Las Vegas – The first annual International CES opens here this week and is expected to attract somewhere north of 140,000 gadget makers, press, politicos, and buyers and sellers of stripes, to 
say nothing of your humble correspondent. Normally this time of year, those same folks would be attending the Consumer Electronics Show here. But the organization that puts on the show, the Consumer Electronics Association, has decided to drop the reference to “consumer electronics” in the name of its signature confab. From now on, the “CES” in International CES won’t actually stand for anything. It’s just the group of three letters people have been using as a handy abbreviation for the Consumer Electronics Show since it stopped being the Radio Manufacturers Show sometime in the 1960s.
The “rebranding,” as the marketing folks say, comes as the show is in fact experiencing something of an identity crisis, underscored last month by word that Microsoft would no longer send its CEO to keynote the confab after this year and would significantly scale back its participation in the show. To longtime show-goers, Microsoft’s decision to drop out is no great loss. Neither Steve Ballmer, nor Bill Gates before him, had said anything worth hearing at Microsoft’s traditional night-before keynote in years. And much of what they did talk about often turned out to be vaporware (Spot watch, anyone?). Read more »
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