Dortch's Digressions

Apple and MacWorld: Who Needs Big Trade Shows Anymore, Anyway?

So Apple has decided that Steve Jobs will not give the Macworld Expo 2009 keynote address in a few weeks, and that the company will pull out of the 25-year-old show altogether after the 2009 edition. And speculation runs rampant across the Web and print media worlds, about (1) Steve Job's health and (2) that of Macworld Expo itself. I'll ignore issue (1) because it's none of my business, and focus on issue (2).

The large computer industry trade show has been a dying dinosaur for years, but has stubbornly hung on in many cases. However, there are now too many factors mitigating against the success of such events. These range from the abilities of companies such as Apple to turn retail stores and Web sites into far more manageable, controllable, and profitable "mini-expos" to growing requirements to reduce or eliminate costly, low-productivity business travel. (I mean, the MacBook Pro on which I'm composing this very screed already has built-in Internet connectivity, a microphone AND a camera...)

But don't cry for Macworld just yet. There is an awful lot of value to be gotten out of the event, even should Apple disappear from it entirely as a participant, or radically reduce its participation. I'm old enough to remember when networking pioneer all but owned the NetWorld trade show, but that event retained value beyond Novell itself, especially when it was combined with Interop, another pioneering big industry event. So there's semi-relevant precedent for the possibility of an Apple-free (or "Apple-reduced") Macworld continuing on successfully, at least for a while.

All depends on how Macworld Expo 2009 actually plays out, and what Apple does, if anything, before, at, and after said event. (If you want to read similar, more granular, and "closer-to-home" musings on this subject, I highly recommend "Apple at Expo: What went wrong?" by Jason Snell of Macworld.com, a corporate cousin of the company that runs Macworld Expo.) But regardless of how things play out at Macworld, what's happened to Macworld is definitely indicative of a larger truth: with few if any exceptions, the larger and/or more focused on a single vendor the trade show, the more likely that its days are numbered. And those numbers, if used to measure years of remaining longevity, are in the low to very low single digits, at best.

Outsourcing Works -- Except When it Doesn't...

Here's a thing:

Information Week reported last week that AT&T is replacing its India-based providers of support for its consumer DSL services with 2,000 unionized, U.S.-based workers. Tier One support providers will earn $30,000 per year, plus about another $10,000 annually in benefits, which AT&T says are "competitive" rates. (Information Week says these rates are actually some four times what workers in India typically earn, but never mind...)

In 2003, Dell Inc. announced that it had stopped using support providers based in India for corporate users of select Dell models, although the company said at the time that it planned to continue supporting consumers from India. (Interesting trade-off, since consumers seem likely to have less complex problems, but also likely to need more custom-tailored hand-holding, but never mind...)

Other U.S. companies appear to be moving support back to the States from India as well, although few are talking about it openly -- yet.

Meanwhile, increasing numbers of U.S. workers seem to feel their work histories are incomplete without a stint in India, at least according to some media reports from outlets in and near Silicon Valley.

What's going on here?

Well, exactly what everyone paying attention should have expected, although only some predicted publicly. Expectations, living standards, and wages are going up in India, which makes Indian workers more expensive than they used to be. Meanwhile, technologies and labor relations are evolving in ways that make domestic support providers less costly and more attractive to U.S. companies.

Throw in the near-constant barrage of complaints about India-based support providers unable to say anything meaningful other than what's on the scripts they're given -- and complaints about difficult-to-understand accents -- and this turn of the outsourcing tide was almost a given. (Some of the ways some Americans have reportedly berated India-based support providers for their "theft" of "'Murican" jobs, seem culturally insensitive at best, and racist and xenophobic at worst, but never mind...)

The thing is, this isn't about India, or outsourcing, or cost reduction. It's about U.S. companies seeking the best ways to provide adequate support at reasonable, supportable costs -- while minimizing their political and reputational risk. If users perceive support as inadequate, it's inadequate, wherever the support providers are based (and whatever their nationalities). So those people responsible for making decisions about where and how to deploy support providers should focus less on geography, and more on user experience. In other words, they should occasionally play frustrated user, and periodically call and interact with the support providers they're paying for -- or have their parents do so. To badly paraphrase the late Johnnie Cochrane, "if the experience isn't great, support must relocate." Not to a different geography, necessarily, but definitely to a higher level of performance.