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. Read the rest of this entry »

At times, Microsoft and Apple have been at each other’s throats during the past 25 years, jousting for the position of Most Innovative Computer supplier. Even though Google has eclipsed both companies in hubris aimed at that title, over the years small business users had to make a hard choice over and over: Windows for inclusion in the big, cluttered clubhouse of computer resources, or Apple for ease of use and a narrower neighborhood.

Many years ago, however, the companies felt like they needed one another. When the business user was choosing personal computers for the first time — and PC didn’t automatically mean Microsoft-based, Intel-driven computers, Apple and Microsoft engaged in a public lovefest.

With the weekend’s amore still in the air, we offer this sentimental look at Steve Jobs and Bill Gates dating in public. Both their companies seemed like eligible bachelors back then, rather than the lifelong mates they’ve become for Mac business users.

Jobs and Gates in 1983

Bill loves Steve, and Steve loves Bill in 1983

By now the business user can have the intimate relationship these two boys swooned over more than a quarter-century ago. Fusion from VMWare as well as Parallels both provide a Windows sandbox to use the tools of the “PC,” as the world has come to call the Wintel systems. Can’t you just feel the love? If nothing else, Fusion and Parallels give the Mac user a way to run Microsoft’s Explorer and see just how awful the Microsoft browser is rendering Web pages for Windows users.