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That's something a good friend of mine told me, in regards to Apple pulling out of Macworld Conference & Expo: "Don't trust the artist, trust the art".
I think that's an important, possibly critical point in regards to this situation: is Macworld about the Art, or the Artist? Is it about Apple Inc., BigCorp extrodinaire, and Steve Jobs, or is it about the Mac, Mac OS X, the iPod, and the iPhone? Is it about Apple Keynotes, and the Apple Booth, or is it about Apple's art and the ecosystem that surrounds it?
If it's only about the artist, Macworld Conference & Expo is dead after this year, move on.
If it's about the art, then no, it's not. It's not dead at all, not by a long shot.
For me, it's always been about the Art. Apple is a vendor in my world, a major one, but I don't need them to approve of how I use their art. I just need them to supply it in a reasonable convenient fashion. Don't get me wrong, I don't ignore Apple. I talk with them, both "officially" and via various backchannels, to help get the things I need done. I'm not alone here, many Apple customers, especially business customers do this. I have a lot of people I consider friends working at Apple, and while I don't get everything I need, I get a good bit of it, so that's all good.
But I don't use Apple, I use a Mac. I'm not running Apple, I'm running the Mac OS. I don't make calls on an Apple, I make calls on an iPhone. Even if my only contact with Apple was sending P.O.'s and getting stuff, I'd still have my Mac, the Mac OS, and the iPhone.
In other words, I don't need Apple to be anything but a creator of Art.
Which is why at Macworld, Apple is just another booth. The biggest one, the one you have to trudge around, or through to get to the real meat of expo. The other people in the Mac ecosystem, the ones who really help you get shit done. It is in the conversations with "the little guys", or more correctly, "the people who are not Apple", where the "magic" happens. Best example I can tell in public. Maxum Development is a little one, occaisionally more, man company, who makes Rumpus, which is one hell of an FTP server. Even in this day of "but the OS comes with an FTP server, why pay for one", there are things Rumpus gives you that the Mac OS version doesn't. It's a kick-ass product.
It was also, for a long time, the best FTP server on the Mac in the Mac OS 9 and earlier days, and I ran it for years on a PowerMac 8600/300, along with WebStar. (Yeah, I'm a Mac Geezer, sue me.) However, it had a limitation, in that you could only have 31-character filenames, which was all the Finder supported, even though HFS+ supported longer names. For most, this wasn't a problem. For me, running IT in a heavy Solaris shop, this was a pain in my ass. So one day at a show, in the back where the small vendors are, I see Maxum, and John O'Fallon, who is the "one man" in "one man shop", and we get to talking about this. He quickly disabused me of my notion that he could use the features of HFS+ to use longer file names, it just wasn't doable without huge effort, at least at the time. But we kept talking, until, between us, we figured out this total hack that would let Rumpus use 240-character path and filenames on Mac OS 8.6, (the current version at the time.) It wasn't perfect but it solved the problem really well, and honestly, for a total hack, it was really stable, and again, it removed a big pain from my ass. Double Word Score!
How long did this take? Oh, like 20 minutes. Could this have happened over email? Sure, i suppose. But it would have taken days, maybe longer, and there would have been the delta of me getting to talk to John over and above the "normal" tech support channels. But in person, on the show floor, we doped this out in 20 minutes.
Don't trust the artist, trust the art
That's not the only example, but it's the best one I can talk about. You cannot, can not duplicate this over da intarweb. Not that level of contact, and synchronization, and the ability of two people to, in person, start thinking together at high speed. You can't even to that over IM, because IM doesn't convey the...excitement you get as you see the other person getting closer to the solution, which drives you to move closer too, and so on. It's a human feedback loop, and you can't replicate that worth a damn when you're a thousand miles away.
It also had fuck-all-NOTHING to do with Apple. Apple could have insisted it was totally impossible until it was blue in the face, and it wouldn't have mattered, because John and I decided that no, it most certainly was not impossible, just not done yet. So with a 20 minute convo, we figured out how to do it, he implemented it, and Rumpus had a feature that *nothing* on the platform at the time could come close to.
Over and over again, at Macworld, in small booths, and sessions, and lobbies, and bars, this kind of thing has happened. People, in the same room, in the same booth, figure out ways to get shit done. You discover products that you only even think about because you happen to walk by the booth, and you find something that is tons better than everything else.
Google is great, but if your search query doesn't fit the right criteria, you miss stuff. Google's for finding, not browsing.
It's not just for me, but I find products for users who do stuff I don't. Odd little Photoshop plugins, neat new bits of hardware, that I only know about because I happen to be walking by the booth.
Don't trust the artist, trust the art
Apple has NOTHING to do with ANY of it, because none of those booths are Apple.
