Apple Tuesday announced that the January 2009 Macworld Conference & Expo will be its last.
The long-standing conference has been Mac fan Mecca, often used by the Cupertino, Calif. vendor to roll out major new products. In a statement, Apple
said new and expanding customer relationships in Apple retail stores and its Apple.com Web site have made tradeshows a “very
minor part” of its customer relations effort. The company has been “steadily scaling back” on its trade show presence in other
venues in recent years, the statement said.
Apple is the star of the show, but it is not the only one: at the 2008 conference, 450 companies exhibited, including 100
first-timers. Among last year’s attendees were Microsoft, NEC, and Samsung, as well as many others representing the broad
swath serving different parts of the Mac, iPhone, and iPod hardware and software ecosystem.
The 2009 show’s opening keynote speech will be made by Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product
Marketing.
The Macworld conference is created by IDG World Expo, a business unit of IDG, which is also the parent company of Network
World and Macworld.
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Comments (6)
Apple further abandons ITBy MFJUMBO on December 17, 2008, 12:21 pmApple's decision to completely back out of trade show support is a slap in the face of IT professionals (Cisco is tending in the same direction). The big guys are...
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Apple cuts back is no newsBy Anon on December 17, 2008, 2:42 pmI think Apple slapped themselves in the face and said "A trade show for new products when we don't have any new products to show?" Oops. Nothing left in the "new"...
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Trade Shows died with the bingo cardsBy Walter Mellon on December 17, 2008, 8:46 pmTrade shows were once the big junket; hey, let's go party in Vegas, or SFO, etc. and check out the booth babes. Like so many other commercial, communications,...
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Get over itBy Anonymous on December 18, 2008, 11:55 amIn the world of instant information gratification, the days of global user education events and prospect qualification parties (tradeshows) are over. From a vendor's...
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It's the economy, folksBy Anonymous on December 18, 2008, 5:57 pmBoy, it really sucks to be in generation X, I'll tell you. We were too young for the free love at Woodstock, and Disco and it's signature one-night-stands flamed...
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earlierBy Anon on December 29, 2008, 8:35 pmBoomers may have had it best, but you still live better than everyone before that. Lots of your predecessors spent a lot of time in miserable hovels, disease-ridden...
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