Computer Industry Descends on Vegas for Comdex Crunch : Conventions: The massive fall show draws 170,000 visitors--who pay $175 a night for rooms and vie for 884 taxicabs.
It’s the King Kong of conventions. It’s the creature that ate Las Vegas. But it’s also the beast that feeds this desert town, to the tune of a projected $170 million in revenue this week. And that doesn’t even count the gambling.
Fall Comdex, the nation’s largest trade show and the computer industry’s annual chance to strut its stuff, got under way Monday in this glittery gulch of ersatz pyramids and volcanoes. By the time the five-day show wraps up, organizers predict, 170,000 people will have walked the 25 miles of aisles connecting 2,200 booths.
If you’re in the computer trade, there’s no getting around going to Comdex. Be there or be square. And that means that high-powered executives and their lowly minions alike will stand grumbling in endless taxicab lines, unable to get to those crucial appointments with suppliers or customers.
“The question is whether it’s become so huge as to be self-defeating,” said Fred Hoar, a veteran Silicon Valley public relations man. “Today when you go to Comdex, you are descending into a maelstrom. It takes over the city, all the hotels and maybe even a few wigwams on the desert.”
If Comdex is a logistics nightmare for participating companies and attendees, it is a cash cow for Sheldon G. Adelson, who created the show in 1979 and has watched it take off.
At that time, the industry’s premier event was the National Computer Conference, an exhibition of primarily room-size mainframe computers that was held in Anaheim. In Adelson’s view, that organization made a fatal error.
“The NCC big show didn’t address the emerging phenomenon called the personal computer,” said Adelson, 60, whose Interface Group organizes Comdex from dual bases in Las Vegas and Needham, Mass. “In Anaheim, NCC relegated PCs to the garage level of the Disneyland Hotel (across a giant parking lot from the convention center). They really gave it short shrift.” The fledgling Apple Computer Inc., for example, showed its first products on a card table.
For that matter, Comdex didn’t amount to much in its early going in Las Vegas. Hardly anyone participating even knew what the name stood for: Computer Dealer Expo.
“The first one I went to was in 1980, and it was tucked away in a corner of the convention center,” said Tom Mahon, a spokesman for a high-tech company and author of several books about Silicon Valley. “There weren’t a heck of a lot of people selling computers, so it was a very small show.”
How times change. The show has become so big and so lucrative that Adelson and his partners built their own adjunct convention center at the Sands Hotel and Casino, which they own, to accommodate overflow from existing facilities.
The average hotel room--most of the area’s 82,000 hotel and motel rooms are booked as much as a year in advance for the event--runs $175 a night during the show, about twice the usual rate. Adelson’s group buys up blocks of rooms and doles them out to companies and the nearly 2,000 members of the general and trade press who preregister to cover the event. The more high-profile the company or news organization, the better the location it gets.
“The hotels charge the maximum rack rate,” said Terry Jicinsky, research coordinator for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. “Comdex is definitely great for the city.”
Since 1988, the show has nearly doubled in size and economic scope. In 1988, 109,000 participants showered $97 million on the city, not counting what they pumped into one-armed bandits or spun away on the roulette tables.
In a futile effort to accommodate this fast-moving crowd, the state Taxicab Authority has put an additional 257 cabs into service, bringing the total to a woefully inadequate 884.
“Basically, in this town, it’s almost impossible to get around during Comdex,” said Rick Boxer, the Taxicab Authority’s management analyst. “It’s a madhouse.”
Twenty specially assigned police officers do their best to control intersection gridlock. “We bill Comdex for the overtime,” said Lt. Stan Olsen, special events commander.
On the exhibition floor, companies strive to outdo one another with lavish booths, many of which cost more than $1 million. The spaces are rented from Interface Group, which charges $4,000 to $400,000 for the privilege, and some companies grumble that Adelson’s group pressures them to rent more space each year.
The expense discourages a rare few companies. Compaq Computer Corp. has not exhibited the last three years. “We feel that we can better spend our resources on better-targeted shows such as PC Expo and the Consumer Electronics Show,” said spokeswoman Nora Hahn.
Often, the attention-hungry resort to outlandish stunts. Consider the software executives who this year are taking to the skies in fighter jets to wage mock laser warfare, symbolic of their price wars on the ground.
Philippe Kahn, chief executive of Borland International Inc. of Scotts Valley, Calif., is one. “You have to clown around and do silly things to be noticed,” he said. “We work day and night . . . to make it worth every penny of the $2 million Comdex is costing us.”
Hoar, the Silicon Valley PR man, sees in Comdex the good, the bad and the ugly (notably the heartburn, blistered feet and pounding head).
“It is filled with all of the frustrations that go with a mob scene, cacophony, everyone clamoring for attention,” he said. “But the flip side is that it’s a magnificent fishbowl, with more innovations than anywhere else.”
