Macworld is Irrelevant

It’s really hard to suppress the eye roll at a time like this. The announcement that Apple CEO Steve Jobs will not be giving his annual address at Macworld 2009 has sparked a range of reactions, from hysteria (“he must be dying!!”) to deep, simmering anger. On the telly, CNN and MSNBC both had “exclusives” when the news broke earlier this week, and Google News registers 1,422 me-too news articles on the subject.

No one really knows why Jobs isn’t showing (or why Apple says it won’t show at all for subsequent conferences), but I submit this, at the risk of death threats: Macworld 2009 will the last gasping breath, a death rattle if you will, of a model that just has no relevance in the long term.

The latest news is about a Mac user who feels snubbed, and who is subsequently calling for a silent protest when Jobs’ replacement takes the stage in January. The replacement is wouldn’t-want-to-be-in-his-shoes senior marketing vice president, Philip Schiller, bearing a decidedly less exalted level than “CEO.” To the snubbed one, I say this: Corporate reality isn’t personal. Just look at the bank crisis. Did you really think Apple cares about you? Just keep buying those Macbook Airs and it’ll love you, alright. Otherwise, well...

...here’s the deal. As I see it. How many Macworld conference tracks, every year, over and over, and boy do I feel a yawn coming on, can be devoted to desktop publishing, graphic design, Webmastering and all those other Apple cliché “core” areas that carried along the Internet revolution of the 90s and really haven’t changed since?

The problem is the fact that good old-fashioned desktop computing is slowly being phased out in favor of a cloud, hosted, managed model which relies on mobility to really deliver.

That is most certainly true on the consumer side. For one, it’s quite simply becoming a services-centric world. Do you use Gmail? How about Facebook? In fact, how many native apps, if any, do you as a consumer run on your desktop? See my point?

And secondly, it’s certainly becoming a mobile world. Consider the increasing pervasiveness of the wireless Internet and smartphones. The big tiger that everyone’s chasing is the idea of using a variety of wireless endpoints to pull down any number of services from the cloud over the air (kind of like OTA iTunes on the iPhone...hmm...).

I was chatting with my publisher about this and he wanted to know if going with a cloud approach would make sense for Apple. He painted an Apple that would make all of our iTunes songs transferable to any device, for instance — cars, even, which will soon be connected to the Internet and iTunes-ready.

And heck, yes, it makes sense for Apple to move to the cloud. We’re talking about a hardware company whose margins are increasingly squeezed. Whose OS is locked in an epic battle with a software behemoth from the Seattle area. Who competes most competitively with that same software giant on the mobile side, while taking on every other mobile device manufacturer under the sun, plus a new entrant – Google – whose Internet application expertise is radically changing the idea of how services should be delivered — and whose strategy is to bundle easy access to those services with its mobile hardware. And whose same strategy has forced Microsoft itself to move to embracing the cloud, at the risk of cannibalizing its own entrenched desktop strategy.

I mean, wow. That’s a collection of competitive themes for you.

Plus all those other lovely drivers: faster and better wireless broadband. Open developer ecosystems. Consumer demand for anywhere anytime access.

In other words, it’s innovate or die, people. Time for something new. And Macworld, you might want to think a bit beyond your laurels.

Sure, there are obstacles to the Apple-in-the-cloud vision. As I told my publisher: Eliminating USB-based device synching for iTunes is incredibly complex on the back end and would require some DRM rethinking. And consider MobileMe — Apple completely botched the launch of that, relaunched it later, and it’s still buggy. Apple would also need to build or buy data centers and build a cloud computing platform. And it will necessitate them working closely with carriers to make it all work. All carriers. Not just AT&T.

So, you know, work to do. But ultimately, the tethered desktop? Yesterday’s news, baby. Yesterday’s news.