This week
The first couple of weeks of the technology year are usually dominated by Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, as indeed has been the case this year, but there’s usually a fair bit of stuff going on outside the confines of Sin City too.
This year was no exception and the start of CES was dominated by the news that Warner Bros had decided to release HD films exclusively on Blu-ray, having previously supported both Blu-Ray and rival format HDDVD. This led to speculation that Paramount would follow suit and effectively end the format battle.You can see highlights of the HEXUS coverage of CES here, or the full breakdown here.
Elsewhere, the big news in the channel at the start of the year was the poor performance of DSGi and of UK retail in general. Disappointing Christmas high street sales figures led to a plummeting of retail shares and DSGi’s in particular. There was even speculation on the part of a leading retail industry analyst that DSGi, which owns PC World and Currys, may have to close 200 of its 700 UK stores.
A year ago
The start of CES was also overshadowed in 2007, but this time by news from the big Apple trade show –Macworld. Apple boss Steve Jobs managed to totally upstage the rest of the technology industry by unveiling the thoroughly hyped iPhone. Billed as a paradigm breaker, with its intuitive touch-screen interface and apparent convergence of phone, Mac and iPod functionality, it probably remained the single most significant product launch of the year.
It wasn’t all plain sailing however. Before Jobs could even think about countering the hackers who would jeopardise his novel carrier profit sharing model by unlocking the handset from his chosen carrier, he had to contend with Cisco. You see, the networking giant already had a product called iPhone and it wasn’t happy with Apple nicking the name without its permission. In the end Cisco was paid off and they all live happily ever after.
Two years ago
The big news at CES 2006 was the launch of Intel’s new digital home platform – Viiv. This was supposed to be to the living room PC what Centrino was to notebooks but the problem was nobody could really work out precisely what it was, let alone what it was for. The brand appears to have been more or less swept under the carpet by Intel now but it could presumably make a reappearance at any time.
Another ill-fated launch was the first BenQ-Siemens mobile phone handset. BenQ had paid what some people considered to be over the odds for the Siemens Mobile Devices division. It then burned a ton more cash on marketing, including getting its name on the Real Madrid shirt, but by the end of September that year the BenQ Mobile German subsidiary had filed for insolvency protection after its parent pulled the plug.
Five years ago
The main news at the start of 2003 concerned another couple of apparent non-starters. AOL Time Warner, having shelled out $10 billion for web browser company Netscape, was suing Microsoft for monopolistic practices over the bundling of rival browser Internet Explorer with Windows PCs. While the Netscape purchase was never redeemed by AOL TW, Microsoft was eventually found to have behaved in a monopolistic was and was forced to radically change some of its business practices.
The mobile phone industry was again the focus of attention five years ago, but it was the apparently omnipotent Nokia that misjudged the market this time with the launch of its N-Gage phone/handheld gamer. It wasn’t due for release until February, but already experts were at a loss to work out who it would appeal to. It was, in fact, the first of a number of ill-fated convergent handheld gaming devices to flop in the next few years. We also had the Tapwave Zodiac, a gamer/PDA hybrid and most spectacularly disastrous of all, the Gizmondo – a handheld gamer that also had GPS functionality and could send messages but not make voice calls.
