Mail checks get easier

Apple’s Steve Jobs waltzed around onstage for more than 90 minutes this morning, much of it showing off the soon-to-be-shipping iPhone 4 at the Apple WorldWide Developers’ Conference. While the new phone is 24 percent thinner than the current iPhones, the most impressive business feature comes from the new iPhone OS. Apple has renamed this operating environment iOS, because it runs the iPods, iPads, and the phone.

iOS 4 makes a distinct difference to Apple’s Mail program on the iPhone and the iPad and Touch iPod. Instead of breaking down your mail checking into multiple tries, Mail now consolidates your different accounts into a single “All Inboxes” menu item.

The current state of affairs is frustrating if you use more than one mail account, which is the case for so many small businesspeople. Your personal email goes to a separate account — or at least a separate email address. The new iOS 4 understands that you’ve got multiple personalities for mail.

The iOS 4 will be available to the iPhone and iPod Touch users later this month. The new environment brings things like a $4.99 iMovie, a choice of search engines including Microsoft’s Bing (take that, Google) and a PDF viewer that’s going to make long documents easier to read on Apple’s mobile devices. The Reader will be worked right into the iBooks application.

Oh yeah, and there’s that multitasking thing in the new iOS4, too. Palm hammered Apple on it all of last year until the Palmsters had to sell themselves off to HP. It was not a big enough deal to save the Pre, but Apple’s got the feature now. It’s probably best used with the newest Apple mobile devices, though — for reasons below.

Using iOS 4, there are now folders to organize that mess of apps so many of us have on our Apple mobile devices. But perhaps the best news of all for business phone users involves battery life. The new Apple chip just made things last a lot longer.

The Apple A4 processor made its debut on the iPad this spring, and for us it’s made battery management while surfing the Web a non-issue. Of course Apple’s made the A4 a crucial part of the new iPhone 4. Jobs claims 7 hours of talk time (3G), 6 hours of Web surfing (3G.) And 300 hours of standby.

The multitasking becomes possible because of A4 — which is not inside your 3GS phone, or the 3G, or the Touch. The new iPad’s got the A4, though, and multitasking is headed there, too.

Apple is hitting the Android/Google competition in the most vulnerable spot. Android phones roll kill off their batteries in under a day’s Web use. The ability to take a phone on sales and client calls, use it without regard for performance, and return to base at day’s end without a recharge required in an automobile charger — well, it’s going to take a specialized chip in Android phones to match that. Even with the latest Froyo version of Android’s OS.

FaceTime between Steve and Jony

There’s a front-facing video camera for conferencing over 3G on the new phone, FaceTime video calling. The app only works over WiFi connects for now, something of a black eye for ATT and its 3G network. It works with both front-facing and forward-facing cameras; you can see an Apple demo of it around the 45-second mark of this video on YouTube.

FaceTime was the “one more thing” that has become a trademark of a Jobs keynote. It’s the most forward-leaping feature of the new iOS 4, but it was demonstrated calling top Apple designer Jonathan Ives, as well as a video between family members. Not strictly a business feature, but expect it to be used for more business two-person meetings and face-time. Thus the name, of course. FaceTime requires the new iPhone 4.

The iOS 4 becomes available June 21, and it’s a free upgrade to users of the iPhone all but the oldest iPod Touch devices. (No word on the iPad availability, but expect it to be simultaneous.) The iPhone 4 goes on sale June 24, and ATT will let anyone with a contract that expires during 2010 upgrade their phone.

And that 3GS, still the leading iPhone lineup until the 24th? Starting that day, the device introduced just last year sells for $99 — and you don’t have to buy it at WalMart to get that price.

A slide-by-slide summary of the Jobs keynote at the conference is online at Engadget’s website. CNET has a darn good summary with pictures, too.

What works in Apple’s favor it that the iPhone has plenty of competition, but no direct knock-offs. It’s the Apple product most likely to introduce the company’s computer solutions to a first-time customer. The second most likely product? The Mac itself. Apple said about 300,000 Macs sold at the Apple retail stores during Q2 went to customers who had never owned a Mac before.

Apple cites a “stronger product mix” including more iPhone sales while explaining how it beat analyst estimates by more than 2 percent for margins. Then there’s the $47 billion in cash the company reported for the period ending March 31: A lot of clams to toss at whatever research and development opportunities emerge.

Apple pointed at its “first mover” opportunity with the iPad as one place where it intends to exploit its advantages with fresh investment. Apple expects to release iPad units in 9 overseas countries by the end of May and ship the 3G versions by the first week of May.

