When Philip Schiller takes the stage for the keynote address at the Macworld conference that begins tomorrow, he will be slipping into the shoes of one of the world's great performers. Like a temporary stand-in for Mick Jagger at a Rolling Stones concert, Mr Schiller is likely to be an unsatisfying imitation. Apple's worldwide vice president for product marketing has frequently played the straight man to its chairman, Steve Jobs, during his legendary "Stevenote" presentations.
But this week there will be no main act. Mr Jobs has pulled out of the yearly event for the first time since his return to the company in 1997, and this is the last year that Apple will attend the show. Apple watchers still have high hopes for what rabbits Mr Schiller could pull out of his hat. At the top of the wish list is an Apple netbook - a small, cheap, scaled down MacBook to compete with the low-cost products that have stormed the market in the past year.
The iconic tech company, which has always made premium priced computers, has rejected the netbook market. "We don't know how to make a US$500 (Dh1,836) computer that's not a piece of junk," Mr Jobs famously told reporters. "Our DNA will not let us ship that." But just as the company slowly lowered the prices on its laptops and music players until they became mass-market products, entering the hottest market in the computer world is something plenty of onlookers rate as likely. Will it happen this week?
The most interesting rumour doing the rounds is for a cheaper, simpler iPhone to be announced. Like the iPod Nano, which brought the cost of iPods down to double-digit dollar levels, the rumoured "iPhone Nano" will cost less than $100 and compete with mid-market devices from Nokia and others. Fun, but unlikely. Fun and unlikely are two words that well describe the strange tradition of the Apple product launch. When Mr Jobs strolled on to the stage at Macworld in 1998, it was both the beginning and the end of a remarkable period in the company's history.
In 1976 Mr Jobs, then 21, founded Apple with his partner, Steve Wozniak, in a California garage. The company changed the personal computer market forever with the Macintosh, the first computer to include two features then considered revolutionary: a mouse and a graphical user interface. Just a year after launching the first Mac, Mr Jobs was kicked out of the company in an ugly boardroom dispute in 1985. For the next decade, Apple would continue to innovate, but lack the revolutionary touch, releasing line after line of increasingly bland, predictable products. By the mid-1990s, it was clinging to a small, fanatical fan base. Most industry onlookers agreed the company was doomed.
During his period in the wilderness, Mr Jobs founded Pixar, the most successful film studio in history, and NeXT, which built the computer operating software that forms the core of the present Apple system. But it was his return to a struggling Apple, and the keynote address of the 1998 Macworld conference, that will be remembered as the defining moment of Mr Jobs, and Apple, in the 1990s. After some small talk about progress at the company, he revealed the iMac, the most iconic desktop computer made. The design - curvy, sweets-coloured translucent plastic - instantly made the iMac the standard computer on the sets of film and TV shows, and a must-have on the desks of college students and design enthusiasts.
Apple had regained its cool in a big way. From then on, the Stevenote became not just the highlight of Macworld, but of the entire Apple year. Mr Jobs combined style and flair with a gadget lover's sense for drama, mastering the art of the slow, teasing revelation. From the iBook laptop to the iPod music player and, of course, the iPhone, Apple turned the simple product launch into consumer electronics theatre.
Today, even a middling Apple keynote, such as the September launch of a redesigned iPod Nano, gains the company hundreds of headlines in the world media and multiple days of constant analysis and speculation online. No other company has turned what are essentially press conferences into such events, and it is hard to imagine anyone else doing so again. With that said, there is also no other company in the world that would turn its back on such an institution in the way Apple has done. The company will no longer even attend Macworld.
The announcement in November that Mr Jobs would skip Apple's final Macworld appearance, was tersely written and gave little detail. In typical Apple style, no further information was released and spokesmen for the company declined to comment on why the company was withdrawing, and why Mr Jobs would not speak. The immediate suspect was Mr Jobs's health. After a cancer scare in 2004, he is officially back to good health, but his emaciated appearance in recent years has led to widespread speculation that all is not well.
The situation was not aided by the news agency Bloomberg in August accidentally publishing an obituary announcing Mr Jobs's death. The story was quickly pulled from the wire, but not before almost 10 per cent of Apple's market value was wiped away by nervous investors. "Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated," said the first slide of a presentation by a living Mr Jobs in November. Few people know the true reason why Apple's charismatic chairman will not put on a final show at Macworld this week. If his failing health is the reason for the no-show, Apple executives have lied in their official statements, and may have broken regulations on disclosure of important information.
It is, therefore, worth taking Apple's official explanation at face value. "Apple is reaching more people in more ways than ever before so, like many companies, trade shows have become a very minor part of how Apple reaches its customers," it said in a statement this month. "The increasing popularity of Apple's retail stores, which more than 3.5 million people visit every week, and the Apple.com website enable the company to directly reach more than 100 million customers around the world."
In the internet era, trade shows are beginning to show their age. What were once the primary platforms for dialogue and connections are now looking distinctly archaic. Why hand out brochures and free pens to a generation accustomed to business being done on laptops and e-mail? Gitex, the largest technology conference in the Middle East, drew a healthy crowd this year, and most exhibitors said the show would remain an important part of their annual agenda. But an increasing number opt to take part informally, entertaining key guests on the sidelines of the conference and hosting parallel workshops and events. The time of needing a booth filled with flyers and giveaways to make the most of a trade show are coming to an end.
The very technology that conference attendees come to talk about is slowly eroding the reason for coming together in the first place. The internet makes it easy to build a fan base and communicate with them; working with industry peers now happens every minute thanks to new collaborative technologies. Apple may have added the most prominent nail to the trade show's coffin, but few other companies share its courage. Most businesses still operate on the "me too" model, which dictates that you must be wherever your competitors are, and will abandon trade shows only when everyone else does.
tgara@thenational.ae
