January 09, 2009, 3:25 PM — Yes, we know: Macworld will be back, in some form, at least once more. The Macworld Expo folks have already put up the hopeful banners to woo attendees to come back next year. But without Apple around, it really will just be Yet Another Trade show -- and trade shows cost millions to put on, and attendees pay thousands to participate, and to feed and house the folks they send to schmooze. As everyone cuts costs, these annual circus shows may just get harder to justify.
Still, Wednesday night, the Macworld folks made a game show of figuring out what everyone wants in a trade show. Macworld Conference & Expo VP and GM Paul Kent ran a town hall meeting in which many ideas were bandied about, from the vague (more "grass roots involvement") to the intriguing (doing Mac film and music festivals in conjunction with the expo) to the slightly self-serving (tiered pricing for participants, moving it to different cities easier for some participants to get to).
One idea that was not apparently brought up was changing the date of the Expo. This struck me because of an intriguing note at the end of David Pogue's wrap-up blog post, from a conversation he had with Phil Schiller: "He noted that Apple marches to certain annual product cycles: the holiday season (Novemberish), the educational buying season (late summer), the iPod product cycle (October), the iLife development cycle (usually March), the iPhone cycle (June). January doesn't fit ANY of them." Well, is Macworld somehow decreed by law to occur in January? Perhaps the Expo should have tried to sync itself up with the product cycle of its lifeblood. Hey, there's still time.
Meanwhile, I'm struck by the fact that most of the coverage I've been reading over the past few days has ended with the reporter/blogger/writer saying "Well, that was fun, now it's time for me schlep to Las Vegas for CES, ha ha ha kill me now." I certainly don't envy anybody the trade show death march; perhaps many of exhibitors who currently do Macworld will just slide on over to CES over the next year or two, seeing as all the same reporters are going to be there.
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