One analyst said the iPad has a chance to become “the Mac of the masses.” In the 1980s Apple called the Mac “the computer for the rest of us.” Many analyst questions during the Q2 conference Q&A covered the iPad. As of this week, one tracking site estimates more than 1 million iPads in use: An introductory rate that outstrips the adoption of the iPhone in its first quarter of sales. Perhaps what the iPhone has done for Apple is a sign of what the iPad might add in several years.

Meanwhile, the stock is starting to approach the estimates that analysts clocked in once the drumbeat of iPad took off. As of this afternoon, the Associated Press reports that shares are at $261 each, about an 8 percent after-hours rise after trading was suspended during today’s Q2 news conference. One investment house thought earlier this month that shares could hit $300 during 2010.

Once upon a time, the analysts and industry experts were predicting nothing as different as Apple’s products could succeed. The company is now at a $50 billion run rate, something that goes along well with a No. 1 rating in most innovative companies (BusinessWeek) and the No. 38 spot in the latest Fortune 500.

Investment in Apple solutions can get looked at askance in some companies. Doing this well in the latest quarter, when Apple sold 3 million Macs in addition to its mobile products, ought to qwell any kvetching you may hear from corporate IT.

We’ll have more tomorrow on today’s Q&A between stock analysts and Cook.

The latest rattling of cyber sabers comes from Apple and Adobe, with Apple’s insistence that Adobe Flash be banished from Jobs’ walled garden of iEverything.  Certain slurs have been sounded, including an odd instance by Jobs proclaiming that Adobe Flash was bug ridden. (Jobs is obviously not a Windows user, for he does not know the true meaning of “buggy.”)

Such bogus blusters are convenient covers for real issues. Flash currently commands a huge share of the Rich Internet Application market by virtual of antediluvian virtualization.  Long ago, Flash did what people wanted, which was to add value to surfing the Web while eliminating cross platform/browser/religious sectarianism.  Want to watch videos of cute kittens or suicidal teenagers on motorcycles, or listen to the latest excuse for music coming out of Nashville on the Web, regardless of  whether you are on a PC, Mac, Linux, minis, odd ducks, occasional mainframes, virtual desktops or smart phone?  Adobe Flash made it happen by bundling [the player] for free into everything. Except iPhones and iPads.

[To be accurate, Flash is only bundled long enough to force you to update it via download, to combat the latest malware and virus attacks. Much of the bundled Flash is already out of date by the time a new Windows or Mac system boots up. But Guy continues on eliminating Flash from Apple's most mobile devices.]

Therein lay Apple’s finest error (aside from the Newton).  As any performer will attest, you give the audience what they want. Putting Snoop Dogg on stage at a cotillion is an error.  So is creating an information/media device that does not deliver information/media.  Since so much of the world’s content is and will for the foreseeable future remain in Flash, and since Adobe is not sitting still in extending Flash for ever better uses, banning it from hardware is inane.  It goes directly against what the audience (market) wants and thus gives them the motivation to consider alternate venues.

First, the Apple devices deliver information and media. Plenty, just not that written to run on Flash Player. To the resulting consideration of alternate venues, I say, “So what? Assume that happens — then what?” So then I’m buying an HP Slate to run Flash? “So much of the world’s content is and will for the foreseeable future remain in Flash,” that’s a real longshot. The key to track the Flash future is the phrase from above, “Long ago, Flash did what people wanted.” Long ago, people watched cable TV for the latest news, too. And Seinfeld. And modems that winked up when you got connected to the Internet.

I disagree with Guy about the iPad’s need for Flash, in part because between the two of us only I own an iPad, and so and have the same 10 days of experience as every other owner. (Perhaps not exactly the same experience; I didn’t buy the $49.95 OmniGraffle app for it [think Windows' Visio planning]. On the other hand, I wrote most of my reply to Guy off an Apple Keyboard Dock, and plenty of people are still waiting for that marvel.) I haven’t missed Flash more than a handful of times out of hundreds of media and content deliveries.

I told Guy he simply needed to see the iPad in action to observe how a Flash-less experience means less than you’d think to business content today — and perhaps little to nothing once content providers adapt to millions of iPads joining the 85 million iPhones and iPod Touches out there. The only difference is that Apple has decided to make a stand against Flash now, after selling 85 million devices that don’t use it.

