Like I promised before heading to Hannover for Cebit 2010; here’s a report of the field trip. Not a very long report, really. Cebit 2010 sucked and I don’t really want to waste much more time on it.
Road trip!
I had to get up at 4 AM. Anyone smarter than me would’ve anticipated by going to bed early the day before. I didn’t. I figured I’d just sleep while carpooling to Hannover. At 4.30 we picked up the last of our “crew” and finally started to head to Hannover.
We made a stop at a gas station around 7am, for some fuel, a cup of coffee and a croissant. It was as close to a breakfast as we’d come.
At 8 am; I “woke” up, so I took some notes for this report. Obviously, there weren’t much notes to make as I had been sleeping. Or, at least trying to sleep. Danny’s car is the WORST CAR EVER to sleep in. You can’t put your head anywhere comfortably. Should’ve brought a pillow.
When we were only 15 kilometers from Hannover, fun started. As in, slow traffic. It took us one hour to get to the convention centre and park our car. 1 hour, for 15 kilometers. 4 hours for the previous 360 kilometers. Go figure.
Most… awesome… event… ever!
The sentence above wasn’t used by me. Or by anyone of the “crew”. I joined Danny and Ernest of Computertaal, and my bro (in every possible way) Kenny tagged along with me. Should I’ve known how BORING it would be, I’d never had dragged him along. And I could have known, because 4 years earlier, I swore to never visit Cebit again.
Yes, I’m an IT guy. So Cebit should be interesting, in theory. But in reality, Cebit is all about “talking business”. Vendors you’ve never heard of try to start talks with German resellers. Okay, that’s not really true. The companies who were at Cebit didn’t try to convince anyone of ANYTHING. In a twisted, reverse world, business people had to approach the representatives to get at least SOME information.
I can honestly say that I didn’t saw one single innovative or new product at Cebit. Unless CAT7 cables counts – woo freakin’ hoo – of course, which I should have heard of. But I’m not much of a Cable Guy.
Speaking about a lack of innovation. At least 70% stands on Cebit are Asian. Now, I don’t have a problem with Asian IT products. But the IT products we saw there, are lame copies of already crappy products, by companies not worth remembering their name. I guess that, at some point, the Chinese started to produce crap products no-one cares about, and they started to copy each other. Just a guess.
All the big brand seem to stay away from Cebit, as well. Of the 100’s of vendors, I only knew four or five. Dell was there, Acer was there, Intel had a whole hall for themselves, and ASUS was there, as well. All other major software or hardware companies? Not there.
Highlight of the day?
Highlight of the day? That must’ve been when I saw Fatal1ty give away some prizes at the Inter Extreme Masters by Electronic Sport League. What a name. The ESL was pretty interesting, too. I saw how the European Champions in Counterstrike 1.6 suffered a narrow defeat by an Ukranian team. That was the highlight of an otherwise EXTREMELY boring day. Would not visit again.
