Just One More Thing: The Apple Faithful Freakout Begins in Five Minutes
The prospect of no Steve Jobs keynote and Apple’s last year at IDG’s annual Macworld Conference & Expo is sure to do five things:
1. Send the legions of Apple (APPL) fanboys–whose attendance at the January event has been akin to those who flock to sightings of the Virgin Mary in various places like, um, toast–into a deep chasm of depression from which they will never recover.
2. Renew rampant and unsubstantiated speculation about the health of Apple CEO Steve Jobs, which will immediately impact the stock of the tech icon. In fact, Apple shares are already down almost six percent in after-hours trading.
3. Begin rampant and unsubstantiated speculation about a power struggle within Apple among the potential successors to Jobs, including product czar Phil Schiller–who is giving the keynote–and COO Tim Cook. This utterly ignores the fact that you actually need more than one person to run a major corporation, even with His Digital Holiness in charge.
4. Result in a series of spurious reports of what cool new product the company will and will not release at the event, reports that BoomTown has calculated on my handy-dandy abacus are typically 83 percent wrong. Incredibly, the company always seems about to release something, because I seem to keep buying.
5. As Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski noted in a tweet just now: “Man, they must be chugging Mylanta by the gallon over at IDG corporate right now.”
Comments
Apple has uniquely relied on Steve Job’s keynotes at events.
It has a following for those keynotes unlike any other.
Yet even Apple says ‘we can spend our money better elsewhere now’?
That’s truly amazing! Will future keynotes come via YouTube or streaming to the retail locations?
Or is Apple seriously planning to move to a model of product launches that doesn’t focus on the keynote at all?
Either way, this seems like a serious blow to the entire industry of tradeshows, or at least the largest acknowledgement to date of a downhill trend for them.
Posted by Dale Larson at December 16th, 2008 at 2:55 pm