Early 2000s and closing
Following COMDEX Fall 1999 (in Las Vegas), organizers made major changes to their criteria for admission of mass media, adjusting criteria to accommodate bloggers with significant market reach, but also restricting simple and open access to anyone declaring themselves 'media'. It offered regular public attendance for the general public.
In 2000, major companies such as IBM, Apple, and Compaq (now merged with Hewlett-Packard) decided to discontinue their involvement with COMDEX to allocate resources more efficiently, usually through their own corporate events or other direct-to-consumer selling (Apple Stores), and the bursting of the dot-com bubble caused a decline on the IT market. To reduce costs following the market downturns after the 9/11 attacks many would-be exhibitors stopped renting out or scaled back official COMDEX booths on the convention center floors, and set up invitation-only suites in various Las Vegas hotels.[7] This also allowed exhibitors to concentrate their efforts on industry attendees rather than the general public.
COMDEX/Fall 2001 organizers at Los Angeles-based Key3Media Group Inc. said they expected attendance to fall from the previous year's 200,000 to 150,000. They also expected the number of exhibitors to decline from 2,350 to 2,000 and the square footage of exhibitor space to slide from just over 1 million to 750,000.
The last Las Vegas show in November 2003 attracted only 500 exhibitors and 40,000 visitors.
In June 2004, COMDEX cancelled the 2004 exhibition in Las Vegas,[7] effectively making the Consumer Electronics Show its replacement in Las Vegas. By 2004 the personal computer had become a commodity item priced at levels individual departments and consumers overall could buy without needing much corporate oversight, so "computers" became just one of many products in the consumer electronics channels and the Consumer Electronics Show.