I have never been a fan of Flash, although I’ve employed it. Many times I’ve met Web designers, clever software developers, or business owners, all of whom were in love with the ox cart that is Flash. You can browse to Nike, big companies, TV networks. Every time I ran one of these apps within a Web site I remembered the advice from a Web site pioneer from the mid-90s, Bob Green of Robelle. As one of the first software companies to offer a Web gateway to his company, Green gave me advice about the design of the 3000 NewsWire, our first Web site and blog: keep it simple; think about the reader who doesn’t have a fast pipe or a fast machine; or does not run a well-ordered system, immune to breakdown.

In other words, try to need as little flash (little F) as possible to spread your content. We’ve toyed with Big F Flash while trying to embed video into the NewsWire’s TypePad blog posts, and it works to the same degree as designing for Explorer: unexpected, corner-case results abound. Web designers I know and have employed get all Yosemite Sam in the face when I ask why our site’s Explorer’s pages look so different, and what could I do about that.

The App Store as Apple’s walled garden is a good metaphor I have seen in many places. Writing in the New York Times tech section over the weekend, Steven Johnson makes a case that given the right conditions, an Apple-controlled store goes from garden to rich rainforest.

The App Store must rank among the most carefully policed software platforms in history. Most of the development tools are created inside Apple, in conditions of C.I.A.-level secrecy. Next to the iPhone platform, Microsoft’s Windows platform looks like a Berkeley commune from the late 60s.

And yet, by just about any measure, the iPhone software platform has been, out of the gate, the most innovative in the history of computing. More than 150,000 applications have been created for it in less than two years, transforming the iPhone into an e-book reader, a flight control deck, a musical instrument, a physician’s companion, a dictation device and countless other things that were impossible just 24 months ago. Perhaps more impressively, the iPhone has been a boon for small developers. As of now, more than half the top-grossing iPad apps were created by small shops.

Those of us who have championed open platforms cannot ignore these facts. It’s conceivable that, had Apple loosened the restrictions surrounding the App Store, the iPhone ecosystem would have been even more innovative, even more democratic. But I suspect that this view is too simplistic. The more complicated reality is that the closed architecture of the iPhone platform has contributed to its generativity in important ways.

The decision to route all purchases through a single payment mechanism makes great sense for Apple, which takes 30 percent of all sales, but it has also helped nurture the ecosystem by making it easier for consumers to buy small apps impulsively with one-click ordering. People don’t want to thumb-type credit card information into their phones each time they download a game to distract the kids during a long drive in the car. One-click purchase also supports lightweight, inexpensive apps, the revenue from which can support small software teams.

The fact that the iPhone platform runs exclusively on Apple hardware helps developers innovate, because it means they have a finite number of hardware configurations to surmount. Developers building apps for, say, Windows Mobile have to create programs that work on hundreds of different devices, each with its own set of hardware features. But a developer who wants to build a game that uses an accelerometer for control, for example, knows that every iPhone OS device in the world contains an accelerometer.

Apple took a lot of heat waiting a year after the introduction of the first-generation iPhone to open the App Store. At the time, it contended that it wanted to ensure that the development tools it shipped met its standards. The success of the App Store suggests that this patience was well worth it.

I’ve lived in this Apple garden, but I’m not locked in. If Mac users want to run Flash applications, we just pick up our MacBooks. But there’s a torrent of testing and reporting out there that says Flash is a pig, backed up by a feeling on my thighs. I hold that MacBook on my lap and play Farmville — which you may know is the most widely-used Flash app in existence. 34 million people a day, and it’s all Flash. And before I can get my sunflowers all planted and my goats milked, my thighs are hot, because Flash has pegged the CPUs off the scale on the late-model MacBook.

What’s easy to forget is what wooly, overwritten lashed up life rafts the Adobe products have become, on balance. I have used them since 1987, starting with Illustrator. Rife with potential, essential to creation, and so very full of just-missed opportunities. On acquaintance  of mine is is now a VP of Quality Assurance over at Adobe, and I can’t help but wonder how he doesn’t go to bed planning to get up and suck on a gas pipe to avoid the stall-mucking he must oversee each day.

It goes too far to say that Flash is essential to good content on mobile devices. It’s just plain wrong to say, as Guy does, that Apple won’t entertain any content delivery it can’t tap for a few bucks. Netflix and Zinio are just two that come to mind. The former delivered 7 hours of Dexter episodes to my lap less than 24 hours after the iPad arrived. (And on a single charge, too, because Flash wasn’t involved.) Apple got nothing out of that 7 hours but the cost of the iPad. Zinio delivers 2,000 consumer magazine titles to computers, mobile and otherwise. Big publishers, too, like the ones that print Popular Science and Esquire and Oprah. My Popular Science magazine on the iPad via Zinio is fun and interactive and costs less than the paper issues that I have to throw away. And Apple gets nothing out of that reading, either, except the iPhone or iPad sale.

