I’d like to take you back to the late 90s. The computer world was well into the dot-com boom. By then, the Computer Dealers’ Exhibition, aka COMDEX, had been taking over more and more of Las Vegas every November for nearly 20 years. (Viewers of the underrated AMC show Halt and Catch Fire may remember Cardiff Electric showing their portable computer at an early COMDEX.) At its peak in 1996, COMDEX boasted 225,000 attendees, along with 2,300 exhibitors displaying some 10,000 products.
Bill Gates, then still an active part of Microsoft, provided the keynote address every year I attended. The last year I covered the show for ComputorEdge magazine was probably 1998 or 1999. COMDEX took up the entire Las Vegas Convention Center, three enormous temporary tent-like structures in the convention center parking lot, the entire Sands Expo (parts of which still make up the Venetian Convention Center), and all the meeting rooms at the Las Vegas Hilton. It was the computer nerd’s Woodstock.
COMDEX was created by The Interface Group and operated by them until 1995. In that year, they sold the show to Japanese technology conglomerate Softbank Corp. Then, in 2001, Softbank sold the show to Key3Media. By 2003, however, Key3Media was in bankruptcy and COMDEX was on life support, never again to return to its earlier glory, or anything close to it.
So what happened? In my opinion, the World Wide Web happened. Travel is expensive and always has been. Why spend all that money to go to Las Vegas and fight your way through 200,000 other rabid computer nerds just to get a peek at new technology when every company on the planet now had a brochureware website where you could browse all the cool, new stuff in your underwear while sipping your morning coffee? The days of big conferences seemed to evaporate overnight.
Oops!
There’s just one problem. As anyone who attends conferences on the regular knows, conferences offer three significant benefits, namely:
Exhibitors exhibiting cool stuff
Comparing notes with your friends and meeting new ones (i.e., networking)
Getting smarter from various sessions presented by various experts
While the web provides a low-cost alternative to the first benefit, it doesn’t do much for the other two. People slowly realized they were missing out. In-person conferences began to creep back into the lives of most technologists.
As an aside, though, I doubt we’ll ever see another tech conference of the magnitude of COMDEX. Money20/20 USA is considered a big conference by today’s standards. They claim to have had about 11,000 attendees in 2024, or about 5% of the biggest COMDEX.
COVID and the Virtual Conference
Just when it seemed like in-person conferences were headed for another heyday, the pandemic hit. To be sure, being deprived of an in-person conference was not anyone’s top concern during the COVID era, but it was still somewhere on the list.
Many conference operators simply canceled their conferences, content to wait out the pandemic. However, in an effort to address the problem head-on, others turned to virtual conferences.
I’ve spoken with many people who either ran or attended virtual conferences during the COVID era. Based on purely anecdotal evidence, I’ve concluded that most of them sucked. One notable exception: a special shoutout goes to Naveen Jain and his virtual CUlytics Summit. This is the only virtual conference I’ve heard consistently good things about.
The Pandemic Rebound
It seemed like once the COVID restrictions were lifted, people couldn’t wait to get back to their crowded airport security lines, inconsistent mask requirements, surge-priced Ubers and awkward social gatherings – and, of course, the three important benefits I noted earlier.
What’s more, the conference calendar is increasingly crowded. Last year, the GAC was held the same days as Fintech Meetup. Credit union technologists were forced to choose between Washington and Las Vegas. I felt obligated to attend GAC, but I definitely suffered an extreme bout of FOMO over Fintech Meetup.
Where will you be the week of April 14? In Las Vegas for the NACUSO conference? In Las Vegas for the Financial Brand conference? Will you try to hit both? I’ll be in Denver for the inaugural Velera Live conference. And so it goes.
If you happen to find yourself at a conference later this year and you see a guy with a blue hippo on his shirt, chances are it’s me. Please say hello and snap a selfie with me. I enjoy posting conference selfies on LinkedIn.