So I just got done watching the Qualcomm keynote that kicked off CES 2013, streamed live out of Vegas, and I have to write this down before I go to bed because I will absolutely lose the thread of how weird that was by tomorrow morning.
Quick context if you don't follow CES: for the last few years the "opening keynote" slot has been this coveted thing, Microsoft used to own it for over a decade before finally dropping out last year. This year Qualcomm grabbed it, and I guess I assumed that meant we'd get an hour of chip roadmaps and Snapdragon benchmarks. Instead we got something closer to a Vegas stage show, complete with a plot.
Paul Jacobs, Qualcomm's CEO, opened things up fine, normal keynote stuff, talked about "mobile computing" and connectivity in a pretty standard way. Then Jason Bateman came out as the host and it turned into this scripted bit about a guy going through his day with all these connected gadgets, cut with skits and cameo appearances, one of which was Steve Ballmer bounding onstage to talk up Windows Phone 8 for a few minutes before disappearing again. There were musical performances. I'm not even joking. It ran close to two hours and by the end I genuinely could not have told you what Qualcomm actually shipped this year versus what was theater.
Here's my actual complaint, and its not just "get off my lawn, I miss boring keynotes." Its that the format ate the content. Somewhere in there they talked about Snapdragon 800, LTE broadcast stuff, some AllJoyn peer-to-peer thing for gadgets to talk to each other without the cloud, which is honestly kind of interesting if youre into that sort of plumbing. But it got maybe four minutes of airtime wedged between sketches. If you'd asked me to summarize the announcements right after it ended I would've started with "there was a guy dressed as a superhero at some point" before I got to any actual product.
I get why they did it. CES keynotes are competing with each other for headlines and a room full of bored journalists typing on laptops doesn't generate the kind of buzz a company wants out of a keynote slot they probably paid a fortune for. But there's a version of "make it entertaining" that still respects that the audience showed up to learn what your silicon does, and this wasn't that. It was closer to a corporate variety show that happened to have a chip company's logo on it.
Little aside: I was trying to watch the livestream on my laptop while also refreshing Twitter to see if I was the only one losing my patience, and my hotel wifi (not even at CES, just at home, my Comcast connection has been garbage all week for no reason I can identify) kept stuttering right during the parts that actually mattered, like the Snapdragon 800 specs. Never during the musical numbers. Of course.
Samsung and LG both had their own press conferences today too, ahead of the show floor opening tomorrow, and from what I'm seeing on the wires both are leaning hard into curved OLED TVs as the thing to look at this year, which is a genuinely weird category to watch develop. A curved television is a strange enough pitch on its own, I dont fully buy that the marginal viewing improvement is worth what these things are going to cost, but I'll reserve judgment till I actually see one in person instead of a press photo.
Anyway. If this is the direction big keynotes are heading, more skits, more surprise cameos, less time actually explaining the product, I think that's a mistake, and I say that as someone who does not mind a company having a sense of humor about itself. There's a difference between a company being funny and a company burying its own news under forty minutes of stagecraft. Tomorrow the show floor actually opens and we'll see what's real versus what was just tonight's fireworks. I'm going to bed.