If Apple wants to kill Flash, the only thing it can do is to keep it off their most mobile devices. Adobe is going to continue to write it and sell it for every platform that it can, because Adobe follows the Intel and Microsoft mantra of “include everything for everybody.” Making choices about what to include reflects more mature insight than “support it all.” It’s almost old-guy thinking, really. People who code for a living, administer systems, review software, design their own Web sites — yeah, they’re appalled at the absence of Flash on the iPad, the draconian Apple rules now in place for writing Apps. Consumers don’t care, or if they do, they can buy an HP Slate. Meanwhile analysts are now dreaming of Apple shares hitting $300 (after 12 months of having increased their value 50 percent during one of the hardest years business has seen.)

I wrote most of a 2,000-word reply on a mobile computer I bought sight unseen. A first for me, in 30 years of buying them for business and pleasure. I have experienced the Apple QA first hand for a few decades while working, and I believed my experiences of Apple’s product build post-2001 would be extended. I don’t miss Flash, and I don’t see how keeping this pig out of a sleek taxi is going to do anything but prop up sales of MacBooks and make Adobe’s tech managers swear out loud on public blogs that embarrass the company. But there’s always the “we can sell you one cheaper” argument to hear from what’s sold outside of a rich garden.

Now Jobs and Company are worshiping at the same altar, and the heretics at Google and the old priests at Microsoft are ready to exorcize a snake from the garden.  Microsoft has a tablet in ready mode, and by stealing (again) some Apple innovations, will serve the market with something cheaper … and with Flash.

It’s always about cheaper, isn’t it? Until you buy a BMW or a Mossberg shotgun and discover that spending more, in the right places, feels so much better. For the Cheapers, they just shuttle from deal to deal and hope to get lucky. My brother is a Sprint customer who argued with me all last summer how hot the Palm Pre would be when he got one. Apple better watch out. But he wasn’t buying on Day One. He was waiting for the cheap deal that would give him a $99 handset when his contract turned over and he got his biannual replacement credit. He misjudged, like a lot of the cheapers, the effects of the garden’s walls. By the time he got his free Pre, Palm was so desperate it was selling the smartphones for $79 on Amazon, contract-free.

Or just go ask those people how it feels to adopt “better” technology that cannot get traction because it’s not popular. Having a tablet is the first step. Selling it as a profitable item that generates content revenue is a much bigger step. The HP Slate will take off and the Flash-lovers will buy it, maybe. Or maybe they’ll carry netbooks instead. What I can count upon is the Adobe “we’ll get to optimizing Flash performance soon” response is gonna have to become more of a promise and less of a tease.

Anybody who believes they can kill one product with another is a grandpa who’s staying up past their bedtime. Markets and consumers and financials kill products, for reasons that sometimes none of us can forsee.

The help-we-need-Flash argument overlooks HTML5, or the industry’s distaste for needing a vendor-controlled element like Flash to deliver content. Flash was running about 97 percent of online media services, last I checked. That number can only go down from there. Zinio’s CEO Jeannie Mullen told me that “we’re de-Flashifying as fast as we can,” and they rebuilt their Web site in a matter of months.

To be fair, Apple makes mistakes and stretches the truth, too. iPad 1.0 WiFi reception, and fooling people into thinking the Macs have no viruses, are examples of each. But Apple has always played to the congregation, because the IT experts and Windows promoters hated that little rebel outpost called Apple — how dare they step away from a Windows tune? Oh, that iTunes thing won’t amount to much, Napster is a better deal, too many people can make a bit of money on an MP3 music player, nobody can just jump into a phone market and succeed, yada, yada, yada.

It’s fun to be contrary, but the Apple monomanical drive is necessary to swim upstream, I believe. Il Duce made the trains run on time, and if Il Jobe makes Adobe’s Flash less hot on my thighs, I won’t care what else the war has to cripple. I’m a consumer of information like that.

