i.e., the last mile is faster than ever). And in the last year, my connection dropped from 6MB/s to 5MB/s, at 60$ a month.

Re:Nobody to blame but themselves.

[Jane Q. Public]

And the companies delivering that last mile service have made a profit, yes?

Re:Nobody to blame but themselves.

[poopdeville]

Yes, at enormous costs to the tax payer. Of course, my point was that cable and DSL use already existing infrastructure for the last mile, so their complaints have "always" (at least since the year 2000) been null and void. Now the same ISPs are complaining about a lack of bandwidth on their internal networks and border networks, when they have lowered the bandwidth they deliver to me, at the same price. If the last mile had been the bottleneck at 6MB/s, the last mile would continue to be the bottleneck at 5MB/s.

Re:Nobody to blame but themselves.

[Jane Q. Public]

Yes, I understand. I know this is subjective, but while my data rate has continued to improve, and at least theoretically is pretty high, I am not convinced that I get the actual data rate that is advertised, or even that shown on the speed test sites. I don't know what kind of subtle trickery they might pull to do that, but still that is the way it has seemed to me.

But more to the point, the cable company has treated their internet service the way they have treated their cable television service. On the TV side, for years, they have kept adding channels (without anyone asking) and then raising the rates. On the internet side, they have kept increasing the bandwidth, and raising the rates. While I am getting, theoretically, much more bandwidth for my dollar, that does not translate to more bits for my dollar. For example, reading and posting on Slashdot does not take anywhere near my maximum theoretical bandwidth, so if I spend the same amount of time on it, I am still paying more for that time than I did last year.

Puh-leeze: they over milked the cow.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry amigos, hafta post AC to protect friends still on the inside.

Did tradeshows in a very large facility (3rd largest in the world, so they claimed) for 12 years, and the first SUPERCOMM as well as 2 CTIAs. Tradeshows are not a dying thing, just changing. As bad as economies get, there's a value to face-to-face that is very hard to replace. (Sorry Cisco, vid's not the answer either.) So things slow down, but the really big shows keep on rollin',

Supercomm show management just killed the goose, overmilked the cow or (insert car analogy here), and now they need a little break. Re-org, sell it to Freeman, or fade away, the last chapter's still unfinished.

Given the way they ran things when I dealt with them, it's no wonder. A tad more planning, a lot more patience, and realistic goal-setting, and they'd still be in business, albeit at 125k s.f. instead of 750k s.f..

This happened with the book show (gone), the hardware show (much diminished), the plastics show (survived). I'm sure some old co-workers could contribute a massive list of the historic failures.

Just send them to Ecomm

[Raindeer]

Lee Dryburgh has been organising a great telecom conference called Ecomm for the last two years. It specifically excludes people pitching their products and only gives sponsors a speaking slot if they have something to say. http://ecomm.ec/

I was lucky enough to speak on the Amsterdam version. I had a 7.5 minute slot to tell my story on why all telecom marketing and product management is wrong and another slot on another day on why voip won't be free anytime soon. I thought the format worked great because of the short pitches of the idea, instead of the usual BS on market shares etc.