Is the Best-of-Show Judging Really Practical?

January 12, 2007, 3:56 PM by Scott M. Fulton, III

Scott Fulton, BetaNews: Quite honestly, we didn't go to CES or cover it all this week so we could pick a "winner." But we wondered, with all the press coverage about which gadgets won the big contests...and after we looked at just which ones they were (one of them's not a gadget, and another was one we'd hurled some big criticisms toward), we started thinking, do the "independent" judges as CES use practical means to judge their contests? Well, if we asked them directly, they'd say, "Yes," so we asked our Sharon Fisher to see if she could supply some outside evidence.

Sharon Fisher, BetaNews Senior CES Analyst: Scott, they say that you can tell the pioneers because they're the ones with the arrows in their backs. And that's typically true of the winners of these 'best of show' awards. I'm not picking on CNET here (which picks out the Best of CES awards); it's true for any technology show. People get impressed by leading-edge technology, but leading-edge gets called "bleeding edge" for a reason – often once people look beyond the dazzle, the product often falls prey to its lofty goals. And that's particularly true at CES, where attendees are sometimes overly impressed by style.

For example, last year, the Creative Zen Vision:M was billed as an "iPod killer" and given the overall Best of CES award. While it's still out there, I don't think anyone would say it has killed the iPod. Another winner was the Pioneer Blu-ray player, and we've seen this year that both Blu-ray and HD DVD players are far under sales predictions because consumers are shying away from the format battle.

That said, let's look at this year's winners.

The Best in Show was the LG BH100, the device that supposedly plays both HD DVD and Blu-ray disks. And CES wasn't even over before it was revealed that the company wouldn't receive certification from the DVD Forum for the HD DVD part because it can only run the video content, not the menu systems and other interactive features.

Two of the other winners were from Microsoft, Vista itself and the "people's choice" award of the Sync, which is Ford's joint venture with Microsoft. Vista isn't even out for the consumer market yet, and we've seen from the lukewarm response it's received from the corporate world that it's not setting the world on fire there yet. While there's no doubt that most people will migrate to Vista eventually, it's not like they have any choice. The Sync's not even going to ship until next year. So this is obviously more a matter of people being swayed by Microsoft's size and presence.

You've also got Yahoo's Last Gadget Standing award, which this year went to the Tornado DataDrive, for transferring data between computers. And that's definitely a matter of style and form factor; there've been cable-based products with that functionality for years. But it looks cool.

So it'll be interesting to come back next year and look at the winners from this year and see which ones have fallen by the wayside.

Incidentally, if you want to see some really useful products, check out this page. Personally, I want Google Brain.

Then there were a lot of people who said the biggest announcement of CES was the Apple iPhone, which didn't even happen at CES. And that was tarnished by the lawsuit, which showed that Apple hadn't even secured rights to the name, and while a lot of people are still interested in the iPhone, there's also a lot of lists out there talking about what's wrong with the iPhone. Plus we're still talking about theory; the iPhone won't ship til June. Besides, it's not even clear that the iPhone caused that big a splash at CES, by that story you told me.

Scott Fulton: I had sources on the floor who said that some handset manufacturers appeared relieved that Apple was competing only on the premium side of the market and not the mainstream, while others said there was so much attention to what was going on inside the enclave of CES that they probably found out about the Apple iPhone once they woke up Wednesday morning to find room service brought them the latest USA Today.

Anyway, Sharon, what was the message you personally came away with this week; what did you learn, what did we learn, that changes our thinking about any sector of consumer electronics whatsoever?

Sharon Fisher: I don't know about any sort of radical change. I don't think it's a surprise or anything new that people are sometimes overly impressed with style. It's certainly not new to have dueling standards and specifications. Nor is it new to know that people want "the biggest" except for when they want "the smallest."

Perhaps, if anything, it's how blase people have become about technology. Look at the iPhone. Twenty years ago I reviewed a cell phone for a magazine and you needed a suitcase to carry the thing. Now you've got music and a phone and Internet access and a snazzy color touch interface and people are going, "Geez, doesn't it support the latest whiz-bang technology, even though you can't even use that technology in most areas of the U.S.?"

You see people complain that a TV is 720i instead of 1080i, even though programming these days is only 720i. They want 3G even though it's only available in a few cities. They want 12 megapixel cameras even though the vast majority of people don't need that functionality. And then there's the whole question of who needs a TV the size of a queen-sized bed where you need a room at least 25' to watch the thing?

We saw from the game console results that all of them slipped, and perhaps that's showing a good sign of that perspective -- that we don't need a $500 device to play games on, and perhaps we'll be seeing more of that as the year goes on.

Scott Fulton: I think the thing I'm noting this year is that we're getting some clear indicators now that the notion of "Let the Market Decide" just doesn't work in practice. All through 2006, we heard that the market will decide the victor in the high-def format war; it hasn't. It won't. People won't buy until there's a decision already made.

Sharon Fisher: Ah, yes, good point. On the other hand, that is a decision. "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."

Scott Fulton: You mentioned the iPhone. I read complaints about the iPhone not only omitting 3G, but not having WiMAX. It's not going to have WiMAX; it's a Cingular (AT&T) phone.