So Guy and I will disagree on this: Sometimes you have to deny your market’s wishes. Not never, because your market sometimes wants exactly what will cripple you. They don’t care if you survive or thrive to think up something that somebody else will steal. There’s not much to steal from the iPad except for the idea that a better tablet will sell, given enough push from a company with $30 billion in cash. Apple is only keeping Flash content from its iPhone, Touch and iPad customers at the moment — and check back with us in one year to see how Hulu and the like are responding to 3 million new devices that can’t use Flash. The iPad is still a few years away from being a creation tool as competent as any laptop. But look who’s kicked open the door to the future again, eh? Who in Hoboken cared about tablets before January? If Mr. Black Turtleneck wants to war with Adobe over Flash, let the bodies fall. As a consumer I don’t want to support any software that looks like it’s built to make my hardware feel feeble, or my thighs feel hot today. A better Flash, plus a rich walled garden? I think I win on both fronts in this empire’s battle.

The trades can only be executed at an Apple Retail Store, the company said in an e-mail to the millions of iPod Touch owners who’ve registered the devices. “Since the tech media has announced that the iPad is simply a large iPod Touch, we’re embracing the comparison,” said marketing VP Phillip Schiller. “We’re Apple and can set the rules for our own products. It’s important for the iPad to succeed.”

The 3:1 ratio is thought to represent the aggregate screen size of three of the Touch devices. Many have begun to experience battery fatigue, according to analyst Rob Enderle. The tech expert lauded Apple on its admission that the iPad batteries might disappoint early adopters, and so would accept three older devices to spread its newest product into the market.

The exchange terms identify a special 8AM to 9AM Swap Hour at the retail outlets in the US. Owners who’ve gathered up three Touches will be admitted to the front of the lines expected to form on Saturday for the first day’s delivery of the iPad.

That a unseen device which starts at $499 blew out its initial run in two weeks of sales is a sure sign that small business owners are investing in the new mobile form factor. Apple may have engineered the size of its first run to ensure a sellout before first delivery. Whatever the reason, e-mail notices arrived this morning that first shipments have left Apple’s plants to arrive by April 3.

It’s a beloved bromide that you shouldn’t buy a 1.0 version of anything computing-related. Some say that you’re only helping the manufacturer iron out the bugs in such an early version of a product. Apple has fired a warning shot across the bow of us eager sailors, cresting into the uncharted iPad waters. If your iPad develops a charging problem, the vendor advises, it will only be $99 to replace the battery. Yeah, an extra $99, plus tax and the pain of parting with your new tool. Apple will give you a refurbished model as a replacement, so you need to have dumped your data into your Mac before the pokey iPad goes into the post.

Us early adopters take such arrows in the back as an expected part of being the first on our block. Apple enjoyed a healthy 1.0 release of the iPod (I owned mine within the first month in 2001), while the iPhone was much better on second and third releases than the $599 rollout model. (We added ours last year, about two years after the intro.) But we invested in the 1.0 iPad because it might move the needle a lot for quick computing, the kind that a small business needs to keep up with a jammed to-do list. That’s an experience we want to share first-hand, instead of repeat from others.

One of our allies, Bruce Hobbs of Engineered Software, is developing iPad applications after decades serving the HP enterprise business community. Hobbs is enlisting other software writers with experience in COBOL, a bedrock business language, to create something new for the iPad.

I’ve been reading books about and working through tutorials on Objective-C, Xcode, Interface Builder and iPhone and Mac OS X development. Michael Watson and I took a two-day iPhone development course back in November. I’ve also been attempting, with limited success, to lure a couple of other HP 3000 COBOL developers into a joint effort. Not sure yet exactly what we’ll put together, but I’m still hoping to have something in the App Store before Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference.

There are a generation of good developers out there who have 30 years of business program creation in hand, talking to users and creating software that helps businesses small and large and in-between. Hobbs has been working in the HP 3000 heartland for decades, a place where both 10-person companies and Fortune 500s use that enterprise-grade computer.

It is probably too early for the average business to expect much from the 2010 iPad except a new user experience and advanced mobile computing productivity. The hardware will have its flaws, bad builds and disappointment. The software will probably only start to mature this fall, after Apple has released the 4.0 version of the iPad’s operating environment. (It ships with 3.2 early next month.) But developers like Hobbs and his colleagues, whether beyond age 50 or not yet 30, are excited about the prospects over the long term.

Hobbs pointed out an inspiring and pragmatic post from another iPad developer about the device’s potential. We like these lines best from Andy Hunt, who bills himself as Pragmatic Programmer:

We’re looking at the beginning of the true direct-manipulation interface.  No more wiggling a spatially disconnected mouse or scribbling on an eternally blank tablet with no feedback.  I think the effect of such an immediate, in-your-face interface will be pervasive and long lasting, in ways that we’re only just beginning to imagine.

