Macworld

I went to Macworld yesterday. It was moderately interesting. I haven't been in years - I used to go a lot in the early/mid 90s and actually worked booths. That was when you could find developers, testers, etc. actually working the booths instead of sales and marketing people. It was more of an industry insiders thing - lots of networking. Every booth gave out free stuff - pens, t-shirts, tribbles (at the Berkeley Systems booth because of the new Star Trek screen saver - I have one somewhere).

This year? Nikon provided free bags to put in... product literature, which is all anybody had. Who wants product literature? If I want to know more I'll make a note to look you up on the Internet. Heck, there were people standing in front of booths looking up products on their iPhones instead of just talking to the people in the booth. I grabbed a bag out of habit and literally never used it. You can see a picture on my twitter - I snapped a few pictures on the way just to try out the whole live thing. But as a result everybody was carrying these identical yellow Nikon bags - I'm sure the Canon guys were like "Duh, what the hell?" - pretty much like normal. (I shoot Canon but their marketing deparment's pretty clueless compared to Nikon, let's face it.)

Actually, that's not quite true -a few companies had something to wear where you could theoretically get a prize. The only cool ones were bunny ears from some company... but I have no idea which company, so perhaps not as effective as they could have been. Hopefully there was lots of word of mouth but I never bothered to ask.

I ran into a former magazine editor/tech writer who was pretty much ethics-free back in the day and Googled him after and found that he'd kind of worked his way down the food chain until he was fired from his last job and now in theory is a freelancer but I couldn't find anything he'd written in years. I guess that stuff does bite you in the butt eventually. Kind of nice to know but I'm sure a whole new batch of weasels have taken his place.

Product-wise lots of people selling backup/storage/drive recovery services, even more than normal, and targeting them for ever tighter audiences. (Do you really need a storage system that's hyper optimized for one kind of data? Like it really matters what's IN the file?) Lots of products that will automatically correct photographs of flaws that could easily have been avoided before the shot was taken. Lots of people selling iPod accessories. Lots people selling cameras, or camera mounts, or lighting gear (take your product photography in house and avoid paying a photographer! Whoo hoo!). An Acura booth??? Why? A lot of it wasn't really Mac related, it was just stuff that they thought Mac people would like to buy.

But it was free (for me anyway), and I do enjoy people watching, and what the heck.