Apple's January Macworld Appearance to Be its Last--and No Steve Jobs
by Sam Dean - Dec. 16, 2008Comments (1)- Related Blog Posts
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Here's a shocker: Apple has announced that this year's Macworld conference, coming up in early January, will be the last one for the company, and Steve Jobs won't deliver the keynote address. In his place, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller will do the keynote at San Francisco's Moscone Center on January 6th. Wow, Steve Jobs' annual keynotes at this conference have been where everything from the iPhone to the MacBook Air have debuted. Many open sourcers are rabid Mac fans, and mingle at Macworld. Here are some of the details.
According to Apple's release:
"Apple is reaching more people in more ways than ever before, so like many companies, trade shows have become a very minor part of how Apple reaches its customers. The increasing popularity of Apple’s Retail Stores, which more than 3.5 million people visit every week, and the Apple.com website enable Apple to directly reach more than a hundred million customers around the world in innovative new ways. Apple has been steadily scaling back on trade shows in recent years, including NAB, Macworld New York, Macworld Tokyo and Apple Expo in Paris."
I'm surprised that this is the company's stance. The media exposure the company gets at Macworld is gigantic, across both tech- and non-tech outlets, and Steve Jobs is always greeted like a rock star there. Jobs won't even keynote for the last time? Despite all the rumors that have flown around about Steve Jobs, I still wasn't expecting this, and it will surely send attendance at the conference way down.
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