It’s an exciting time to be using Apple products for business, as well as being in the business of testing, analyzing and reporting on Apple’s products. You will see the news, good and otherwise, up here once the FedEx fellow drops off that box next month.

Hobbs is also soliciting ideas for business apps for the iPad. Well, apps of any kind, but there’s nothing like asking a business veteran for a tool to make work a little easier.

Devices can be ordered online starting next week, or pre-ordered from Apple’s retail stores. Shipments start April 3 for online orders, with in-store pickups available the same day.

In a press release Apple’s Steve Jobs says the tablet, using a trademarked Multi-Touch interface, let users “connect with their apps and content in a more intimate, intuitive and fun way than ever before.”

The device that will deliver a renovated Mail program (included) and runs $9.95 apps for Apple’s Numbers spreadsheet and the Pages word processor, does not yet include a camera. Analysts believe that Apple can sell as many as 5 million of the tablet computers in the product’s first year. Prices range from $499 for a 16GB WiFi up to $829 for a 64GB 3G+WiFi unit.

Some of the biggest enhancements to the business computing experience will come from Apple’s applications at first. The company promises a Mail experience that will let users “see and touch your email in ways you never could before. In landscape, you get a split-screen view showing both an opened email and the messages in your inbox.”

The iPad’s Calendar tool takes a big step toward the functionality of the DayTimer and DayRunner journals of the 1990s. The landscape format and portability, along with the utility of managing several calendars at once, take the mobile device into the realm of portfolios we carried from meeting to meeting.

Apple’s refreshed a Web page that summarizes the initial value of investing in this business tool. The marketing copy focuses on the applications that will be available as included software.

Attendees waiting for the keynote to start covered a wide age range

A trade show is an odd thing, an entity that exists only in a brief span of time like a polliwog, a text message or an NBC talk show host’s gig. Afterward, it’s remembered best by those who were actually attending the conference, like last week’s Macworld Expo. But the Web is full of ace prognoses today about the health of the Apple world’s biggest trade show, many served up by people who want to justify their absence.

I’ve sat in that kind of chair, far away and commenting on a show I didn’t attend, doubting its health and relevance and value. Take those comments for what they’re worth. There was a lot of value in being at this year’s Macworld. In the days and weeks to come, this blog will tell stories from being there, ones you couldn’t report any other way about what’s new or what works for Apple computer users who employ their gear as a work tool.

People at the uber-sharp Macintouch.com site are weighing in on the experience, although a serious share of them didn’t experience the conference. Some who were there are saying they noticed a genuine upward age creep in attendees. It didn’t seem any different to me than in years past, except maybe there were not scores of 25-year-olds in an Apple booth. Nothing wrong with the youth of America, but a robust trade show is built of equal parts managers and explorers. 2010′s show had both in my iPhone’s viewfinder.

Unless there was a fountain of youth bubbling in the basement of the Moscone Center, making us geezers somehow look callow, there were plenty of attendees well under 40. The show itself may be elderly in hitting age 25, but many there were not a lot older than the expo’s own tenure. The picture above is a little clue of who was on hand at the first day’s Feature keynote.

If you want to forecast the lifespan of a trade show, you need all your instruments working to make a prediction. When people talk about this year’s MacWorld as “half as many booths” or “no massive vendor exhibits with savvy people inside,” they’re correct, but not accurate. Those raw numbers don’t matter any more than just measuring the wind speed and then trying to predict weather. You want to work with business measurements, because a trade show is a business opportunity.

There’s no way you could have been in the aisle between the Dr. Bott’s booths anytime Thursday and believed this expo was less than any other. I haven’t been at every Macworld, but I’ve been at the last five in a row now. The previous four included Apple and this one didn’t. I didn’t miss the fruit company wizards. Last year Apple’s big news was what, iWork? We didn’t have people seven-deep, drooling over a phone which wouldn’t be on sale for nearly six months. That was a dramatic moment in 2007, like lining up at 4 AM to try to squeeze into the Reality Distortion speech. These things drive ardor, but I don’t find them to be a massive business lift.

I’m a technical journalist and editor since 1984, and a newsletter and blog publisher since 1995. I’ve used Macs in publishing and small business since 1987, and set up two little companies that rely on them, but I cut my teeth in the HP marketplace, in particular its HP 3000 business line. That vendor has killed off that product and turned its computing business on its ear. Innovation is just acquisitions for lots of HP’s inventing today. Apple couldn’t be more different.

