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as at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA); it also
provided a market when no private irms stepped up in the irst rounds
of semiconductor production. Lobbying can be essential to making sure
government provides a stable environment for growing businesses. More-
over, criticisms presume that lobbying is only about achieving a speciic
goal. Google lobbies to stave off antitrust regulation, Facebook to avoid
privacy controls, and Microsoft to weaken environmental rules and win
low-cost power for its cloud data centers. But, important as these are, lob-
bying means more than accomplishing short-term goals. Lobbying also
helps companies promote the general interest of the industry, including
selling its products to government, which often helps to make a market
and to win government support for a favorable business climate abroad.
Looked at in this way, lobbying is every bit as promotional as commercial
advertisements, blog postings, and high-level business reports.
Cloud Expo: Promoting Cloud Computing through Trade Shows
Lobbying is also interesting because, in an era that touts the wonders of
social media and moving everything to the cloud, it remains a decidedly
interpersonal, real-time activity. So are trade shows and conferences that
aim to advance both knowledge and support for IT and the cloud. In
the IT sector there are endless rounds of these events, but over the years
arguably the most important have been the COMDEX (Computer Dealer
Exhibition) trade shows, which took place from 1979 to 2003, and the
Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which brings together companies
aiming to have their new products named “the next new thing.” CES
began meeting in 1967 and continues as an annual event in Las Vegas.
COMDEX was the major IT event until 1999, when it tried to restrict
media coverage to writers accredited with a handful of the leading trade
publications. Competition contributed to a drop-off in attendance from a
peak of 200,000 attendees and, when major companies decided to make
big product announcements at CES or other venues, COMDEX discon-
tinued the event. CES picked up the slack, topping 150,000 attendees in
2012 and again in 2013 (Takahashi 2013).
Trade shows are important because they circulate technical and mar-
keting information about products and because they build networks of
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