I remember back in high school when I went on a marching band competition field trip to Daytona my freshman that was such a fantastic and transformational experience that I ended up writing an essay about it for English class early in my sophomore year. Got an A+ on it too. Then I went out to band practice that afternoon and the band director announced that we wouldn’t be making the Daytona trip that year (or ever again, as it turned out) due to a scheduling conflict. Talk about blowback. Just as I was realizing how important a particular annual event was to me, it disappeared from my life in a puff of smoke.
Today feels like I’m living that day all over again. I’d just finalized the travel arrangements for Macworld Expo, just nailed down which iProng staff members would be attending with me this year, and just this morning published a new issue of the magazine with an in-depth interview with the guy in charge of the expo. And then a few hours later, Apple announces that it’s done with Macworld Expo. No keynote this year from Steve Jobs, no Apple presence next year at all. It’s certainly not game over. But the game is over as we know it.
It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but it did nonetheless. You know we all knew Obama was going to win by election day, but when the words were officially plastered on the television screen, I still couldn’t quite catch my breath at how we’d actually managed to pull it off? This is one of those moments, but with the opposite outcome. All the right (wrong?) pieces were in place for Apple’s pullout to happen, and yet today I still can’t catch my breath at the fact that this sad day has actually arisen.
How much did this catch me off guard? A couple weeks ago I was looking over the Macworld Expo website and I realized that there was no mention of Steve Jobs giving the keynote address. I mentioned it privately to a few friends in the industry, and while they were surprised by it, none of them thought that it could possibly translate to Steve not giving the keynote this year. And I found that I had to agree with them. In fact the idea seemed so absurd, so National Enquirer-style left-field out-there, that when I interviewed Macworld Expo’s Paul Kent last week I didn’t even bother to ask him about the keynote. After all, the expo folks hadn’t officially announced that the lights would be turned on in the exhibit hall this year and that the front doors to the Moscone Center would be unlocked for us, but it seemed safe to assume that those were a mere formality. And the Steve Jobs keynote, an annual tradition in the decade-plus that he’s been back with Apple, seemed like just as much of a formality. So maybe that’s why it managed to sneak up on all of us even though we should all have known it was coming.
For that matter we should have seen this coming for at least six or seven years. Apple may be tacitly using the weak overall economy as an excuse, but if so then that’s all it is, an excuse. The Apple economy is thriving, each of Apple’s products is at an all-time high in marketshare, and almost paradoxically the company whose computers generally sell for $1200 and up is doing just fine at a time when companies that sell $500 junk computers are hurting. Actually that’s not so paradoxical, as the people who buy Apple computers tend to think of their computer as a far more important part of their life than those who buy the junk machines, and so when people are cutting their budgets during tough times, upgrading an old junk PC to a new junk PC isn’t going to take nearly as high of a priority as upgrading an aging but vital Mac to a new and vital Mac. If the sinking economy is affecting Apple at all, it might be along the lines of Steve Jobs only needing to rent eight new warehouses this year to store all the excess cash that the company doesn’t know what to do with, instead of the usual ten new warehouses. No, this isn’t about the economy. This is about Boston. And I don’t mean the Augustana song.
Back in the early part of this decade, IDG (the company that owns and runs Macworld Expo, an event that is not owned or operated by Apple itself) decided that it was going to move the east coast version of the Expo from New York City, where Steve Jobs wanted it, back to its original home in Boston. In turn, Apple announced that if the Expo moved back to Boston, Apple would refuse to participate. IDG moved the Expo to Boston anyway. Apple bailed. Short version of the story is that a year later there was no more east coast version of Macworld Expo.
On the surface it looked to be nothing more than IDG mistakenly thinking that Apple was bluffing and then finding out the hard way that Steve really didn’t think an expo in a non-world-stage place like Boston (sorry Red Sox fans) was worth his company’s participation. But look deeper and you see that Apple was simply using the move back to Boston as excuse to bail out. This was right around the time that Apple was opening enough retail stores across the country to essentially create a local version of Apple’s expo booth that could stay open 365 days a year instead of the four days a year provided by the expo. And the internet was growing to the point that word of major new product announcements could spread like wildfire even if those announcements didn’t come from a major trade show. And it was also right around the time that Apple had regained sufficient mainstream reputational footing that Steve Jobs could call a press conference any time of year on a whim and most of the media would show up just to see what he had up his sleeve.
And sure enough, there are now hundreds of Apple Stores all over the world. Steve holds press conferences a couple of times a year, whenever he’s ready to introduce new products as opposed to trying to force new products to be ready in time for specific expo dates, and the last one I attended appeared to have more than a thousand journalists in the room. So if Apple had been looking for an excuse to bail out of the east coast version of Macworld Expo, found it when IDG got Boston-stupid, and managed to do just fine in the several years that followed, then it only makes sense that Apple has been similarly looking for an excuse to bail on the west coast version of the show as well. And it looks like the sagging economy is just the excuse that Apple has been looking for.
