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I just browsed Google for webcam streams from the CeBIT tradeshow starting tomorrow, and I found one stream showing setup and construction on a booth.
I was visiting CeBIT since its premiere in 1986. First as a visitor, some years later as a journalist, and since almost 10 years as exhibitor as well. This year will most likely be the first year I am not going at all.
During the first years, you could cover the whole of the exhibition in one single day, seeing every booth. Later, one needed 2 days, and even later one had to make a checklist first.
I remember the year when the Acorn Archimedes [pages.zoom.co.uk] was introduced. Nobody knew about it, only a single magazine featured it 2 days prior to CeBIT. They were not even listed in the catalogue! Nevertheless their booth was crowded with nerds (just like us), and we spent a whole day there. The Archimedes was a great machine, its OS being programmed in a higher level language which was compiled on the fly. You could even change the OS's code during runtime. And it was FAST. Blazingly fast! A pity it never took off...
I remember the hype of transputers [en.wikipedia.org], being seen as the "Next Big Thing" in number crunching. The German company Parsytec was leading in it, and they had a huge transputer system there which made a "live" video of diving into a fractal (at a framerate of about 7fps). Never took off too, and each graphics card today has more processing power. Parsytec still exists, and they are selling regular PC's nowadays...
Becoming an exhibitor now was a cool thing. Even as a journalist I never went to the show prior to the opening. As an exhibitor (and the guy who managed it all) I had to be there 2 days before and 1 day after, which made those trips to Hannover a total of 10 days. European tradeshows are much different from US tradeshows. For a US tradeshow, you get a table, a wall, some tabelcloth and a soft carpet and you're good to go. For a European tradeshow, you build booths. and those booths are basically constructed ON SITE, including all the carpentry, welding etc. I was close to freaking out when at 23:00 hours on the day before, a) our software developers were still debugging code ON SITE and b) the guys from the booth builders were welding and sawing and nailing and painting. But so was every other booth! But the next day at 9:00am it was all clean and nice...
The decline of CeBIT started about 4 years ago. The officials got to greedy, and even a small company with a humble booth could easily spent 25K$ for CeBIT alone. The ROI started to rapidly go downhill. Everything surrounding CeBIT got extremely expensive, and everybody tried to rip you off. We stayed in HOLES which were STUFFED with visitors and exhibtors and paid top dollars! We got ripped off for water and electricity costs! Plus, the officials changed focus, following hype after hype. Soon, CeBIT cost more than we got revenue out of it. Basically we are only following the big guys. Apple? No-show! Canon? No-show? Sony? No-show! Microsoft? Initially No-show, but then they changed their minds.
Nevertheless, CeBIT was always special. I always liked to go there. I enjoyed it, in a way. It will be hard to break that habit. Let's talk in a week to see if I really didn't go...
If it's of any consolation others believe it's going downhill (according to recent reports from IT news sites [theinquirer.net]).
Cebit is still the largest IT related show in Europe and I believe that they actually make a profit.
Press releases during the show and after the show were highly optimistic, saying the economy is taking on again, and that a turning point was reached. Nevertheless visitor count was significantly low again, as well as exhibitor count.
A few of my colleagues went, and they spoke of almost empty aisles, no parking problems whatsoever, inexisting queues in front of the entrance and rather bored salespeople on the booths.
Pair of Wieners with stale breadroll cost 8 EUR this year - that's an all-time high.
