Report: Macworld Expo Site May Move After 2010

6:43 am, January 9th, 2009, Ed Sutherland

Attempting to survive a post-Apple environment, Macworld Expo may pull up stakes and move after 2010, general manager of the tradeshow indicated in an interview published online Thursday.

“IDG is absolutely open to considering other venues and pricing structures after the 2010 Expo,” according to an Ars Technica interview with Paul Kent, Macworld Expo vice president and general manager.

Kent suggested the show will likely remain in the San Francisco Bay Area due to the dense number of tech companies. However, the Expo leader left open the possibility of moving from San Francisco’s Moscone Center after next year.

Wednesday, IDG held a Town Hall where it heard a number of ideas of how Macworld Expo should change to reflect Apple’s future absence from the gathering of Mac faithful.

As reports circulated many Macworld vendors might ditch the show for rival CES, IDG said it will provide price breaks to ensure companies stay put and attendance doesn’t collapse.

To entice visitors to a Macworld void of Apple, IDG will offer free admission for attendees of the 2010 event. Likewise, Macworld organizers are considering changing the pricing structure for Expo visitors.

“The company wants to ensure that, at the very least, as many attendees as possible make the trek out so that exhibitors will make the effort to be there,” Kent told Ars Technica.

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Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.

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2 comments

They really should move the show to Vegas. Best of all worlds. Same place, same time.
And anyone who thinks there would be too much competition between the two shows just doesn’t understand how small Vegas really is and how much space is available here for conventions. It would be like an all Apple pavilion at CES!
The best!

Jimm, on January 9th, 2009 at 9:00 pm

If the rumors about CES courting Mac vendors are true and Vegas has a lot of convention floorspace, IDG would have to move fast to try to grab facilities for 2011 at the same time as CES. It will be the battle royale of trade shows.

Here’s what I’d do – first go to Macworld Vegas, then CES, and finally end the night at the AVN convention