Don’t get me wrong: I hate this move. I hate it with a passion. I hate their pullout of the San Francisco expo even more than I hated their pullout of the east coast expo seven years ago. But I can’t blame Apple for making the move. The expo, and the keynote in particular, have largely become a needless distraction for the company, an artificially created crucible in which Apple is arbitrarily required to come out with amazing new products during the second week of January whether they’re ready or not, probably one of the worst weeks of the year to announce new products since it just happens to be right after the holiday shopping season is over. Apple has figured out by now that products which are going to need some time to sink in to people’s minds, to gain some gradual traction before the holiday season, should be announced in the spring or summer. Products that are going to be immediate hits should be announced with enough time to find their way into the retail world in time for the holiday season and with just enough time for the aftermarket to bring just enough accessories to market for that new product to not be embarrassingly unaccessorizable (it’s no accident that Apple has announced its newest iPod models at its own press conferences during the second week of September for the past four years in a row – they’ve likely calculated it as being the latest they can make such announcements without it being a bumpy ride into the holidays).
I’m not sure this is the end of Macworld Expo. While the east coast event was absurdly expensive to produce when it was in NYC and too far off the radar when it was in Boston, and the moves back and forth had made it too vagrant to have much of a local footing in either locale, the circumstances for the west coast show are different. Twenty-five years in the same town, same building, same time of year, I wonder if maybe there’s just enough tradition and inertia there to keep the show going as a less ambitious, mildly successful, largely regional show which relies on the tons of west coast-based Apple software and accessory makers and tons of west coast Apple enthusiasts (and believe me, there are plenty of both) to keep the show afloat in one hall of the Moscone Center.
Time will tell on that front. But what’s for sure is that after today nothing is quite the same. An announcement like this sets off a chain reaction of decisions that will have to be made by everyone affected by it. Will Macworld Expo’s exhibitors bolt for the more generic CES (which is always inexplicably the same week as Macworld Expo but in a different city), will they stay at Macworld Expo and try to make a go of it, or will they simply stay home and try to put that $10,000-100,000 chunk of their annual marketing budget to use in a different manner? Most of those companies likely don’t even know the answer themselves yet.
As far as media coverage, I’d be willing to bet that a good number of mainstream journalists have canceled their Macworld Expo flights today. These are the folks who show up just for the Steve Jobs keynote, spend the rest of Tuesday flooding the press room so they can file their reports about what Steve just announced, and are on a flight home by Tuesday evening without having even visited any other participating companies. We all know Apple VP Phil Schiller isn’t going to announce anything terribly important during his keynote address, so why would those kinds of journalists even bother to show up? But I don’t think too many Apple-specific publications will be canceling their plans just yet. I’m not changing anything about iProng’s coverage plans this year beyond allotting less time to experiment with Apple’s new stuff after the keynote, since there likely won’t be any new stuff to play with. But all that means is an earlier jump on covering the seventy-five or so companies that will be demonstrating iPhone and iPod related products in the exhibit hall, more than half of which will probably introduce brand new products.
Don’t ask me yet about Macworld Expo 2010. I’d first have to have an answer on whether there will even be a Macworld Expo 2010 before I can speculate about to what extent iProng will participate (and for what it’s worth, IDG just announced that there will be, and I still can’t begin to speculate). In general I’ll say that if there’s a vital event taking place that falls within iProng’s coverage areas, then iProng is likely to be there. So I guess “vital” is the keyword there. You can interpret that however you like. Macworld Paris (or whatever they call it) did fine after Apple walked away, but not fine enough for me to get on a place for France. Macworld Tokyo folded up like a tent when Apple bailed. From my standpoint, as far as 2010, all I can do is watch for now.
If anything, today’s news should probably be seen as a sign that Apple’s turnaround has been so complete, that its success is now so substantial, that it no longer needs the expo. Ten years ago, when the company and its platform were adrift despite having the best products in the market, Apple needed community events like Macworld Expo to pull together the folks that were left, energize the troops, and rely on the community to help spread the gospel. But these days there isn’t a company in the world whose product announcements are more closely paid attention to than Apple. And frankly, at this point the internet is the glue that holds the Apple community together, not Apple itself. Apple stopped wearing that hat a long time ago, because it no longer needed to.
Things change. Lately things have been changing quite a bit. The other biggest annual event within iProng’s scope, New Media Expo, was bought out by BlogWorld Expo last week. After four years of partnering with New Media Expo and three years of attending and exhibiting there, it was beginning to feel like home. But the house has been moved, and the new “BlogWorld and New Media Expo” is where it’s at now. On the Apple side of things, where is “it” at now? Will Apple’s own press conferences take on even more importance than they have in the past few years? Will CES absorb enough of the iPhone and iPod industry exhibitors that it’ll become the de facto place for us to be in early January each year? Or will none of it matter much anymore, now that the internet and new media and instant delivery of all things new is now the norm? Today I have no answers about tomorrow.
That leaves this year’s expo, three weeks from now. Knowing that it just might be my last-ever Macworld Expo leaves me tempted to feel sad, remorseful, even disdainful, but that’s certainly not the attitude to take into the event. In fact, the quasi-finality of this year’s expo (even if it continues into the future it won’t be the same) makes it potentially something memorable, maybe even special. You never know. Several of my industry friends have displayed some kind of brief commentary on today’s news in their iChat/AIM status messages, which tells you just how profoundly the news effects those of us in the thick of it. But one of them reads “Gonna make this Macworld count” – and that’s the one I’m going to go with as far as my attitude toward Macworld Expo 2009.
Hey, let’s make the best of it this year. After all, a year from now we might be looking back at the 2009 event as the good old days in which we had an annual automatic excuse to all congregate in the same building for the same week each year. Then again, we might eventually look back on this time as the quaint old days in which we actually needed an annual event to keep the Apple universe propped up and headed in the right direction.
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