In a story spreading faster than California’s Wildfires, Apple has recently annouced that Macworld Expo 2009 will be its last. And if you thought that Steve Jobs would be there for the last ‘Hoorah!’… you will only be met by the fact that Apple will be sending Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. Many people asked whether the lack of Steve Jobs at the keynote would be related to his health, but as Techcrunch points out, this is probably just because they want to lower expectations
A long forseen prophecy has now been fullfilled. As John Grueber predicted in 2002, Apple, as well as other companies, would probably begin pulling out of expensive trade shows like this because of the other, easier, and more managable way to release new products. As Robert Scoble put it in this post:
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I’ve watched as Apple invites a few hundred bloggers and journalists into a conference room at its headquarters in Cupertino and gets the news out to the world without having to go to an expensive venue.
What changed?
Blogging and online video.
Big companies are looking at the millions of dollars they spend for booths (not to mention bringing employees to) and are realizing that it’s just not getting the return on investment that they should get.
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This means a lot for consumers aswell as Apple. One of the reasons some authors believe is because about a month before any major keynote, consumers hold off on buying Apple products, knowing that something is bound to be refreshed soon. However, now that Apple has gotten out of that cycle, you will probably begin to see anger from customers with their brand new MacBook becoming the older version the day after they buy it.
Apple will probably set a big precedent that many companies will later follow. Having a big company pulling out from an event that is basically all about them sets a big standard at where it wants to put its finances. All it really takes is a good amount of bloggers to start writing about it, then letting it loose into the wild hands of the Social Media community, and hopefully Apple is realizing this.
