Prelim (Video) Thoughts on Macworld Expo

Both my wife and I are attending Macworld Expo this year. I have purchased a platinum pass and my wife has a User pass. While the platinum sessions look to be very good, and they have to be for my company to drop that much cash when airfare and hotel are considered, the User track SUCKS!

We last attended in 2007 and that year the User conference was fantastic. My wife was excited about it and was leaving me to run of to attend sessions, it is usually reverse. It was nice to see her excited about the sessions. Now my wife is a long time Mac user, having purchased her first Mac in 1986, but is not an uber-geek like me. She uses iWorks, Mail, Safari and buys casual games and dozens of versions of Shanghai! She is happy with her Mac and wants to learn a few more things like iPhoto, how to take better pictures with her point and shoot camera, a $250 10 MP Canon.

There are no sessions to meet her needs. She is not interested in creating Virtual reality photos, shooting in raw or embracing Aperature... she has embraced iPhoto and likes it. She is not interested in greening her IT department or learning about e-maill client shutdown. She knows how to shutdown her email client: Command Q has worked for her for 24 years! What more does she need to know?

Perhaps my favourite session that she could attend is "New Secrets Revealed for Adobe Flash"! She doesn't know what it is and frankly doesn't give a rat's ass about it. All she knows is her movies play when she clicks them. She doesn't care about putting Quicktime X to work, since it does... click on the window and sound and video play! She didn't even know I updated her desktop and laptop to Snow Leopard... they looked the same and worked the same to her so she does not care about things like Services and Text magic. Her favourite session was "Magic Mouse A to Z"... she has a mouse and it works. An hour on the mouse?

In my humble opinion IDG has dropped the ball this year. Did they think about what the users might want to learn about and go out and look for speakers to talk or did they just look at the sessions submitted and cobble together a user conference? Based on my observations, the latter occurred.

We are also very disappointed with the keynote speakers! She asked me "Why is the guy from Kawasaki motorcycles talking at Mac Expo?" I had to explain to her that he was a Mac Guru a very long time ago. She also wanted to know who David Pogue and Leo Laporte are and why would she go to see them. She wondered why didn't they get the Mac and PC guys from the Apple commercials to come out and speak. While I know who most of the keynote speakers are, I have been an uber-Apple and Mac user since 1980, I see Pogue and Laporte every week... I subscribe to their Podcasts!

For $1000 registration fee for myself and $200 for my wife, I expected a little more on this end of the show. Oh yes, there is the party on Friday night and it better rock our socks off or there better be a free bar so that I can get really drunk and drown my anticipated disappointment!

In conclusion, if the quality presented at the expo is not at least 10X better than what I have read about, I do not think I would spend my money to go again next year. And I am flying from Calgary, Canada to go, so this is not cheap at all, over $1000 for airfare alone!

Enough ranting.. I need to go pack for my flight tomorrow and finish off my paper.

Maurice

PS... I just tried to e-mail this to IDG, but when I clicked on the "Contact Us" button, I got "Error: Page not found"! Can someone send me Paul Kent's e-mail address! Now I am really pissed!