Will Apple's Absence Hurt Print Developers?
December 19, 2008
Steve Jobs will not show up at MacWorld next months. Bad news for MacWorld's parent company IDG, but probably no serious loss for developers. Although a few print industry software developers still show up at MacWorld, they are largely those who either have a consumer focus, or (like Adobe, are big enough to play in both the professional and consumer marketplaces.

No doubt Jobs' absence will hurt turnout, as will Apple's decision to pull out completely next year. And for the little guys who are not print-focused that could be very bad news. But it has been a long time since consumer desktop publishing had a major voice at MacWorld. Today it's mostly music and video and, more recently, iPhone developers. Does anyone go to MacWorld to check out the latest in tools for print production? I'd be skeptical.

One of the realities of the print industry is that it has truly become platform agnostic. A lot of folks still prefer to do design and prep work on Macs, but the increased ability of Macs and PC's to "play nice" together has made such a preference just that: a preference.

Apple's switch to a Unix based OS a few years back has added to the interoperability of programs accross platforms. And even though Microsoft's notorious problems with Vista has allowed Apple to maintain a lot of their share in the print marketplace, most printers have simply opted not to upgrade to Vista, finding their servers work perfectly fine without the bells and whistles and system crashes of Vista.

We'd love to hear from the developers of printing tools for all platforms and get their take on the MacWorld announcement. My guess is it will be a stifled yawn.

The one concern that could have an impact: this announcement feeds into the media frenzy about Jobs' health. But that would only explain the disappearing act this year and not the pull out from Macworld in the future.