CEBIT Hanover to be cancelled | Hacker News Reader

CEBIT Hanover to be cancelled

cebit.de

128 pointsFabianBeiner46 comments

I’m a resident of Hanover and have been to every Cebit in the last ten years.

The fall was inevitable. You could feel that Cebit was struggling to attract visitors and wasn’t sure what it’s identity was. I feel like they should have focused more on the Global Conference Series where they always had very interesting talks lined up but the entry fee for that (You had to buy a separate ticket for that) was far to high imo.

It was customary to get some friends and stroll along the massive fair grounds when it was still focused more towards consumers and we always had a great time. I could split off to check out actual booths that interested me and most even had competent people who actually knew their product and could talk about it. I feel like that changed right around the time Cebit decided to only cater towards businesses. Instead of knowledgeable people you now had to deal with pretty ladies who knew nothing and PR folks who wouldn’t tell you anything else than how great their product/service is. Before you could get answers to technical questions that could not get answered by visiting their website and have a discussion with people who actually worked on the product.

Last year was especially dull; nearly every booth I visited was just handing out flyers with links to their websites. I tried to have some discussion to get to know whatever they were promoting but it was near impossible. I had the all-day event ticket but after the first day of scouting booths quickly decided that it wasn’t worth my time and only attended three talks from the Global Conferences after that. I was planning on only visiting the latter this year and don’t waste my time on the actual fair. I’m not to sad to see it come to an end but have kind memories of what it once was.

End of an era, but not all that surprising in the end. For years they experimented with different audiences, but didn't really find a profile that was relevant anymore.

Finding out about new products or companies doesn't require a trade show anymore. They went to focus on the business side anyways so no private visitors anymore (until the turn-around attempt this year) and other places took up that market. But the business market also has its own events now, both smaller, more specialized ones and ones run by the large companies. Way fewer small (or even large) companies where you can talk to people actually involved with the product developments, which was something you could do in the beginning. Again, no need to travel to CEBIT to talk to marketing.

It's fulfilled its purpose when it was needed, now it has been replaced.

It's a pretty common pattern for a lot of big tradeshows that aren't controlled by a single vendor to become about everything to the point that they're about nothing at some point, especially as the motivations for creating the show in the first place become less relevant.

Comdex, Linux World, and lots more I can't list off the top of my head. I'm a bit surprised that CES has been able to hang in there but I guess the market for electronic gadgets is so huge that there's still a place for it.

There are still huge vendor shows out there which seem to still make sense--though tradeshows can be a bit of a racket for everyone involved--but I mostly prefer smaller and less commercial venues.

I've been to a lot of the big shows though never CEBIT. Almost went at the last minute to appear on a panel a few years ago but it was too logistically challenging.

I think Cebit in a way started as "being about everything IT", but back then that was fine, since the field was way smaller and everything overlapped more, and the sub-sections wouldn't sustain their own events. (It started as a side-event to Hannover Messe that at some point got large enough to stand on its own)

Now "everything IT" is way to broad, and the discovery aspect has moved online.

I think that's right. At the time, Cebit was a pretty logical outgrowth of the Hannover Fair at a time when IT was just the latest round of industrial technology. Need a combine, need a mainframe, they're all there.

Comdex came more out of the PC revolution and was originally more oriented to PC-related distribution and vendor networks but it suffered similar problems over time.

Yeah, and "everything IT" is a cloud, so you might as well attend any of the Azure or AWS events.

Yeah, the fall of Comdex went from 200K+ visitors to collapse over the course of a few years.

I think most often these collapses are financial (believe it or not). What typically happens is the conference wants to encourage "free expo passes" to ramp up visitor numbers to crazy high levels. They then use this to market towards exhibitors: "Here is why you need to pay so much for a booth, we have 200K visitors!".

However, having 200K visitors doesn't necessarily lead to more sales for your niche product, therefore the economics of paying $$$ for a booth don't work out. Thus, the expo floors become dominated by a handful of mainstream companies which then results in a negative feedback loop of collapse. (Visitors don't need to attend a show to see what Microsoft, Sony, and LG are up to...the real benefit is finding out what all the small below-the-radar companies are doing)

Furthermore, when tradeshows become all about the needs and wants of the sponsors, quality often declines with more and more presentations becoming essentially sales pitches.

Another pattern you see is that a tradeshow becomes a house of cards where every vendor attends because they feel they need to or people will talk. Then, a keystone vendor pulls out (as Sun did with one of the big Unix events, Uniforum maybe) and now everyone is "Well, if Sun isn't there we don't need to be either."

