The Timely Demise of Macworld Expo
At the risk of sounding glib, we welcomed yesterday's news with open arms. I legitimately feel for the folks at IDG, who work hard each year to put on the best show possible. But there comes a time for all great things to come to an end and, for the largest global Mac event on the planet, that time is now.
There was a phenomenon I learned in my college Psychology class that I can't quite remember the name of (and Google is no help), which essentially supports the fact that hindsight is 20/20. As the various Mac pundits line up to kick dirt on the newly nailed coffin, there will no doubt be a sense of inevitability to it all. Over time, the news will fade into another chapter of Apple's evolution. But where have all these naysayers been over the last three or four years?
In some ways, I wish we had the intestinal fortitude of Adobe or Belkin. Each year we debate whether or not to exhibit at the show. Once, we even stopped payment on the check to IDG as a result of an internal SNAFU where the left hand didn't tell the right hand that we weren't going (true and embarrassing story). Of course, we crawled back to IDG (who were great) on our knees, begging to be accepted back into the fold a month or two later. Why? Because for all the intellectually sound reasons we had for not going, we were scared of the perception we'd foster by our conspicuous absence.
On the plus side of the ledger: Macworld Expo has allowed us hundreds (thousands?) of memorable connections with customers and potential customers. That is obviously the draw. But at what cost?
There are the hard and quantifiable costs of airfare, lodging, booth space, booth setup, booth rentals (eg internet connection, carpet, padding for the carpet, oxygen), booth teardown. And every bit of it is expensive, at least for a company our size. Conventional wisdom has you grooming your children to become doctors and lawyers. I'm strategically steering my kids toward a lucrative career in trade show rentals.
Then there are the not-as-easy-to-quantify costs. The opportunity costs associated with planning, managing and attending the show for as many as ten people. What else could we be doing in the office to build better products, fine tune our service delivery? We value the customer interaction, but we get that in other ways. We monitor calls, visit local customers, hold Apple Store events. But I still haven't pointed out the most obvious reason we resisted attending each year.
It just doesn't make sense.
For so many years, Macworld Expo filled an empty space in the hearts of Mac users everywhere. Pre-internet, pre-Apple Store, the idea was perfect and brilliant and the experience was unique. But the world has changed around it. That experience has been distributed to a mall near you. In all my travels, I have yet to walk into an Apple Store not brimming with happy energy. And then there's the internet, where big companies like Apple and small companies like us can reach around the globe in ways just not possible in 1995.
No doubt we'll miss the show in its current form. Nostalgia has a way of making the heart grow fonder. And who knows? I'm open-minded to hear how IDG is remaking the non-Apple Macworld Expo. But for now, we're excited to figure out how to use that time, money and energy during the months leading up to January 2010.
-Scott