Thrills! Excitement! Business?

Apple’s entire business hangs on the hour that Steve Jobs spends onstage at the Macworld Conference & Expo. Attending that conference wearing my journalist, IT, media producer, and geek hats stacked atop one another is a thrill. I also get a king-size kick out of the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, the JavaOne Conference, and the CTIA (Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association) conference. I attend shows that threaten to drop such a bomb on me the first day that I spend the rest of the week writing instead of sleeping or eating.

At Comdex in November, a fellow attendee noticed the “property of Apple Computer” tattoo on the back of my neck and asked me about Xserve RAID. She wanted to know, apart from being 2.5TB of disk space, what Xserve RAID is. That knocked me back a step. I knew from looking, and from the direct way she asked the question, that she uses technology (adeptly, I later learned) but technology is neither her love nor her living.

This woman runs a small chain of retail businesses that sells party supplies. She automates her sales and inventory, but before she takes one step beyond the PC-based solution she’s using for that, she wants to explore growth options. She plans to build up to targeted customer-loyalty programs, order entry and tracking with her suppliers, and selling her wares online. She got her mind around the concept of the Xserve immediately: It’s a flat Macintosh with no monitor. Go ahead, roll your eyes, but she’s right; that’s what it is. So I said that Xserve RAID cheaply moves data to and from permanent storage about as fast as it can go. She nodded. We talked a little more about her fledgling IT operation and the recent work I’ve done to update my IT core so it looks something like where she’s heading. She listened, I listened, and I got a free wake-up call.

I’m glad we didn’t have our talk at Macworld. There, the halls will be filled with people arguing about whether IBM will buy Apple, whether the G5 is really a 64-bit processor under Panther, and why the DVD burner on this model of PowerBook initializes twice instead of once at power-up. Yes, this is my tribe. I take the rumor sites and the exhibit floor chitchat under the DoveBar umbrella in stride. But since that conversation with the party store entrepreneur, I think more about how what’s written and said comes across to people who are, at the time, outsiders. It’s not that they’re skittish. They want to solve their technology problems once and know that the chosen solution will run until they decide to unplug it.

The businesswoman with whom I spoke isn’t an InfoWorldreader. Maybe she will become one, in which case I get a little notch added to a “property of” tattoo that’s not as easy to see as Apple’s. The best thing I could do for her is to help cool down the fiery atmosphere of radical change, urgency, and risk that prevails, not just at trade shows but within the pages of magazines such as InfoWorld. Did Panther completely devour Jaguar? Should I haul my G4-based Xserve to the dumpster because the G5 server will be eight times faster (because if it’s only seven, I’ll keep what I have)? Will a Power Mac G5 really know if I lay it on its side and use it as a server? These questions are fun to ask, and the answers are fun to read. But if you see me in the hallway at Macworld, don’t think me rude. Please, this lady has a business to run and she hasn’t much time to talk. I’ll catch up with you under the Dove umbrella.