Sharon Fisher: Oh, for heaven's sake. Even if it did have WiMax, where are you going to use it?

Scott Fulton: But WiMAX, I read, is the speed leader (at least according to WiMAX), so surely we should come to a decision, the blog posts go on to say, that it's the market victor. You don't roll out multi-billion dollar transceiver enhancements based on two or three guys' prediction of the "market victor."

Sharon Fisher: The best technology doesn't always win, or Microsoft would be out of business. Witness Betamax vs. VHS.

Scott Fulton: If you're a carrier, you go with what your evolutionary path has set you on, which in Cingular's case is HSDPA.

Sharon Fisher: Right. And then LTE.

Scott Fulton: And it can't roll that out continent-wide for maybe another four years.

Sharon Fisher: Right. And who knows what might happen by then.

Scott Fulton: That's about six product cycles, on Apple's calendar...And we've got February 17, 2009 coming up in just over two years.

Sharon Fisher: unless it gets extended again. Remember it was supposed to happen originally at the end of 2006.

Scott Fulton: Where were the low-def, broadcast digital TVs?

Sharon Fisher: There's one nice thing I'm seeing about that, though -- there's going to be gift certificates to enable low-income people to buy the converters they'll need to continue to use their existing TVs.

Scott Fulton: We're seeing all kinds of other product concepts that will take two years to culminate; why haven't we seen that?

Sharon Fisher: Who's going to buy a low-def, broadcast TV?

Scott Fulton: Stations are spending millions to upgrade their transmitters to send pictures for a medium that will require either new TVs or new set-top boxes to manage.

Sharon Fisher: Right.

Scott Fulton: Last year, Motorola promised there'd be plenty of these boxes; in fact, the US government plans to subsidize their purchase in low-income households.

Sharon Fisher: Right, that's what I was saying. There's going to be certificates for it.

Scott Fulton: Well, since I didn't see any evidence that these boxes are being created for high-income households too, just what are we planning here? Upper-class TV and lower-class TV? The HD "have's" and the PBS "have-not's?"

Sharon Fisher: Hey, my parents had a black-and-white TV until I went to college. I'm still pissed at them for that...When I think of the differences between the privileged and the exploited in this society, you know, there's a lot of things that seem more important to me than whether the poor people get HDTV.

I interviewed Bob Metcalfe, one of the co-inventors of Ethernet, a number of years ago, and asked him about the "digital divide" and what should be done about it. And his reply was "Jesus, let's get them fed and housed first."

Scott Fulton: Reminds me of the old "Max Headroom" show, where they'd have homeless people stretched out along the streets warming their hands over a fire in an oil barrel, all of them watching their own TVs.

Sharon Fisher: Right. I don't know how realistic the stereotype is, of the people who are dirt poor but by God they've got their TV, but the stereotype is certainly out there.

Scott Fulton: Here's what I think is a legitimate question: If we as consumers pony up the thousands of dollars to upgrade our input to 1080p digital, whether it be over digital cable, fiberoptic, WiMAX, whatever, will that guarantee us that the programming we get will become good again? Will some of that money be spent on content?

Sharon Fisher: Ha. no, I wouldn't count on that.

Scott Fulton: It occurs to me that Sony produces shows.

Sharon Fisher: Any more than buying a new computer gives me better software...Do we really want to spend thousands of dollars to see a reality show? When I want reality, I turn off the TV.

Scott Fulton: If we really want to believe "The Market Will Decide" which format or which content should succeed, then how do we explain the millions of people these past few years who have effectively cast their vote by watching YouTube videos of possums chasing squirrels? That's the lowest definition you can possibly have!

Sharon Fisher: You know, I was going to mention YouTube. Though actually, to be optimistic about something...

Scott Fulton: Please do.

Sharon Fisher: YouTube and its brethren have the potential to change the world. In the same way that the Internet allowed anyone to become a journalist, YouTube allows anyone to be a photojournalist...For every hundred possums chasing squirrels, we can also have something like the video of Saddam Hussein's hanging, and that told us something very important that disagreed with the official statements about it. Millions of stations, and the ability for anyone to send video anywhere, makes it harder to hide the truth about things -- if we can find it in the morass. But it's out there.

Scott Fulton: Well, from my vantage point, it isn't always the truth that gets disseminated first.

Sharon Fisher: Right.

Scott Fulton: Not to malign the Saddam Hussein revelations, but the fact that LG's player doesn't really play all that many HD DVD players, is not what's being said on a lot of the blogs.

Sharon Fisher: Right. We talked earlier about inaccuracies we've seen.

Scott Fulton: Thus far, there is no central arbiter of truth for the Internet.

Sharon Fisher: Do we want there to be? Free speech means that you fight speech with more speech, not shutting the speech down.

Scott Fulton: Which sometimes makes our job a little harder, because we have to confront what a large body of users would rather believe, with some not-so-interesting cold, hard facts.

Sharon Fisher: But that's always been true.

Scott Fulton: Well, "more speech" is luckily something I've always been good at.

Sharon Fisher: You know, I've noticed that this week.

Scott Fulton: Okay, I think we covered the universe with that topic. Sharon, for all your hard work and help these past eight days for us, I thank you tremendously. It's been a sincere pleasure working with you.