[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhnRfthbarE]
IDG’s senior VP Jason Snell tried to provoke comment with the view that “Apple must release a smart watch in 60 days or it’s all over,” but if the rest of the clips are any guide, there wasn’t too much controversy in the rest of the discussion …
The show opened yesterday in San Francisco, and ends tomorrow.
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I was at this yesterday, it was a great event.
Sorry but I was at MacWorld yesterday and Jason Snell should be worried about two things. First that this MacWorld has become a waste of time and money to attend. I came from Washington D.C. and it took me three hours to see junk at MacWorld. I didn’t fly 2,500 miles to see the newest and greatest iPhone/Ipad cases. No one product hit me as being great and the attendance of companies is at a all time low. After like 20 or 25 MacWorld’s I fear this may be the last. One other thing, people at the show say they miss the old January date.
The second thing that Snell has to worry about is his magazine. Anybody see it lately, talk about small, the issue is under 100 pages and lacking information. The issue of iPhone Life is bigger and has better articles, the reason why they care what the reader wants. I can troll the internet and get more Mac news better written and more timely than I am finding at MacWorld magazine.
In talking with Snell yesterday he strikes me as this arrogant kid that thinks his stuff is the greatest and that we should all genuflect at his feet. Snell needs to get off his high horse and understand that he needs to write things that people like me want to read, not what the staff of MacWorld thinks we want to read. Jason, pay more attention to what your readers want, not what you think is best.
So let me be sure I have this right: Jason Snell is arrogant because he writes what he thinks the readers want to read, but you think he should drop everything and listen to ONE PERSON’s opinion of what readers want, because that’s not arrogant at all.
(not defending Snell, just suggesting you might want to look up the expression “pot calling the kettle black”)
Just saying that times are changing, that MacWorld in both the conference and the magazine has been slow to change.
If you were at MacWorld you would feel the same way, it’s completely lost what it use to be and after hearing some of these talks can see that Snell is not listening or can no longer listen to what people want or need. Yes it lost a lot of it’s luster when Apple back out three/four years ago. But I attended last year and the year before and despite being 15% the size of the old one had a lot of good parts to it.
Sorry but I came all the way from Washington D.C. and it was a waste of money. I am on by way to sightsee instead of going back to MacWorld conference. It would be interesting to see if others that attended the conference agree with my sentiments. Trust me when I say it’s not the “pot calling the kettle black”
golfersal, I don’t disagree with you (Ive been criticizing IDG for years for the failures of Macworld Expo) but you may not realize that Jason Snell and Macworld Expo are *not* the same thing. Snell is in charge of running the magazine. He has nothing to do with running the show. Both organizations are owned by the same parent company.
Shawn King,
It is the same company, but I attended two talks that Snell and some other editors had and they were so boring. They didn’t even ask the audience for our thoughts which is wrong in something like that.
But what really ticked me off, after one of the talks I went up to Snell and Dan Moren and asked if first, when they thought that apple would put out a replacement monitor and second if they could suggest a replacement for Spell Catcher, a great program in which the developer has died and hasn’t been updated.
They gave me arrogant, 15 second answers that showed how they really didn’t care about my question.
On the Apple question I got a Apple isn’t very interested go by a 4K monitor. On Spell Catcher I got another 15 second use the spell checker that Apple provides.
Gosh I thought that I would get a little better response. First on the Spell Catcher this is becoming a problem as everyone gets older. A great program run by a mom and pop company, owner dies off and nobody around to update the program. What a great story for the pages of MacWorld, a bit change of pace. We have dozens, probably hundred of favorite programs that are disappearing. But MacWorld magazine and Snell want to write the same crap everyone else writes, what is the next iPhone going to look at.
Have some creatively in the magazine and write some different, human articles about how hard it is to get a product to market, stories of developing Apple stuff. That is the only story of this year’s MacWorld, a much of new and struggling developer but Snell and Macworld never does these different, fun angles.
I understand that Snell doesn’t have much say in the MacWorld conference, but he could be better to people in the audience and think of different angles. He has been there too long, must of the other editors are too comfortable in their jobs. MacWorld magazine needs new blood and thinking, that’s all
I agree about the “didn’t even ask the audience for our thoughts.” *EVERY* setting like that should provide time for the people listening.
As to “they were so boring”, well, that’s subjective but one of the problem is many of the people you see on a Macworld Expo stage *aren’t* “professional speakers” (whether they do a podcast or not is irrelevant) and so many of them have no clue how to engage an audience and *be* engaging themselves.
And I don’t disagree about the focus of the magazine or the need for new blood and thinking. But as long as they keep laying people off and making the ones who are left behind do more with less, that’s less and less likely to happen.