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Tuesday, March 11, 2003
14:49 - So... very... tired...
http://www.thinksecret.com/news/mwny03.html

(top) link
No matter which way you read this article on the impending retooling of Macworld New York, the subtext is unmistakable: it's just not doing as well as the San Francisco event, and it's time to see if a fresh coat of paint can salvage it-- because the alternative is to scuttle it altogether.

At the heart of the decision, and of the dissolution of the tight binding Apple itself had with the event, seems to be the fact that Steve Jobs is well and truly tired of pulling biannual miracles out of his ass.

The decision to break with tradition and not have a Jobs keynote reportedly was made by Jobs himself. When exhibitors asked why he wouldn't be doing a keynote, many were told it was because Jobs felt it was getting tougher every year to produce the same amount of innovative products and excitement for a keynote. "Apple feels they have to pull a rabbit out of a hat at every keynote and it was getting tough for Jobs to live up to the hype," said one exhibitor.

I guess it was bound to happen; the kind of energy Jobs has kept up since his return to Apple in 1998 hasn't been the kind of thing the company can sustain forever. It's been reinventing itself at a breakneck pace, hitting all kinds of homeruns with new products and astonishingly few failures by comparison to their performance throughout the 90's. But they've been living on borrowed time. Now comes the sugar crash. Once they make it to the plateau of the 970 and a stable OS X with Quark Xpress native at last, I imagine the company will heave a deep sigh of exhaustion and zonk out for a long nap.

I don't expect they'll stop coming up with cool stuff; I just think Jobs doesn't have it in him to keep the company inventing on a timetable like they have been. It's time to let Apple get back to a more sane schedule, bringing out products when they're ready, rather than timing everything according to the keynotes and trying to live up to ever-increasing pre-keynote rumors and hype. Many of their most successful products over the past year or two-- the iBook, the iPod, the new displays-- have been released at surprise press meetings; and keynote introductions like the iMac, Safari, the TiBooks, and so on have frequently been slow to market (the 17" RealUltimatePowerBook still isn't shipping in quantity-- and word is that Apple knew all along that this would be the case). Apple's playing a losing game, trying to outsmart the user base when the user base is paying such close attention to the company that Jobs can't fart without the rumor sites picking up the news.

So it's back to a less glamorous but (hopefully) more sustainable product development model. There'll still be MWSF, but now we'll have half the opportunities to have our greatest dreams fulfilled as scheduled on the event program-- or, if you prefer, half the opportunities to be irrationally disappointed.


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© Brian Tiemann