I have lived just south of Boston all my life. Every year I would wait in great anticipation for the Macworld Expo to come to the Bayside Expo every summer. Some years it was so big, that it spilled over to the World Trade Center. When Apple decided to discontinue the Boston Expo, I was saddened because I felt a part of the Mac community was now dead. And my fear was that as the community became marginalized, that Apple would lose market share, which it did by the way.

Back in the early days of Mac, mid 80s to early 90s, there was a definite community. In fact I participated in that community in a material way. I belonged to, and was an active member in the Boston Mac Users Group (BMUG), and I ran the MacMentors Bulletin Board Service, or BBS. For those too young to remember, BBS’s were the precursor to the Internet. It was a dial-up service that was interconnected with tens or even hundreds of other like services. My BBS had four 2400 baud modems attached and over 2,000 users from all over the world. It was truly a community, with a self nurturing culture. I was also a speaker at several Macworld conferences and some of the New York City based conferences, and consulted in the field of electronic publishing.

The Boston Macworld Expo was a critical part of maintaining that community culture, because it gave us Macophiles a chance to meet face to face, and to share the unique experience that was Mac, the computer for the rest of us. Back then Apple was barely a $1 billion dollar company and losing ground under the uninspiring leadership of Scully, Amelio and then Spindler. Apple needed the community to hold itself together and survive.

And how ironic was it that Steve Jobs was ousted from Apple because the board of directors didn’t believe he had the ability to run a billion dollar enterprise. So, they tried their hand with corporate veterans, like Pepsi man John Scully. WTF does a guy hocking soda know about personal computers?

Anyway, Steve comes back and re-injects his vision, takes Apple back to it’s roots by recognizing the customers that got it to that point, and then proceeded to expand that customer base. But that’s when the community started to fade. Apple was outgrowing the need for a community, and also outgrowing the need for regional expos, because it was interfering with the natural product cycles and marketing plans that were bringing the company back to life. Apple, under the leadership of Steve Jobs, was growing up, and turning into an efficient machine that embraced the purist forms of capitalism. The faithful were still there, and always will be, but Apple expanded their base by delivering products that people wanted, and by knowing who those people were.

The vision that launched the Mac initially was a closed system, it was simple and elegant, and made computing fun and easy. Apple accomplished this through total control over every aspect of the design and delivery of the product. When Steve left, this vision waned. When he returned, so did the vision. Jobs recognized that in order to rekindle their success, they needed to control not only the supply chain, design and marketing, but also the sales and support end too. So, that’s why they opened the Apple Stores. The mom and pop shops and the big box retailers weren’t cutting it. They were unable to deliver the level of support and the total experience that was encased in the Steve Jobs vision.

The most recent implementation of this vision was shedding the shackles of Macworld. Apple no longer needed Macworld, in fact it was becoming a ball and chain to their future plans. And while some Mac fanatics feel that Apple has diss’d them, and snubbed their noses at what was left of the Mac community, what these fanatics failed to realize is that the Mac community died many years ago. The new pseudo community is a bit more sterile. But the brick and mortar Apple Stores, the Apple online store, and the iTunes and App stores, provides a much more efficient and useful experience for the customers, and that’s the bottom line.

Apple can no longer be bound by the timing of Macworld. Early January simply does work for them. This became amplified as Apple started to switch major product announcements to the World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC), and other ad-hoc venues. Apple’s VP Phil Schiller expounded on this point to David Pogue after his Macworld keynote, explaining that having to come up with another dazzling show every January—a huge production, starring knock-’em-dead new products every year—was unsustainable. Speaking to Apple product cycles: the holiday season (Novemberish), the educational buying season (late summer), the iPod product cycle (October), the iLife development cycle (usually March), the iPhone cycle (June). January doesn’t fit ANY of them.

So it’s clear, the community aspect of Macworld is no longer needed or wanted by Apple. And there are far better, and more efficient ways for Apple to move product. Maintaining a community isn’t one of them. The Apple community is dead, long live the Apple community.