So CES kicked off in Vegas today, and by the time I got through my RSS feeds this morning about a third of them were already breathless over Samsung's curved OLED prototype (a TV that bends toward you, apparently, which is either brilliant or a solution to a problem nobody had. Im leaning toward the latter but Ill withhold final judgment till I actually see it). I'm not going to do the whole "here's every gadget from the show floor" post, because honestly every tech site on the internet is doing that exact post right now and mine would just be noise. Instead I want to talk about something weirder that's happening this same week and getting a lot less attention than it deserves.
Eric Schmidt (Google's executive chairman, the guy who spent years as CEO before handing the reins to Larry Page) is in North Korea right now. Or he was as of a day or two ago, flying in with former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson on what's being described as a private, unofficial humanitarian visit. Not a Google trip. Google has been pretty firm about that point, putting out a line to the effect of "this is Eric's personal trip, not the company's business." The State Department, for its part, said publicly that the timing wasn't great, given North Korea launched a long-range rocket back in December.
I keep turning this over because the irony is almost too on the nose. Here's the chairman of the company most associated with "information wants to be free," walking into the one country on earth that has basically opted out of the internet entirely. North Korea's domestic network isnt connected to the actual internet at all. It's a closed intranet, Kwangmyong, that a tiny sliver of the population even has access to. Schmidt has said in interviews before that he thinks connectivity is close to a basic right at this point. So what does that conversation even look like when hes sitting across from officials whose entire system depends on nobody having it?
Richardson isnt a random pick for this either. Hes done these unofficial diplomatic runs to Pyongyang a few times over the years, going back to his days as UN ambassador. So thats presumably part of why this delegation exists at all, hes the one with something like a working relationship there. But adding a Silicon Valley executive to that mix, during the same week the rest of the industry is arguing about screen curvature and which TV manufacturer has the thinnest bezel, is a genuinely strange split-screen. One half of the tech world is in a Vegas convention center arguing about pixel density. The other half is in a country where owning an unregistered radio can get you sent to a labor camp.
I dont have some grand conclusion here, Im honestly just fascinated by the contrast and slightly annoyed that its getting buried under CES coverage. If Schmidt comes back with anything resembling actual color on what he saw, thats a more interesting story than 90% of what's going to get written out of the show floor this week. My personal guess is we get a pretty sanitized readout, if anything at all. These things usually go that way, officials on both sides staying vague on purpose. But Id genuinely like to be wrong about that.
One small aside since Im already off topic: I tried explaining this whole thing to a friend over coffee yesterday who doesnt follow tech news, and her first question was "wait, the Google guy?" like it was a prank call situation. Which, fair. It does not compute at first pass. Google, of all companies, in North Korea, of all places. Sometimes the plainest reaction is the correct one.
Anyway. Back to your regularly scheduled CES liveblogs, I guess. I'll probably do a real roundup once the dust settles and its clear which announcements actually matter versus which ones are prototype vaporware that quietly disappears by March.