After 2012, Microsoft Is Done With CES Keynotes
Microsoft is ending its years-long run as the Consumer Electronics Show keynote kick-off event. Its 2012 keynote, which should highlightWindows 8 will be its last and next year will also mark the software giant’s last trade show booth at the event.
Microsoft made the surprise announcement Wednesday in a brief blog post by Corporate Vice President for Corporate Communications Frank X. Shaw:
“We have decided that this coming January will be our last keynote presentation and booth at CES. We’ll continue to participate in CES as a great place to connect with partners and customers across the PC, phone and entertainment industries, but we won’t have a keynote or booth after this year because our product news milestones generally don’t align with the show’s January timing.”
After participating in the event for almost 20 years, Microsoft will still have some sort of presence at the show. In recent years, it’s had both an enormous booth and a large tent in the Las Vegas Convention Center parking lot where it hosted events, meetings and product demonstrations. It’s unclear if the tents will be around in 2013.
While these keynotes are among some of the most highly anticipated events of CES, they haven’t really been the same since Microsoft Founder, Chairman and former CEO Bill Gates retired from the company to focus on his philanthropic activities. Gates was not a magnetic personality like the late Steve Jobs, but he knew how to work a stage and hold his audience. His CES keynotes (and the COMDEX ones that preceded it) were “must-attend” events and usually featured at least one truly surprising or exciting product and a couple of celebrity appearances that somehow always worked.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer‘s keynotes, which he began giving in 2007, have been decent affairs, but Ballmer is a salesman who seems happiest when he’s talking to a like-minded audience. He could never whip a group of journalists and skeptical CES attendees into a frenzy the way he could Microsoft developers and the company’s sales team.
As for how Microsoft will reach customers in the future, Shaw points to a number of avenues it’s already been leveraging, including special events like the Windows Phone event in Herald Square, its website, and social avenues that include Twitter and Facebook.
Mashable contacted the Consumer Electronics Associations (the group that runs CES) for comment and received this statement:
the fourteen years that we have invited Microsoft to deliver a keynote address at CES, the company has unveiled some great innovations, from operating systems to gaming platforms to mobile technologies, Both CEA and Microsoft have agreed that the time has come to end this great run, and so Microsoft will not have a keynote at the 2013 CES.
The International CES is widely recognized as the world’s best stage for technology debuts, and each year we experience incredible demand from the world’s leading technology companies for invitations to keynote at CES. We will announce our amazing lineup of keynoters for the 2013 CES beginning in the early summer of 2013.
Microsoft has also informed us that, although their plans for the 2013 CES are not yet finalized, they will not request the Central Hall exhibit space that they have used in past years. Given the huge success of the 2012 CES, with more than 1.8 million net square feet of exhibit space (the second largest show floor in our history) and more than 2,700 exhibitors, we have received expressions of interest for that space from the long waiting list for Central Hall exhibit space. Exhibitors will choose space for the 2013 CES during the 2012 show, and in past years available Central Hall exhibit space has sold out within hours.
Microsoft is an important member of CEA and we wish them all the best as they evolve their plans for new ways to tell consumer stories. We also look forward to their CES keynote on January 9, 2012.
