Hello and welcome to our next The Companion Show to Matt's Blaine, but we try and tackle the wider aspects and implications of some of the biggest stories in the tech world. I'm of course your host Matt Amatage. Now we're still in beta phase with this show, which means I haven't really got the faintest idea how to record or edit these things. So if you've stumbled across us, thanks for your patience, and I hope I'm not going to test it too much.
Usually on the show we have two or three stories, but today we're going to be talking about just one, an extended rant on CES, the show that took place in Las Vegas last week. Now if you want to round up of who did what and what was released at the Consumer Electronics Show, there's loads of information already on the web, so I'm not going to be rehanging what you can already see. So sit tight and I hope you enjoy the episode. Now if you're a techie or a geek, you will probably have noticed that the 2018 edition of the Consumer Electronics Show was held in Las Vegas last week, although increasingly it seems to be with a sense of diminishing returns.
The show, which has been running in some form since 1967 and annually since the early 2000s, has come to dominate the consumer electronics industry. And certainly in the 10 years from 2005 to 2015, CES was the event for manufacturers. It was the one that they couldn't afford to miss. And for consumers, it was something to look forward to in January.
It was a way to get over those post Christmas blues. So as I said, CES has dominated the consumer tech world for at least the last 10 years, but the last two years have shown a marked decline in the show's importance. Those were years when some of the big stories were a smart hairbrush and an electric car that still hasn't made it into production. And this year seems to continue that trend.
Not a lot of big stories coming out to the show this year. It does seem that unless the show's organizers can really pull something out of the bag for 2019 and beyond, there's a very real chance that the glory days of CES as the go-to showcase for all of the gadgets and gizmos will be buying for the next year or so has gone. And that would be a shame because I'm a big fan of this show and trade fairs like this in general. On the face of it, it seems strange that now is the time that shows CES become less relevant because the kind of consumer technology that CES specializes in is becoming more and more integral to our lives.
And partly that seems to be because technology itself is becoming too big and too broad for CES or any other single show to house. We've seen the evolution of CES. One year, the smart home is the big thing. The next year, it's robots, then it's self-driving cars or electric cars.
But AI, artificial intelligence, seems to be up-ending that trend in general. As we build the internet and communicability into every single device, everything becomes technology. Even the terrible ideas that smart juicers and salt shakers that track your own sodium intake, when everything belongs at CES, it's hard to find the space or justify the expense. So perversely, at the very time, we should be celebrating the place of events like CES.
Instead, it seems that they're becoming increasingly irrelevant. Another thread in that story, of course, is the crowdfunding model. Now, this has enabled smaller developers to enter the market. And because they are pitching directly to their target market, they are able to do something that most retailers are not able to do, which is convince consumers to pay for something that may not even have reached prototyping stage yet, let alone retail.
So, as well as allowing smaller players to fight against the big boys, it puts them beyond the rigid campaign cycle of the traditional retail sector. And it gives them more freedom to maneuver instead of competing for airspace in a crowded January announcement market dominated by CES. Players both big and small can now decide on their own airtime and make their pitch far more effectively. Now, we're going to take a quick break, stay around for more on CES on Connect.
Back now, before the break, we were talking about CES, the ubiquity of artificial intelligence in the internet of things, and the effect that the crowdfunding model is having on product release cycles, which of course brings us back to the big boys. A lot of the bigger manufacturers prefer to stage their own events where their heroes status won't be challenged, where they can demonstrate their own ecosystems and where everything can be stage managed and controlled. Because when they don't do that, as this year at CES has once again shown us, things can and do go wrong. Those mistakes are far more manageable and a lot less glaring when the herd of journos is on the way to another of your brand's keynotes rather than heading off to see a sex robot redefine the phrase nonerotic with a mechanical in every sense of the world's striptease.
And the last thing your brand wants is to be further down the pole than a robo stripper, a fate that befell LG when its home controlling robot Chloe gave up halfway through the presentation. LG's US marketing head David Van DeWiet was supposed to show off the company's think AI system, but instead it demonstrated the dangerous effects of a virus that seems to have infected a lot of techs big players, the overreach of the closed ecosystem. And that begs the question, why are they trying to close the loop? The answer to that is actually quite complicated.
It's easy to understand that things are not rosy in the consumer devices market. We're so obsessed with companies like Apple and smartphones that we assume all the other tech companies are squirreling away the kind of profits that Apple is making. And that's just not true across the board. When you look at all kinds of household appliances, they're so little to distinguish the major players from one another, whether it's kettles or fridges or washing machines, TVs especially, you name it and the products are nearly identical.
And they are all very, very good. You have to try really hard to buy something lousy from Sony or Samsung or whoever. And that makes differentiation almost impossible and squeezes your profits inexorably. So the temptation to tie you into or build a system where as long as you buy everything from the same manufacturer, your fridge, your lights and your TV, everything will work together as a seamless unit.
That temptation is bewitching the attractive for executives with no other clear vision of the company's future. Does anyone think that the closed ecosystem is the way to go? I can't see it. It makes for great headlines at developer events or trade fairs like CES.
I think it's terrible for us as consumers. The think failed at CES when van der wheat attempted to ask Chloe to read his calendar appointments for the day. That's not really the business that LG is in as far as I can see. I don't particularly want an LG house any more than I want an Apple or an Amazon home.
Maybe that's something that we're all going to face in the future where we have the chance of subsidized rentals if you buy a home with integrated Google ads, but we're not there yet and I hope we're not going to reach anything like that in my lifetime. Last time I looked LG was a hardware manufacturer and a really good hardware manufacturer. I can't say that I'm using a lot of LG software or AI architecture from LG. Whether it's LG, Samsung, Sony or most of the others, they all rely on Google's Android platform for their smartphones.
Now, a smart home is a far more intricate procedure. Yet they all seem committed to burning countless millions to try and ape what others can do far, far better. If I want AI, I'm going to ask IBM. I'm going to ask Google.
Think about all the waste. Think about all the duplication. IBM, Amazon, Google, even Apple are all storming ahead with their visions of a smart connected world. Amazon and Google are practically giving their AI enhanced gizmos away in the hope of getting them into as many hands as possible.
Imagine a CES presentation where all the big players have pulled the resources to create a set of universal standards. Think how quickly we could advance the capabilities of this wide world and offer a real sense of choice to consumers. Instead, we get these interminable and tedious format battles. The electronics industry seems to see history, the edges versus beta and Nintendo versus Sega, as wars with winners and losers.
And maybe that's true in the short term, but in the long term, it inhibits progress and development and it creates kings of the hill who get complacent in their roost and are ultimately toppled from their perch. Now, it might seem a world away from CES, but in a world where you have microseconds to grab consumers' attention, these yawning and ultimately futile scraps between the contenders are a huge turn off to people. I want to see the future at CES, not the gaping hole of disaster. Thanks for listening to that extended rant.
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Thanks for tuning in to MX. I'm still Matt Armitage. You've been fantastic. Hope to see you next week.