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Mary-Jo Foley
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Microsoft: No Consumer Electronics Show for us in 2013

By | December 21, 2011, 9:09am PST

Summary: Microsoft won’t be keynoting or exhibiting at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show, company officials announced on December 21.

Well how ’bout that. Another of those seemingly crazy Microsoft rumors was true.

Microsoft won’t be keynoting the Consumer Electronics Show in 2013, as I first noted on Windows Weekly a couple of weeks back. In fact, Microsoft won’t even have a booth at next year’s CES, though company execs will still be attending and holding meetings with customers and partners.

Microsoft will be counting on its own events, stores, social media and marketing as venues and channels for its big announcements, as Corporate Vice President of Communications Frank Shaw announced in a blog post on December 21. Sounds a lot like… Apple — at least to this Microsoft Watcher.

CEO Steve Ballmer is slated to keynote the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in 2012, however, on January 9, starting at 6:30 p.m. PT.

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Topics

CES, Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Windows, Operating Systems, Software, Mary Jo Foley

Mary Jo has covered the tech industry for more than 25 years for a variety of publications and Web sites, and is a frequent guest on radio, TV and podcasts, speaking about all things Microsoft-related. She is the author of Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft plans to stay relevant in the post-Gates era (John Wiley & Sons, 2008).

Disclosure

Mary-Jo Foley

Freelance journalist/blogger Mary Jo Foley has nothing to disclose. WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). I do not own Microsoft stock or stock in any of its partners or competitors. I have no business ventures that are sponsored by/funded by Microsoft or any of its partners or competitors.

Biography

Mary-Jo Foley

Mary Jo Foley has covered the tech industry for 25 years for a variety of publications, including ZDNet, eWeek and Baseline. She has kept close tabs on Microsoft strategy, products and technologies for the past 10 years. In the late 1990s, she penned the award-winning "At The Evil Empire" column for ZDNet, and more recently the Microsoft Watch blog for Ziff Davis.

Got a tip? Send her an email with your rants, rumors, tips and tattles. Confidentiality guaranteed.

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RE: Microsoft: No Consumer Electronics Show for us in 2013
gomigomijunk 31st Dec
@CustomComputers

The real question is ... is it parity or parody. English is a tricky language. Maybe if you didn't waste all your time watching dumb cartoons you would know. lol.
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Makes sense to me
oraman 21st Dec
after all, companies pay good money to attend Microsoft events. They should be the first to hear all good news.
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CES is a place to show innovation
Uralbas 21st Dec
MS hasn't had much innovation lately. Good motive not to attend.
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Guess that goes for Apple and Google, even Amazon
William Farrel 21st Dec
@Uralbas
to not attend, right.

And you shoudn't attend, as your posts haven't shown any innovation, either.
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RE: Microsoft: No Consumer Electronics Show for us in 2013
x I'm tc 21st Dec
@Uralbas
Not to feed a troll, but, for the first time in...well, maybe ever, MS is really innovating in a big way. Metro is something completely new, and their bringing it to phones, consoles and even Windows itself is certainly something new. Their offline-online document management (Office and Skydrive/SharePoint) is something no other competitor can touch. Their work in the cloud with Hadoop is groundbreaking.

Indeed, they are firing on all cylinders and are finally an exciting company to watch. We have the rise of Google and Apple to thank for shaking the rust off what has always been a rather stodgy company.

This is the fruits of all that antitrust litigation finally ripening.
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I agree, jdakula
William Farrel 21st Dec
@jdakula
People are looking forward to Windows 8 tablets, XBox360 and Kinect outselling everything else, with the added capabilities that Kinect brings.
Sharepoint growing and the colaberation it allows is great. WP7 is the most stable OS I've used, and I like it enough to buy it again.

I agree, it took Apple and Google to get them going again.

What you have to realize is that people like Uralbas skip over alll that stuff and keep bringing up stuff that didn't take off out of the gate or whatever, and dwell on that like it makes eveything else MS did not exist.

Go figure.
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RE: Microsoft: No Consumer Electronics Show for us in 2013
Anthony E 21st Dec
@Uralbas
I agree with you.

@jdakula
Metro is new, but there tiles instead of icons, a slight improvement.
There work on hadoop is bringing it to the windows platform, Underlying has already been done.
Don't get me started on WP7..

The're pretty much spending there time playing catch up.
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RE: Microsoft: No Consumer Electronics Show for us in 2013
gribittmep 21st Dec
@oraman

But, but, but...

Where will we hear Monkey Boy shout Developers, Developers, Developers!!!
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RE: Microsoft: No Consumer Electronics Show for us in 2013
marklabelle870 21st Dec
No innvoation? It's a consumer show and they innovated with Kinect most recently. Also, Windows Phone is innovative, whether the Apple Lemmings agree or not. Keep clicking your static little, crowded icons - WinPhone 7 is innovative. Not to mention the hundreds of other business apps in the ecosystem. What have you innovated?
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RE: Microsoft: No Consumer Electronics Show for us in 2013
Those who hunt Trolls 21st Dec
@marklabelle870

I'm just waiting for someone to mention Siri, which is a good product but not enough to make me dump my WP7.
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My company just released apps
HollywoodDog 26th Dec
@marklabelle870 ... for Android, iOS and Blackberry. The company has no plans to do a WP7 app because it doesn't have enough market share to justify the effort.
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RE: Microsoft: No Consumer Electronics Show for us in 2013
Key Lime 21st Dec
I can certainly see dropping the keynote, especially considering how Ballmer got burned a few years ago with that Tablet prototype. And certainly the days of the FUD strategy are not proving to be as effective.

But to drop being an exhibitor with a booth does not make any sense unless Microsoft had a falling out with the show's promotor, which is the only real reason I can see this happening.
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RE: Microsoft: No Consumer Electronics Show for us in 2013
FrederickLeeson 21st Dec
@RudyGr

"But to drop being an exhibitor with a booth does not make any sense unless Microsoft had a falling out with the show's promotor, which is the only real reason I can see this happening."

Not necessarily. When commenting this issue various Softies are saying that the market and the products are now changing/developing so rapidly that being tied down to a once a year date determined by someone else begins to make less and less sense. They argue that MS is better off making these announcements/presentations at events they host themselves because that gives them the necessary control over the timing.
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YEP!
CustomComputers 21st Dec
@RudyGr See my post below for a laugh.
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Just a thought..
CustomComputers 21st Dec
Possibly a fact that the Corporate Image has suffered enough from years past!
We will see if this http://youtu.be/UY1fI9Q4eEg is truth or parity when Win8 releases.
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RE: Microsoft: No Consumer Electronics Show for us in 2013
gomigomijunk 31st Dec
@CustomComputers

The real question is ... is it parity or parody. English is a tricky language. Maybe if you didn't waste all your time watching dumb cartoons you would know. lol.
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RE: Microsoft: No Consumer Electronics Show for us in 2013
Loverock Davidson- 22nd Dec
With Microsoft starting this trend, soon you will see everyone bailing out of CES.

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