Surprising Changes In 2006
By Steve Smith -- TWICE, 12/18/2006
Amazingly enough it's that time of year again, the Holiday Season, which is (hopefully) your busiest time of year. I know it is our busiest, with TWICE covering all the news going on at retail and preparing our pre-show, show and TWICE CES Daily, the official daily of the International CES.
Before we bid 2006 a fond farewell and get ready for 2007 and CES in January TWICE has put together its usual year-end retrospectives. (See p. 20 and 119.) Anyone who has been in this business a while shouldn't be surprised with plenty of changes. Still some of the things that happened jolted many.
When 2006 dawned Roger Heuberger headed the PRO Group as he had for around a decade. Dave Workman, who left Ultimate Electronics in 2005 and joined Warrentech, became the head of MARTA replacing Warren Mann. MARTA aligned itself with BrandSource at CES. He stayed a short time but left and found a home at a group he knew well, PRO, where he replaced Heuberger.
Back in January Peter Weedfald, along with Jim Sanduski, were still over at Samsung, while Bob Perry was preparing for another CES with LG Electronics. At RadioShack Dave Edmonson was still CEO, but left in February due to resume inaccuracies and was replaced temporarily by Claire Babrowski. Eventually she left when ex-Kmart and Sears veteran Julian Day arrived.
At Circuit City Alan McCollough was still chairman but he retired in June and handed over the management reigns to Phil Schoonover. Last January Larry Mondry was CEO of CompUSA. By May he was replaced by another CompUSA veteran Tony Weiss and in September former Philip Morris executive Roman Ross came in to replace Weiss.
Those were just some of the goings-on in 2006 and illustrates that changes in this fast-paced industry are not just about the technology. But there was plenty of changes, and talk in tech too.
For instance in January there was much discussion about how PS3 was going to take on Xbox and how Nintendo's Wii would fit into the video game mix. In typical video game industry style, after ten months or more of talk PS3 and Wii finally debuted in.
In January everyone was wondering which format would win the high definition video disc war between Blu-ray and HD DVD. (As of this writing we are still wondering.) Twelve months ago manufacturers and retailers were worried that HDTV prices would fall dramatically during 2006. They did, especially around Black Friday, due mostly to action by those same worried executives.
As the old saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
And a final publishing note. Our next print edition will be Jan. 8, 2007, the first day of CES. If you attending the show you can pick up a copy in Las Vegas along with the TWICE CES Official Daily which will be published there. For those of you not at the show, check our special TWICE CES Daily microsite at www.TWICE.com to see a Web version of our daily. And of course until our next issue visit our Web site and read our e-newsletter for the latest news.
Have a happy, healthy and safe holiday season, and we'll see you at CES.
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