Will Apple CEO Headline CES '10?
Those snubbed by Apple CEO Steve Jobs take heart. He won't return calls from Gary Shapiro, who heads the world's largest consumer electronics industry trade group. — Bloomberg News — Steve Jobs, CEO and co-founder of Apple, at an October 2008 press conference.
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple spent December 2008 dismantling its trade-show presence: the company blindsided IDG with an announcement that ended its MacWorld keynote run, leaving even the event's manager unable to say whether Jobs would appear for a final MacWorld Expo appearance. By June 2009, the succession question itself had become the story, with Business Week framing Apple's CEO conundrum around Jobs's health and return.
Now Bloomberg reports that CEA chief Gary Shapiro cannot even get Jobs to return calls about headlining CES 2010 — confirmation, if any was needed, that Apple's no-trade-shows posture extends beyond the shows it abandoned to the ones it never attended. The rumor mill treats a Jobs CES keynote as conceivable; the reporting says Apple is not engaging at all.
First-order effects
- CES organizer CEA enters its 2010 keynote planning cycle without its most valuable possible draw: Shapiro has no channel to Jobs, so the show's biggest speculative booking is dead on arrival.
- Apple loses nothing operationally — the company controls its own product-announcement calendar and needs no trade-show stage, as the MacWorld exit already demonstrated.
Second-order effects
- Other consumer-electronics vendors become the de facto headliners of CES 2010, and the show's programming must sell itself on Nokia, Sony, and Microsoft rather than an Apple appearance that exhibitors' booth budgets were quietly hoping for.
- Trade-show operators like IDG and CEA are forced to compete against Apple-owned events on Apple's terms — the MacWorld collapse showed that when the company pulls its gravity, attendance and press follow.
Third-order effects
- If the largest CE company treats industry gatherings as optional while commanding the press on its own schedule, trade shows drift from mandatory calendar anchors toward commodity exhibition space — a structural repricing of what a keynote slot is worth.
- The episode reinforces the pattern critics flagged during the App Store controversies of July 2009 (the Google Voice and Latitude rejections, the jailbreaking warnings): Apple's leverage over partners and gatekeepers rests on scarcity of access, and Jobs's unreachability is itself part of that strategy.
The trend: Consumer electronics is splitting into two worlds — companies that need trade shows for distribution of attention, and one company whose product launches make the shows optional.