Apple at Expo: What went wrong?

Tuesday's news that Apple had announced that Steve Jobs wouldn't be appearing at Macworld Expo and that the company would stop exhibiting at the show after 2009 came as a shock. I'm stunned that Apple has taken a 25-year-old event that has been the single best meeting place for the entire community of users and vendors of Apple-related products and treated it like a piece of garbage stuck to the bottom of its shoe. But I'm not really surprised: Apple has been leading up to this moment for a long time now.

Read a similar account of what the show meant to another reporter.

(Before I continue, a bit of disclosure. The company that I work for, Mac Publishing, does not run Macworld Expo. The company that runs Macworld Expo is IDG World Expo, a separate company that shares the Macworld brand name with Mac Publishing and shares the same corporate parent--IDG [International Data Group]. IDG's corporate structure splits different businesses into different companies, each with its own budgets and management teams. So while I'm the editor of Macworld, my business doesn't actually receive any money from the operations of Macworld Expo and isn't judged by the financial results of Macworld Expo. However, the owner of my business is the owner of their business, so we're cousins in the same corporate family.)

The timing of the announcement stinks. It's three weeks before the Expo keynote, and now Apple has decided to announce its plans not just for the keynote, but for the 2010 show? Why now? My guess is that the first announcement required the second. Imagine if Apple merely announced that Steve Jobs wouldn't be appearing at Macworld Expo. Immediately the Steve-Jobs-health speculation machine would whip into action. Jobs not appearing at Macworld Expo would be used as fodder to fuel a million different pieces wondering about Apple's CEO.

The announcement of Apple's "final appearance" in 2009 dulls that speculation a little bit. It won't go away -- if you picked "three" in the pool to see how many comments it would take for someone in our story thread to speculate about Steve Jobs' health, you win -- but in making that second announcement, Apple has changed the story from one about Steve Jobs' non-appearance into one about the death of Macworld Expo.

I don't know anything about Steve Jobs' health. And I really do hate idle speculation about the health of a human being. (Though I do believe that if he's terminally ill the shareholders ought to be informed. Otherwise, it's nobody's business but his own.) Who knows the real reason for the exit of Jobs from the keynote? There are many reasons that don't involve the man's medical history. Maybe there simply weren't any earth-shattering products ready. Maybe someone at IDG offended someone at Apple. Maybe a product that was intended for release at Expo has been delayed, either for technical reasons or because today's economy would make it a bad time to launch a new product.

Apple doesn't perform on your schedule

Now here's why I'm not surprised by Apple's announcement. Let's back up for a moment to the turn of the century. At that time, there were two Macworld Expos -- one in January in San Francisco, and one in the summer on the East Coast. (First Boston, then New York.) Apple pulled out of the New York show just as it was announced that it was returning to Boston. Which one of those facts came first depends on who you ask. But let me tell you this: those final few Apple keynotes at Macworld Expo New York were lame. Apple had very little in the way of new products to offer, so the high expectations that come with Apple keynotes led to major disappointment.

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