CES is very important for companies like the one I work for because it's an alternative to visiting 50 places in China, Taiwan and Europe when it comes to talking to component suppliers, contract manufacturers, ODM, JDM, etc. When you have a long BOM, it's great to be able to meet every vendor on it, plus all their competitors.

An additional issue was that years before they tried focusing on business, CEBIT had already become untenable for business. It was completely overrun by laymen who wanted to play with cool gadgets and get free stuff.

They should have focused on business much sooner. E.g. they could have hosted conferences. Instead they let the business minded crowd largely vanish before betting everything on exactly those people who had found other channels for communication already.

Or maybe they could have sold consumer stuff, I mean at least 2 times there was the consumer version of CEBIT. But instead of buying things (with exceptions though!), you only get flyers or get install discs of Unix derivates. And of course you could look at the amazing new tech, sometimes things only useful for large enterprises. I imagine that business relationships emerged from that.

But then with IT moving more into commodity, even when it's about servers, there is no need for this mode of presentation. But for the conference style this would have worked.

For us oldschoolers, Cebit 1990 demoscene afterparty democompetetion winner, Red Sector Inc. with the demo named “Cebit 90” [1]. Waz not there, but those were the days...

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hHHdldXaWdo

holy cow i thought the scrolling text would end at some point.....

Technically, it does...after ~14.5 minutes.

That is a surprisingly good fit the article discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18543546 ..

You know what's crazy? Second Reality is only three years later.

Completely unsurprised, but still a bit sad. My husband insisted I go up to CeBIT in 2011, when I was struggling to get interviews for IT jobs in Germany. Apparently, the people at the DIS AG booth were impressed enough to recommend me to their Nuremberg office, who put me out on a placement that was with the company I’ve now been with for 7 years.

Wow, really the end of an era. Sometimes shows fail due to the end of a technology (steam engines?) and some due to its success (e.g. NCC, West Coast Computer Faire, and now CeBIT).

I only attended once. It was by far the largest show I'd attended, bigger even than (by far) shows like CES or the Frankfurt Auto Messe. It was so big that the daily fliers of stuff vendors needed to know were distributed by postmen/postwomen. Yes every booth had its own postal address!

Don't forget about Comdex! I have never been to any of these trade shows but it was always cool to read about the new stuff that's coming out during Comdex/CeBIT on Anandtech.

End of an era indeed!

You can always experience them in video form. Computer Chronicles covered few Comdex shows https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evMilwVBHAQ Comdex Fall 1992

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5OmtYRRMOw Best of Comdex 1999

There is also 1983 one recorded by Dan Bricklin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VNS8TE4XhU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrgwliaIYTQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnDRw8-caxU

The Hannover Messe was typically more interesting, to me anyway, than the Cebit ("was" as in "I wasn't there in a few years" not "It doesn't exist"). In the Hannover Messe there was always all kinds of absolutely fascinating industrial machinery and robotics, and many of those booths had at least one actual engineer you could talk to.

I have so many great memories of Cebit. My dad used to get tickets for me and friends from work and we would go every year as teenagers to see cool tech across the board (yes, of course we also checked out all the games related stuff).

I am glad that a decade later I had my own booth there with my startup at the time...it felt a major milestone!

Going to cebit was very formative and has lead to an amazing career in tech that I will be forever grateful for!

I worry that younger generations in the region will lack that sort of inspiration in the future.

I get it though, the world has changed. You can get better information on most type of products online and talk to experts too...no need to travel to Hannover once a year and be ripped off on booth fee’s and local businesses (hotels, restaurants, bars, etc)

I was there in 2009 and 2014 or so and I found it extremely boring. It was meant only for business people, not the general public.

Yes, they focussed on business later on. In the years before it was also very much a consumer show.

But since consumers started to buy their PC stuff online, at even better prices, the consumer part died little by little.

ATi had some Star Trek:TNG LCARS panels installed in 2000 and Klingons in Worf uniforms walk around IIRC. And there was Lara Croft throwing 3dfx t-shirts one of which my dad caught. Those were the days...

I was there several times and it was just not interesting, like at all. Even from a business perspective there was nothing to do. When they changed some things to make it more attractive in 2018 they simply made it even worse.

Not surprised that they are shutting it down.

I was there as kid with my dads electronics firm. It was the coolest thing ever.

