On Dec 18, at 11:36 AM, Tom Guenthner wrote:
Apple has announced that its 2009 appearance at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco will be its last. It has also revealed that there will be no keynote address from Steve Jobs.
A few days ago I read Apple's announcement and I've been brooding over it ever since.
Back when I was still writing software reviews for computer magazines and a regular column for the now dead Louisville Computer News, I'd finagle a press pass to MacWorld and spend some time among the Mac faithful. A couple of days wandering the aisles and attending tech sessions could tell you more about what was really going on with Mac software than a whole year of reading at home.
But, to many, MacWorld is more than a trade show. The faithful show up. To them, Apple is more than just another huge company trying to plug itself into their wallets. The show is like a rock music festival. You can wander the aisles and see the person with the Apple logo carved into his hair or the woman dressed like an old bondi blue iMac. (Remember: this is San Francisco.) Whole user groups from Japan or Denmark or Britain move in packs, easily identified by their matching T-shirts. Hundreds of vendors vie to catch your eye with outrageous booths—huge ones from Apple, Adobe, Symantec and even Microsoft—small ones from BareBones, Wolfram, SmileOnMyMac and uncounted others. It is a carnival. The motion, lights, noise and confusion are a kaleidoscope.
The rock star at the center of the whole thing is Steve Jobs, and his keynote is treated like a Stones concert. I've seen several Stevenotes, and they were all pretty much the same. There are two lines: one for the unwashed masses and another for the lucky horde with press passes. Since there are only a few thousand seats, commoners start queueing well before 6:00 and anyone entering the line after 7:30 won't get in. The exalted ones with press passes start drifting in at 7:30 or so. The wait is like a big party with MacBooks and iPods.
The doors open at 8:45.There we sit with loud 70s rock music filling the dimly-lit room. A twenty-foot screen is in front of us with nothing on it but a huge Apple logo. Anticipation pervades.
Suddenly the music stops. Thousands wait with bated breath. Just as casual as you please, Steve Jobs saunters onto the stage and says, "We have a lot of things to show you."
It's hard to describe the atmosphere in the room. Jobs is the master of the product rollout. He's the superstar. The audience wants to hear him and he feeds off the audience. The only time I've ever felt anything like it was at a few rock concerts: Simon & Garfunkel when I was in high school; Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash when I was in college. Charisma. Electric. It's been said that Jobs creates a "reality distortion field." Although they try hard not to show it, it's clear that even the old-time tech reporters are swept up.
You can't get this feeling watching the QuickTime replay on the Web. The replay is good, but it's not amazing. I suppose it's the audience, the expectation and the ambience of the place and the time. The flaws in the gadgets and the limitations of the software are invisible in the reality distortion field, but become ever more apparent as time and distance weaken the effect. It's one of those times when you really have to be there to understand.
So now there will be no more MacWorld Stevenotes. I think this will be the death of the show. Without Apple to anchor the main floor and without all the speculation about that amazing "one more thing" at the Stevenote, the press will be able to ignore the whole thing. When the press leaves, the exhibitors won't be able to justify the ever growing cost of a booth.
It seems it was inevitable. Nearly all the other big technology shows have vanished. COMDEX stopped in 2003. E3 drastically downsized in 2007. Even CES, the king of all the shows, was shortened by several days in 2007 and has had much lower attendance.
I've found myself thinking about that old song by The Buggles, Video Killed the Radio Star. In this case it's The Internet Killed the Geek Show.
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