Tomorrow begins MacWorld. The annual pilgrimage of all the major, minor and wanna-be Apple product developers, modders, designers and professionals along with the Apple faithful, which includes bloggers a plenty and even a few member of the press. There will be non-Apple faithful press members as well, they will be the ones that don’t oooh and ahhh during the keynote tomorrow.
There may be less oohing and ahhing this year during the MacWorld Keynote as Steve Jobs won’t be giving it. We learned a few weeks ago that tomorrow will mark the final keynote presented by Apple. Since Steve Jobs has given every keynote address at MacWorld for over 10 years, that’s a big deal.
Why won’t he be giving the keynote? No one really knows. In an open letter today from Steve Jobs he said his health has been a problem of late. Apparently it was due to a hormone deficiency, seemingly a rare one, that has caused continual weight loss that so many in and out of the press have been discussing since before last year’s MacWorld Keynote; which turned out to be Steve Job’s last MacWorld Keynote.
More importantly though, Apple also announced that they will no longer be attending MacWorld. With all the press Apple has garnered this year, that one little announcement will probably reverberate longer than even the announcement of the iPhone. When Apple pulled out of MacWorld Boston everyone could say, there is still the one in San Francisco. Now not even that one will have Apple as an attendee. From now on, Apple will be making product announcements from their HQ in Cupertino. For a company that thrives on control, that’s no big surprise. For those that bought tickets to MacWorld 2009, the shock is still being felt. For those looking to buy tickets to MacWorld 2010, I doubt the realism of it has even started to sink in yet.
All that being said, what will happen tomorrow during the Keynote not being given by Steve Jobs but instead by Phill Schiller? Who knows. It seems hard to believe that any major product announcements will be made tomorrow; despite the rumor mill. If a major product is announced tomorrow, something really earth shattering, then this could spell the beginning of a transition for Apple. Meaning that not only are they not going to put many of their major “Apples” into one basket called MacWorld; they aren’t going to have one person, Steve Jobs, promoting their goods. That could be good for Apple in the long run, since their fortune is so directly tied to Mr. Jobs; but in the short run I see headaches and problems.
Steve Jobs is Apple. It just isn’t the company he started with The Woz, today he is the company. I can’t imagine an Apple without Steve Jobs and neither can Wall-Street. Every time there is a rumor of his death, sickness or just a simple cough Apple stock does a belly flop. It’s not hard to see why they might want to divorce themselves from the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion field, for fear of getting sucked into that field like so many stars into an unstoppable black-hole. That being said, they don’t want to get rid of Steve Jobs either, he seems to have the Midas touch more often than not.
You can check out my favorite sites on all things Apple: