Microsoft will no longer be at CES after 2012

Microsoft has today announced that next month’s/year’s International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas will be its last.

This means that no more keynote presentations will be held in the future, but it also means that no more booth will be found. While a lot of speculations have been heard in the small amount of time since the announcement, Microsoft’s main reason is principally due to timing.

“We’ll continue to participate in CES as a great place to connect with partners and customers across the PC, phone and entertainment industries, but we won’t have a keynote or booth after this year because our product news milestones generally don’t align with the show’s January timing,” Microsoft explained in a blog post.

In short, Microsoft will not disappear from the show, quite the contrary, you’ll still be able to find staffers around the area, although Microsoft will be less present. Microsoft’s reason, as previously mentioned, is due to timing, according to which the industry is fast moving and a yearly show cannot dictate the timing of the releases.

It is therefore in an effort to better satisfy the needs and demands of consumers that Microsoft is pulling out of CES.

However, when looking at it from a big company’s perspective, CES is indeed placed in a rather ‘uncomfortable’ window for marketing. It certainly is a great place to catch the eye of consumers, but economically speaking, it isn’t very well located.

Even though the departure of such a big company would seem like quite a significant loss for CES, it seems that this decision was mutual:

“In the fourteen years that we have invited Microsoft to deliver a keynote address at CES, the company has unveiled some great innovations, from operating systems to gaming platforms to mobile technologies,” the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) said in a statement. “Both CEA and Microsoft have agreed that the time has come to end this great run, and so Microsoft will not have a keynote at the 2013 CES.”

In any case, it seems that for those of you heading to CES, you may want to stop by and see what Microsoft has in store for their last keynote.

Source 1; Source 2