It's also the relationships. At the 2008 WWDC, while walking around with my boss, who is pretty damned well-connected himself, he told me how impressed he was with the fact that I couldn't walk ten feet without saying hi to someone or them saying hi to me. While some of those folks I'd "met" at least initially, via mailing lists, the truth was, almost every one of those people saying hi, were saying hi because we'd actually met, and 90% of them, I'd met at Macworld. In sessions, on the show floor, at after parties. I'd established personal and professional relationships with them at Macworld, that I renewed twice, and later once a year. In fact, a majority of the people I consider my closest friends are people I only see at Macworld.
The only thing Apple has to do with that are the people who happen to be Apple employees. For some of them to not be able to show up at Macworld anymore would be a shame, because all of them are really good people, and some of them will never make it to a WWDC.
Now, to be fair, sometimes Apple does have a supporting role in things...
For example, Hilary Percy. Hilary used to be Shawn King's cohost on The Mac Show: Live. Hilary is a gorgeous, smart woman who is a ton of fun to hang out with too. Other than random comments in the Mac Show's IRC room, we only ever "met" at Macworlds. She liked to throw bits of roll at the goobers wearing 10,000 buttons. Good aim she has.
However, the Mac Show became Your Mac Life, and Hilary eventually moved to Paris. We would occasionally talk over iChat or email, but it was infrequent and random. So a few years ago, (the year before Shawn King got married at Macworld to be precise), I'm walking by the Apple booth, and I hear...Hilary. For those of you who have never talked to her, Hilary has this smoky, deep voice. It's instantly recognizable, and I almost snapped my neck looking for the source, because I knew it was Hilary, and it was. There she was, on the Apple stage, doing a presentation.
That bit of reunion made for a truly spectacular Macworld. Everything that year just happened perfectly, and Hilary was the icing on the cake. So in a sense, Apple had something to do with it, but it wasn't in a way that only Apple could have done. Anyone could have paid her to fly over and do a presentation. It just happened to be Apple.
Don't trust the artist, trust the art
The Macworld sessions. Sessions where I first heard about MacFUSE. Sessions where I learned a ton about the stuff I need to do my job. Apple didn't do those. People in my line of work did them. Some of them worked for Apple, but the best ones have always been given by people who use Macs, not make Macs.
Don't trust the artist, trust the art
Giving sessions...the contacts I've made from people who liked a session I did, or in some cases, didn't. Having a little old German man torture me during a session on wireless, forcing me to reach back twenty years to my Air Force training on RF, because he was asking questions about antenna propagation, then come up to me afterwards and tell me he was a retired professor of electrical engineering, and that I had done very well, and was a very smart young man. That's not happening on the Internet, and it wasn't run by Apple. They just made the base station.
Finding out that the workbooks we'd done for our TNA Power Tools session were now required reading for an IT Department run by a guy who is so much smarter than I am.
Apple didn't do that, we did that with the stuff inside Mac OS X.
Don't trust the artist, trust the art
Watching two good friends, Shawn and Lesa King get married at Macworld, right before the YML party, and pulling a toast out of my ass just before the wedding started that ended up making everyone cry, and is probably the best bit of speaking I'll ever do. It was the Mac and Macworld that brought them together, not Apple.
Don't trust the artist, trust the art
My final memory that has nothing to do with Apple is something that is a once in lifetime thing. I've known Paul Kent now, since 1999, so in January, it will be ten years. Last year, before Macworld, I wanted to come up with a way for all the people he's put on a stage in Macworld sessions, and been a mother hen to in so many ways, say "thank you" to him, but not with card, or something that would eventually get put in a box. It had to be something that would mean something to him on every level, not just the names. So I made a list of people I knew well enough, and who had all been speaking at or going to Macworld longer than I, and we all chipped in, and bought him a guitar. A Les Paul, to be precise. We then talked to the folks at the Mac BU, who were sponsoring the Macworld Blast party that year, (Devo was playing). Not only did they agree to let us present the guitar to Paul on stage, but they bought a nice coffin case for it. It was a seriously cool moment.
Now, think about that. What are the chances that Apple would have even begun to allow that during one of their presentations?
None. Zero. Zip. Zilch.
Had Apple been running things, we would have done it in a hotel room or a bar. It would have been a great moment, but doing it on stage like that made it even better.
Don't trust the artist, trust the art
So when everyone starts crying and wailing about Apple, remember, and remind them that Macworld Conference & Expo is not about Apple, and it never was about Apple.
It is, and has been, about the Mac.
We only need Apple to make the Mac.
We don't need Apple to make Macworld. That's our world. They just visit it occasionally.
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Posted by John C. Welch at 00:38 | Permalink
©2003-until I'm fucking dead and then some. you steal my shit, and I will fuck with you like you were a lonely shepherd's slowest sheep.
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