COMDEX, a shadow of its former self, getting back to basics

"Uh oh. This is not going to be good."

I had just spent half an hour thumbing through the official "Program & Exhibits Guide" for COMDEX Las Vegas 2003 and I was in shock.

For 14 of the past 16 years I have made the pilgrimage to Sin City each November to help launch, promote and check out some of the coolest technologies to grace this planet.

And for the past 24 years, the COMputer Dealers EXposition has been the place to be each November if you worked in the information technology space.

So there I was, sitting in the media room inside the Las Vegas Convention Center a week ago Sunday, and I had not found a single Utah company listed as an exhibitor at COMDEX. Not a single one — ugh!

Then it got worse.

Finding an unguarded door into the bowels of the LVCC, I surreptitiously snuck my way inside the actual exhibit area only to find that nearly one-third of the Central Hall had been curtained off.

In other words, where the granddaddy of United States-based technology trade shows had once filled all of the LVCC, two floors of the Sands Hotel convention center, and several other venues near the strip, it appeared that COMDEX was now struggling to even fill one hall in the LVCC.

In the end, it turns out there were two Utah companies actually on the show floor at COMDEX: LearnKey of St. George and Cerberian out of Draper.

A third Utah firm, Franklin Covey (NYSE: FC) of Salt Lake City, was also in Vegas as a participant in a Sunday evening media reception, while Lindon-based SCO Group (Nasdaq: SCOX) participated in the brand new CDXpo, a competing technology conference held across town in the Mandalay Bay Resort convention area.

After walking the COMDEX show floor on Monday and Tuesday along with the other 50,000 attendees, I came away from the show with several observations.

One, obviously 50,000 attendees is a dramatic decrease from a top-end attendance of more than 200,000 people that had descended upon COMDEX in 1999.

Two, dropping from more than 1 million square feet of exhibit space to roughly 100,000 square feet of exhibit space is similarly a dramatic drop.

Then again, trade show attendance and exhibitor trends tend to be trailing economic indicators as most decisions to attend a trade show are often made a year or more in advance.