CeBIT

» see cebit.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

cebit had its turkish moment starting in 2000, which is the year the istanbul computer fair took the cebit name and started running as cebit bilisim eurasia. i was a teenager on a home line in ankara when that happened, and the fair arrived as newspaper coverage in the autumn rather than as a hall i walked through. what the name did in turkish was odd and worth recording: for about fifteen years, cebit was the word local press reached for when it meant any large technology exhibition at all.

the original was german and much older than its own branding. it opened in 1970 as hall 1 of the hannover fair, the wing where office machines went, and the acronym unpacks into a german phrase about office automation and information technology. it grew inside its parent until deutsche messe cut it loose in 1986 as a separate event scheduled four weeks ahead of the industrial fair.

the scale is hard to convey now because nothing at that size exists anymore. at the peak, during the dot-com years, eight hundred and fifty thousand people came through, with 830,000 counted in 2001. hannover is a city of about half a million. every march it had to be rearranged around a trade show, with visitors sleeping in spare rooms two towns away and the train timetable rewritten for the week.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the istanbul edition ~

cebit bilisim eurasia was run by a joint venture between deutsche messe and a turkish organizer, and it inherited an older istanbul computer fair that had been running through the nineties under a different name. it moved in 2012 from the tuyap grounds out in buyukcekmece to cnr expo at yesilkoy, which is the kind of relocation that happens when a fair still thinks it is growing.

it ended before the parent did. deutsche messe cancelled the october 2016 istanbul edition outright, citing the political situation in turkey and the reluctance of international exhibitors to commit, and said the content would be folded into the win automation fair from march 2017. so the turkish cebit died two years ahead of the german one, and for a local reason rather than an industry one.

~ the cracks ~

the underlying problem was that a horizontal show stops making sense once every vendor large enough to matter can fill a hall by itself. the companies with the biggest stands worked out that they could hold their own event and control the whole room without paying rent to a fairground. what was left in hannover was a general exhibition for an industry that no longer thought of itself as general.

the 2018 attempt to fix this is the part worth remembering. deutsche messe moved the show out of march into june and wrapped a festival around it, with outdoor space and live music, trying to become something closer to south by southwest. about 2,800 exhibitors and 120,000 visitors turned up. that is roughly a seventh of the crowd the same fairground had held eighteen years earlier.

~ the day it died ~

on 28 november 2018 deutsche messe announced there would be no cebit 2019, giving declining space bookings and falling visitor numbers as the reason. the industrial and enterprise pieces were absorbed back into hannover messe, which is where they had come from in 1970. the fair ended where it started, as a wing of something bigger.

cebit.de still resolves. it answers with a redirect to hannovermesse.de, so the domain was never dropped, just pointed at the survivor. the brand is still used on smaller international shows, which means cebit technically exists and has not been a place anyone travels to for years.

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