I went there some time in the 90's, I think 1994. My friend and classmate was the son of our local Apple dealer, who got some free tickets. My friend and I skipped school and went there with his dad. While the dad was busy with grown-up stuff, we played Mac games like Spaceship Warlock and F/A-18 Hornet. Afterwards, we got into real trouble with our chemistry teacher for this. Good times.

However, by and large the show did seem kind of boring even then, so I never went again.

I was there prob around 2009 - 2010.

A lot of halls, but the only thing that I found interesting was a hall dedicated to gaming. With gaming machines, and some tournament-style thing going on.

Occasionally walking around there there was some cool tech, but it's not something I ever went since that day. Not worth the travel.

[I went as student at the time. But I can't imagine I'd find it more interesting now]

Wonder if anyone of you who visited can compare it to Systems in Munich, preferably ~2000 - 2010?

I've never been to Cebit because I had the Systems right at my doorstep and it was awesome in the beginning and a bit meh in the end, so I stopped going.

Was there in 2016 as an exhibitor (for free). It was a pretty average event and the target audience was pretty limited.

Even though the jobs/startups that I worked in heavily utilise trade shows, I can't wait for all this BS to go extinct. Go online, choose your SaaS/HW solution, done.

CEBIT is too generic and consumer oriented.

Electronica Munich 2018 (electronic components, systems and applications, SEMICON) just ended and it was bigger than ever. There was attached events like eMEC (medical electronics conference) that made it worthwhile for many.

Ends after 32 Years, good number.

hotels and airbnbs in hanover are going to be sad

Yes, that's my memory of it in the 199x, you had to sleep with peoples renting a part of their apartments. That was weird to me at that time because it was the only show where that was needed. My only memory of CEBIT, bad hotels :-)

Renting out private homes is, or shall I say was still a big part of Cebit in Hanover in 2018. As a resident living in the core of the city you’d always get flyers in the months leading up to it asking you if you’d be interested in renting your home to Cebit visitors. There are some other fairs but none of them needed so much accommodations like Cebit. All Hotels (and we have a lot of them) were booked out months in advance. It was good money to be made even renting out some small <50m2 single room apartment could pay over 100€ per night. You’d just had to stay with some friends a few days and hope that your visitors wouldnt trash your home.

Never been there, now never will.

It is that kind of event that was over-hyped.

On my city it was called the "startup-killer" because the costs to have a stand there were high (transport, rent, preparation, living costs) and bring zero return for the most.

The internet is slowly killing all trade shows ( cars even ).

Yep, CEBIT got rather boring when all relevant stuff was already known from Web sites.

Is that actually true? I wouldn't know it from my travel schedule :-) I do think there tends to be more focus and certainly more small/casual events these days. There are still huge tech conferences, but they're mostly put on by a single vendor. It's the big relatively generic events that seem to have suffered the most.

I don't have numbers but i thought about it a few days ago as well.

E3 and stuff means: "Watching the trailer 'live'" and "waiting for hours for playing one game for 10 minutes. Not even sure why companies like Nintendo, Sony and co spend so much money on it.

That shit is expensive, the journalists don't use the public both and the 'normal people' which are able to consume it, are not that much in comparison to advertising.

A lot of the value of big shows is that they're an opportunity for lots of meetings with partners, analysts, press, customers, etc. They keynotes and breakouts can be good, but I'd rather watch them on video. There are times I've gone to big shows and watched the keynotes from a hang space, overflow room, or my hotel room. I'm usually ion too many meetings to have much time to go to sessions anyway.

Increasingly, though, I try to avoid the big events and spend my time at smaller ones where I find it easier to have informal conversations.

I wish!

CEBIT is just being replaced by multiple more targeted indirect successors. One of them being the Smart Country Convention[0] which happened last week for the first time. From what I've heard SCC has been created directly following the announcement of the changing concept of the CEBIT this year.

DISCLAIMER: I was tangentially involved with SCC via organizing a Hackathon there.

[0]: https://www.smartcountry.berlin/

I never went to Cebit but companies I worked for did attend trade shows in the UK. It was exhausting work, setting the stands up, manning them, evenings out and tearing it all down. It was always lucrative though, we would come away with piles of leads for sales people to follow up.

I do miss it, selling stuff over the internet has less friction but it's so impersonal and even dehumanising in many ways.

My father went there sometime around 1990 on a business trip and brougt back a handheld grayscale scanner. The software ran in DOS.

My school nootebooks were packed with pictures printed on a dot-matrix printer.

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