The organisers, of course, spend their marketing effort trying to frighten Microsoft into taking a bigger acreage of carpet. They warn the exhibition manager that Electronic Arts is doubling its space (for the purpose of the exercise, it doesn't appear to be important if EA really is doing that, or not) and from the exhibition organiser's point of view, this is a great tactic, because it usually works, and they charge by the square foot.
But the rest of us have to plod on the bruised foot. And the bigger the Microsoft booth, the longer it takes to walk past.
That's how you end up spending all day walking, and actually only get to see two or three exhibits. Comdex started to die when just one company decided to drop the game: Compaq pulled out way ahead of anybody else. But the little domino knocked over the next, which ended the next; and when the bubble finally burst, nobody worth writing about was there. Even the mom-and-pop lemonade stalls were no longer innovators, they were liquidation agents flogging obsolete stock at half price and vanishing before anyone could realise that this wasn't a reputable retail outlet which would accept returns.
So, which over-size convention gets your vote for "bubble ready for pricking"? I think the writing is on the wall for several, and I'd point at my favourite show, 3GSM, as the ripest fruit ready to drop.
The 3GSM show is the mobile phone industry thrash. It was held at Cannes for years, and some of the glamour of being "the same exhibition area as the film festival" rubbed off. The trouble is that the phone business is many, many times bigger than the movie business, so although the show was good, you simply couldn't find a hotel within an hour of the convention centre.
Now it's moved to Barcelona. A great city (if you ignore pickpocketing as a problem) and quite a lot easier to find accommodation - but, unfortunately, it has far more convention space than 3GSM needs.
What's the result? Easy! Everyone is "offered the opportunity" to have a bigger booth and everyone discovers that their main rival is "taking advantage of this special offer", and everybody spends a little more, and gets a lot more space.
And those of us with legs, give up.
By the time you've collected two branded shoulder bags filled with CDs, special purpose-built rattlesnake-skin souvenir binders for the CDs, glossy brochures, clockwork phone chargers, special sample software on USB dongle chips, invitations to parties where you get cuddly zebras, and "prize draw" bottles of commemorative Scotch, it's not just the legs, either. There's a limit to how much you can carry with you all day and still feel enthusiastic about tucking it all under one arm so you can use the other to shake hands with. And where do you put it all when you need a meal?
And yes, that's another trivial matter for the organisers. They can eat in the organisers' office - after all, the catering concessions bring in a lot of money. But ordinary people with legs need food; and preferably, nice food at reasonable prices. When did you last see nice food at an exhibition, or food at an exhibition that wasn't extortionately priced?
And so, one by one, the big shows implode. Can E3 re-vamp itself in time? Many think not, but organisers the Entertainment Software Association, say they'll spread out into a lot of smaller "more intimate" shows and not just in that City of Angel's (where Buffy isn't allowed to go), but also in other parts of the world - Germany, Asia, and so on.
It may work for the ESA, in that it may make more revenue from exhibit space than it would if the show just collapsed. But I won't be going, all the same. Send your press announcement, in advance, and I'll write about it, for sure; but actually being there isn't the fun the organisers seem to think. ®