My Macworld Odyssey (Part 1)

Macworld is fun! Macworld is exciting! Macworld is where many of the MyMac staff as well as from other sites around the world get together and declare our joy of all things Mac-i-ness! This is exactly how it should be. Hope, love, peace, and a firm belief that we are doing our fair share to make the computing world just a little bit better.
OK, now that the bile is rising let’s talk about what Macworld really ends up being. Long flights, stressful traveling, weird meals at odd times, and conversations that may start out one way and end up as an interesting adventure in wonderland! Macworld is ALL these things occasionally at the same time. This isn’t a contradiction. Macworld folds these interesting emotions into a rich tapestry of delight, joy, shock, amusement, insanity, anger, befuddlement, and without much warning terror. I’m telling you all this to set a mood before I talk about my recent adventures when the faithful gathered in San Francisco for Macworld 2010.

At the end of Macworld 2009, the mood was bleak. Apple had not only announced JUST before the Expo began that this was going to be their last Macworld Expo, but seemed to take great delight in using little tweaks to make everyone believe that it would be the last Macworld ever. From their keynote that Steve Jobs apparently couldn’t be bothered with attending (though the whole “I need a new liver and I’m very sick” might have had something to do with it) to Tony Bennett singing, “The best is yet to come” after an amazingly for Apple lack of any real stunning product announcements (iLife 09? Really?), it just seemed like they were going through the motions. Kind of like a Prom date where you thought you were going to take the head cheerleader and instead ending up with the girl that everyone describes as having, “a GREAT personality”. Not that you aren’t also going to have fun, but it can be a bit of a letdown.

To IDG and Paul Kent’s credit, they immediately went into damage control mode to salvage the best of what really was a bad situation and the rest of the Expo was spent trying to assess just how bad it was going to be for next year. Never before after Apple left an event that focused on their products did the event last more than a year and in the months that followed it looked like the Macworld Expo was going to be no exception. Many companies PRE-announced that THEY too wouldn’t be there and it seemed a ripple effect might kill the 2010 Expo before it even got a chance. More on that later. Suffice to say that the 2010 Expo was announced and was certainly going to happen so many of us who write for the Mac web made our plans.

A couple of things made this Macworld different. First off it was going to be a day shorter and have a Saturday date for the Expo floor. Good move since many locals who might want to attend do have jobs and such and having a Saturday meant that any work-related excuse just flew out the window. They also moved the date away from CES (good one Paul) into February which also meant we weren’t going to have to fight holiday crowds to get to the event (even better move Paul!). All fine and dandy except in a bad economy, many of the writers we typically get to go to Macworld suddenly couldn’t make it without a sponsor and no sponsors seemed overly interested in coughing up any dough for MyMac to cover the event. Perhaps a bit short-sighted seeing how much value we brought (not to mention traffic to their booth and websites) but I can understand the reluctance…mostly. So instead of lots of MyMac staffers rushing out and bring back tidbits of Mac joy, it came down to really 4 people, 2 of which had to leave at least 1 or two days early. Owen Rubin, Mark Rudd, David Cohen, and myself. I didn’t mention Tim our fearless leader because he was there for OWC and OWCRadio though he was a HUGE help behind the scenes. Mark had some family issues that pulled him away and Owen ended up staying longer to try and fill in some of the gaps. David and I had our first day Main Stage presentation to do which cut the first day VERY short. But as usual I’m getting ahead of myself. In order to talk about the behind the scenes stuff, we first had to actually GET there.

Part 2: San Fran bound and the great blizzard of 2010