For 25 years I’ve attended trade shows as big as 25,000 users, including close contact with the customers and show volunteers. Macworld 2010 didn’t exhibit a debacle, or slink away. I gotta disagree with the doom.

Yup, the show area was half as big. I didn’t care. I was drained after two days of interviews and demos and Q&A about features and business models and competitive stances. I said wow a lot, especially in the mobile apps floor space. I was impressed by products I didn’t know existed, because media notice is now fragmented and sliding so fast it’s harder to keep up than ever. What I didn’t miss at all was 75 booths’ worth of iPod accessory makers. Or the massive leather couches where you could watch media streamed onto TVs you could only buy at home if you hit the Lotto. Or the big honking booths from the likes of Adobe and Microsoft with lots to toy with, but experiences that would often not escape the labs as those products were released. At those booths you could talk to an engineer easy. But whatever they said to you then had to clear the business and marketing arms of the companies — and firms like Adobe and Microsoft have massive hurdles to clear in those areas.

Contrast that with the vendors who were on the floor at Macworld 2010. Smaller companies who often had innovation those larger beasts didn’t want to invest in. It was no problem in some cases to talk with the CEO of a little firm and believe they were really going to follow through with what they showed you. After 25 years of talking to software and hardware companies, you can tell sometimes what’s true faith and what is fantasy, or worse.

Yes, dead-on: There were less than 800 people in the room when Jon Gruber, Guy Kawasaki or David Pogue spoke, not the thousands at hand or watching remote screens to see Steve Jobs year after year. What did this matter? 700 media credentials were issued and the press room was busy, albeit not packed. People were watching and writing this week with a larger audience than the total attendance of 10 Macworlds. What’s more, their insight and summaries are going to be available to the Mac world on Web sites like this one for a lot longer than what you’ll remember from a suitcase full of data sheets and demo disks.

I’ll remember this: A David Pogue one-act as part of his keynote, a parody mashing up Steve Jobs’ life with It’s a Wonderful Life, played by the likes of The Gregory Brothers and LeVar Burton, that plucked the heartstrings of the Mac faithful — those of us who suffered through the 90s — just as ably as any tune that Jobs ever fiddled from a Macworld auditorium that only the lucky few could enter. (We saw last month how declined Steve’s demo skills have become, when he blew through his iPad demo points via Web access that looked slow and peppered with blue-box reminders of a Flash-less Internet experience. If you saw the show live, rather than the cleaned up Apple video, you can hear the chuckles from the audience while Steve-o showed the “best way to experience the Web.”) I love the iPad’s concept and believe in The Job’s ability to make it ready for work users. But I didn’t need Steve Jobs to distort the iPad reality on Jan. 27, or this week at Macworld.

It’s just as hard to predict the campaign of the iPad’s progress as it is to forecast the future of a trade show that’s already 25 years old and is working to change. But I saw changes in this year’s event that give me hope, the kind of faith I have in Apple’s pursuit of iPad business. I saw conference sessions, like a User Show with a half-dozen tracks, providing great training at several levels of expertise from seasoned consultants. I attended three sessions, and each gave me more value than the $27 I spent to attend them. The e-mail client showdown all by itself was worth the whole $79 one-day user conference pass. (You want to attend the conference sessions, really. Even for just one day. You could download every PowerPoint deck for every track, no matter what you’d paid for, once you entered the session hall in Moscone West. Talk about hidden value.) The show did heavy discounting this year, and you had to be pretty unplugged to need to pay for your Expo pass.

Macworld had gotten too big for all of it to be useful, bloated as bad as any Microsoft or Adobe product by the time Apple pulled away last year. The economics of this year’s experience are measured the most by how the exhibitors felt. I didn’t talk to a single one who was disappointed with floor traffic, and I didn’t even stay to see the Saturday floor, which had the potential for being unprecedented.

Who will be back in a booth in 2011? Well, there were 80 iPhone app companies squeezed into microscopic kiosks, with traffic so jammed I got lost and talked to a company that wasn’t even on my interview list. That kind of random messaging and learning is why we come to shows instead of sitting at our browsers to learn. The kiosk people will be back, and some will spring for more elbow-room to demo.

Go ahead and believe that the 2008 model of Macworld is the only one worth attending, if you want. I have a feeling that when you can get a sharp pencil like Jon Gruber to talk for an hour about Apple’s weak spots — the problems it needs to address — you have a more useful show than the one where everybody tiptoes around the El Jefe Vendor who is the patron of the Mac populace. I have January 25 circled for next year’s calendar, even while I admit there’s an outside chance that IDG collapses its business in the Mac expo market. But I bet not. It’s harder to build business than to rediscover it.

