This year, my company GeBE exhibits at the worlds largest computer fair in Hannover, Germany. If you are there, we are in Hall 7 booth A41. This years CeBIT is the largest ever with 4.500 exhibiting companies and an estimated 700.000 visitors.
On this Page, I will bring you news and stories of the CeBIT show with pictures taken with my digital camera.
Wednesday, Feb. 23rd: Preparations
Thursday, Feb. 24th: First Day
Thursday, Feb. 24th: First Day, afternoon (updated)
Friday, Feb. 25th: Second Day
Saturday, Feb. 26th: Third Day
Saturday, Feb. 26th: Starring Yours Truly
Concluding Statement
After spending 4 days at CeBIT, I¥ve decided to call it a day and travel back to the office, where much work is waiting. But I won¥t leave without some concluding statements.
This year¥s CeBIT was a huge, albeit low quality event. The CeBIT management releases news of new attendance, new exhibitors records every year. I guess they should reconsider and focus on quality again. CeBIT used to be an important event. Companies held new releases back a couple of months just to be able to come out at CeBIT with a huge sensation. The Pentium was debuted at CeBIT. The Macintosh II was debuted at CeBIT. This years debuts: A keyboard with Tux instead of the Windows Logo. Even brought us TWO TV appearances.
Also, there is much policy and little information. The CeBIT management issued a list of banned products which can not be shown at CeBIT. It included Trackballs and "Online Store Content". No explanation as to why was given and of course, Bertelsmann is there with bol.de and we showed trackballs. The content is supposed to be struktured by hall, but there are lots of big shared booths for companies from Taiwan, USA, Belgium, Korea, China, India, Russia and so on. They show anything on every one of those booths so that the structure is lost. In every hall you find digital imaging products and web design and development tools, networking hardware and software and telecommunications gear. The structure is very weak in favor of management convinience. It is very much a case of nonexisting customer focus.
Around the fair ground, traffic control is pathetic. They spent millions on a system called MOVE that switches signs on and off but is entirely incapable of reacting to actual traffic conditions. The speed limit is set to 80 wether there is no car at all or a traffic jam. Directions are misleading or missing. They keep reducing the number of parking lots but build the train station miles from the fair-ground. And no zebra crossings for pedestrians. They have either have to walk miles to the next traffic lights or traverse the traffic flowing at high speeds.
The list of management blunders goes on and on. I got the impression that the event got to big for the management to swallow.
As for the business contacts: Last year, 80 percent of german resellers were at CeBIT. This year, only 60 percent planned to come. A lot of our customers complained about how huge the event is and how low the contact quality is. If you get in line to ask a sales rep, most of the time when it is your turn, you discover that they don¥t know the answers to the most simple questions.
I could go on and on. In summary, I would say that the CeBIT gets less important every year. If we had not signed a 5 year contract, this year surely would have been the last year of our attendance.