I received an e-mail from CEA this morning with this subject line: "CES Electrifies the Global Economy." Honestly, I ignored it, initially. First of all, I'm pretty much done talking about the show for another year. And second, after working in technology journalism for years, I've grown accustomed to this kind of unprovoked self-congratulation.

I wouldn't suggest that CES 2009 wasn't a monster of a show. It was huge. I managed to walk every inch of the showroom floor and almost killed myself in the process. Still, now that the smoke has cleared, it's hard not to raise an eyebrow at that subject header.

I had to scramble when asked by some colleagues to cull together a list of the show's biggest hits. The floor is always largely occupied by minor products--I spotted a ton of iPod, Wii, and Guitar Hero knockoffs trying to pass themselves off as innovations. That's nothing new. However, coming out of last year's show, I remember a lot more clear winners. At the moment, I'm struggling to name many beyond a few obvious choices--like, say, the Palm Pre.

The show was also notably smaller than it was in 2008. The CEA, in that "CES Electrifies the Global Economy" email, pats itself on the back for the estimated 110,000 who attended the show. In the same paragraph, the number for last year's show is given as 141,150. If this year's estimated number holds up, that's a 22 percent drop. 31,000 fewer people is not insignificant. (To be fair, last year's number did prove to be a bit more than they had `first estimated--this year's final numbers won't be released for another three months.)

Nearly everyone in the industry, I think, expected a drop in CES attendance. Much of the drop can no doubt be chalked up to this global recession--which has become all the more real as the dire holiday sales stats come out. After all, there's something odd about a company serving a shrimp cocktail platter in a room full of expensive gadgets, in the midst of Las Vegas's seemingly endless parade of decadence--all as our industry plunges further into the red.

That said, even considering these dire economic times, there's a growing consensus that, for better or worse, the age of the convention is drawing to an end. The exclamation point was added to the end of the sentence a couple weeks ago, when Steve Jobs announced his decision to pull Apple out of Macworld, stating that the show was no longer necessary to Apple's marketing plan.

We also watched the collapse of E3 in recent years--before this current recession took hold, and despite the fact that the gaming industry is one of the few fields relatively unaffected by the crash.

There's also a certain irony in having huge numbers of people flying to CES from all corners of the earth, while both the exhibitors and those running the show insist that their products are greener than ever before. Perhaps someone who's better at math than I am can crunch the numbers of the carbon footprint of a combined 111,000 travels.

It would be sad to see it go, but it's hard not to see CES 2009 as the beginning of the end of an era. Even if we do manage to claw our way out of this economic hole, the show will likely never quite be what it once was.