01-12-2009, 10:13 PM
MacWorld Expo was ho-hum as to be expected when 1) the economy takes a dump, 2) the Messiah returned drops a few pounds and says he's going to sit this one out, 3) the mothership company is pissed at the show sponsor for moving the schedule up a week when they promised they wouldn't last year, and 4) the mothership wants to take her ball and go home anyway.
My suspicion is that this will end up being the last Mac Expo and the next year CES will try to steal all the Apple vendors. I've been working on and off at Mac Expo since I was at ComputerWare in the '90s, so it was kind of a fizzle and a bit disappointing. If you're not a fanboy and follow the Apple news with baited breath, they didn't announce anything significant. A couple of tweaks to some of there software offerings, and a better battery in one of there laptops.
Traffic was a little lighter, but it picked up. And I've been at Expo during the lean years before Jobs came back, before it was the iPod accessory show, when it shrank down to a single hall in Moscone and they actually set up the aisles in a bit from the walls. That sucked and this was no where near that bad.
While I deal mostly in utility software, our company picked up a number of graphics titles and those show really nicely, so there was a decent amount of interest at the "pretty" side of our booth. My voice went froggy by the second day. We were lodging at the Parc55 which is nice, but my roommate announced he snored the first night. I said that's ok, I have ear plugs. Well...I switched to an iPod played loud and that helped a bit, but I slept like crap all week.
I did eat a lot of nice food (and drank). On Monday night it was New Delhi (behind the Parc55). Tuesday I went with two friends to House of Nanking. Wednesday was the staff dinner, we went to Umbria. We followed that with a trip to the top of the Marriott for drinks. Thursday we did a charity bowling event at the Yerba Buena bowling alley and loaded up on free beer and bad pizza, but then went out after to Japantown for more drinks. I'll post more in the food forum.
I came back on Friday to do some work in the office and recover.
--tg
My suspicion is that this will end up being the last Mac Expo and the next year CES will try to steal all the Apple vendors. I've been working on and off at Mac Expo since I was at ComputerWare in the '90s, so it was kind of a fizzle and a bit disappointing. If you're not a fanboy and follow the Apple news with baited breath, they didn't announce anything significant. A couple of tweaks to some of there software offerings, and a better battery in one of there laptops.
Traffic was a little lighter, but it picked up. And I've been at Expo during the lean years before Jobs came back, before it was the iPod accessory show, when it shrank down to a single hall in Moscone and they actually set up the aisles in a bit from the walls. That sucked and this was no where near that bad.
While I deal mostly in utility software, our company picked up a number of graphics titles and those show really nicely, so there was a decent amount of interest at the "pretty" side of our booth. My voice went froggy by the second day. We were lodging at the Parc55 which is nice, but my roommate announced he snored the first night. I said that's ok, I have ear plugs. Well...I switched to an iPod played loud and that helped a bit, but I slept like crap all week.
I did eat a lot of nice food (and drank). On Monday night it was New Delhi (behind the Parc55). Tuesday I went with two friends to House of Nanking. Wednesday was the staff dinner, we went to Umbria. We followed that with a trip to the top of the Marriott for drinks. Thursday we did a charity bowling event at the Yerba Buena bowling alley and loaded up on free beer and bad pizza, but then went out after to Japantown for more drinks. I'll post more in the food forum.
I came back on Friday to do some work in the office and recover.
--tg