It’s tough times out there, which is a better explanation for a downsized show floor than “There’s No Apple” to bring its black-shirted staff up the road. I’ve talked to Apple Macworld staffers who were no more savvy than anything experienced talking about Entourage. (By the way, Microsoft seems to be moving away from Entourage to Outlook, so maybe nobody at MS cares about those template answers anymore.) I didn’t struggle to compare e-mail, or scanners, or backup products, or mass storage. I had an easier time for some of that because I didn’t have to hike more than a mile from hall to hall. People were getting by with less to exhibit, and you knew that those who were there were selling and building for the long run.

One 10×10 booth was staffed with eight people from a small but sharp company. They saved the square footage and cartage charges but sent their best. You need to have staffed an exhibit to know how this works, but as IDG you want that booth size to grow from kiosk to small to larger. Macworld got a reset of its economic model this year. You could forecast its demise. But that wouldn’t be a lot smarter than subscribing to Dell’s premature obituary for Apple.

You can let go of the old trade show model, if you try, and open your eyes to the potential for something better. I say let’s see, in person, what Macworld Expo can become. This looked to me like the first year that I attended Appleworld, not just Macworld. I didn’t observe a business event that was in trouble, just one in a state of change.

Those holes on the browser’s screen were Flash videos, built in to sites like The New York Times and Time magazine. Flash is everywhere except the iPad and iPhone. Apple doesn’t like it because Flash is a hog, a tar-pit that brings the iPhone to a crawl. And apparently the iPad, even with the hot A4 processor Apple built to drive the device.

What’s a business need Flash for, anyway? Well, information presented quickly. Hit the Wall Street Journal’s front page with an iPhone to see what you’re missing. All the video, that’s what. A 2-minute video summary can be the best way to find an overview of a business story. It’s a stubborn oversight for the iPad and Apple to sneer at Flash. At the WSJ site it’s especially important, because the paper is now owned by News Corp., which runs a little thing called Fox News.

There will be a lot of business information on the Journal’s site that won’t appear on an iPad. Jobs’ blinders during the demo were among the most un-Apple-like facets I’ve seen from the company. Especially in front of an audience of journalists in the media.

The articles are starting to appear today about Flash being missing. The LA Times posted an item this morning that compared Apple’s absence on the Flash team with Adobe’s desire to put the product onto iPads and iPhones. The disconnect shows two things to a business customer. First, Apple wants a video standard they can control or influence, like the pretty-green HTML5. Second, that no matter how fast you think your hardware is on your business tool, there’s always something to stop it dead.

The lack of Flash is something I’ve come to accept on the iPod Touch and iPhone (3GS) I use. But this missing piece cuts Apple’s mobile products with complete Web features down to just one: its notebooks.

This is different than a high-pixel camera not present in the first iPhones, or tethering or MMS messaging only arriving 2 years after the rollout. Those are good-enough (photos) or niche uses for most. Flash has become a defacto standard for video. On a product aimed at content delivery like the iPad, it’s a big, glaring check-minus. And so Flash support becomes something that HP will be able to make big strides with, if it can deliver Flash to the anticipated Slate tablet.

Tradeoffs like this are always on a business owner’s mind when they make a technology choice. Pick Windows for your OS and live with the storm of viruses written for the popular, program-rich environment. Use a Palm Pre and endure the dearth of apps while you save money on the device and its data plans. Apple doesn’t usually leave obvious holes in its flank like this.

So it’s an act of faith to expect the company to correct this, just like its failure to support Internet telephony over 3G, or the foot-dragging to give Google Voice a chance on the iPhone. Like any big corporation, Apple tries to get away with what they think will work best for the largest return on investment. The calculations will work against this new tool. They are likely to have an impact on how many iPads get sold this year to people who use mobile tools to consume video reports.

Apple has demonstrated this week that the first release of this product is going to be like the early Kindles or the rollout iPhones. They’ll be $499 products that are going to need a $699 refresh, or a more advanced processor. Unless Apple believes it can knock Flash out of the Internet, somehow. That’s going to be a problem with its newest content partners, the five major book publishers who will sell books through the iBookstore. Books have Flash ads promoting them. Publishers will have to create alternative sales tools to hawk them on an iPad. These kinds of detours don’t work out well for a vendor, not even Apple.