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By John Rizzo MacWindows' Macworld Expo report: Expanding on the tweets Monday, January 31, 2011 Last week I tweeted reports from Macworld Expo in San Francisco: software executives in drag, an electronic cello concert, enterprise developers touting iPad integration into Windows networks, and the upstart Microsoft taking on Google. What's it all about? Since the 140-character Twitter posts didn't tell the whole story, I'll expand my report here. First, something about this year's show, the second since Apple pulled out. Information about integrating Macs and Windows was plentiful, but much more was to be found in the workshops and sessions than on the show floor. There were several all-day tracks on Macs in the enterprise, Mac OS X Server, and Active Directory ("DNS Demystified" offered some interesting fixes), as well as sessions on running Windows on Macs through virtualization. The show floor, which was the smallest anyone could remember, included fewer of the companies that we cover here at MacWindows. But I did see CodeWeavers and Group Logic, Active-Directory integrators Centrify and Likewise, and Mac enterprise integrators JAMF and Absolute Software. CodeWeavers was the only one with a major product announcement: CrossOver 10. When Apple abandoned Macworld Expo most of the larger companies follow suite. So the companies that used to have the largest booths, including Microsoft (who gave briefings in a hotel room), Adobe, IBM, Cannon, Nikon, and FileMaker, were absent. This resulted in a smaller show floor than has seen since the 1980's Macworld Expos. A presentation called "The Future of Mac" might have been "the Future of Macworld Expo." IDG World Expo predicted that 25,000 people would attend, half the crowd in Macworld's heyday, but it might be enough to bring back the show for another year. The big money for trade shows is in the booths on the show floor, and that had to be a big hit to the bottom line. But the aisles were packed with traffic jams of attendees, so IDG may have hit its target. That's the background. Here are my tweets, and what they meant: Tweet MacWindows_com Developers offering software for integrating different platforms into Windows networks usually talk to me about their Mac support. This year, the Mac integrators wanted to talk about iPads and phones. I'd try to steer the conversation towards group policies in Macs, and they'd start telling me about setting iOS attributes. After awhile, I just gave up, and started walking up to booths asking them to talk to me about iPads. Computers in phones and pads are creating some issues in enterprise, and not all of these are solved yet. For instance, Apple wants you to manage iPhones from users Macs, not a central location. So if you have 400 iPhones and you want to update software on them, it means plugging them into 400 Macs and launching 400 copies of iTunes. In addition to corporate phones, employees are bringing in their own personal phones and using them for company email and such, installing their own apps. Inventory control of software is an important issue. The enterprise integration developers are characterizing solutions to these issues as mobile device management, or MDM. (It's not a real software initiative if it doesn't have an acronym.) JAMF Software added MDM support to its Casper Suite 8.0 last November. A JAMF spokesperson said that they were trying to leverage Active Directory and the information it provides in order to centrally manage iOS devices. The client management suite can control software licenses, activating and deactiviating when needed, not just on Macs, but on mobile devices as well. They provide inventory and configuration, and some settings management in the form of policies. Casper Suite 8 also provides a console for distributing iOS apps wirelessly, including apps from the App Store those created in-house. Absolute Software also added MDM last November as well. Absolute Manage MDM for iOS 4 works as a standalone or as a plugin to their software for managing Mac and Windows clients. Absolute Manage for iOS 4 can do asset management, deployment of data and configuration files, and can distribute in-house applications (though not App Store apps yet). A spokesperson said they would be expanding their mobile offerings in the future. Tweet MacWindows_com Maybe that second sentence is an exaggeration, but it was stricking. Stand at the intersection of two aisles and look around and you saw iPads everywhere, mounted on every possible type of bracket or stand. I certainly saw more software demonstrations on iPads than Macs, and I was looking for Mac software. I'm just saying, that's all. Perhaps next year it will be called iOSworld Expo. Not that I was any different. I posted these tweets using an iPod Touch 4G. Hey, the thing weighs 3.5 ounces. Perhaps next year I'll be iOSMacWindows. Tweet MacWindows_com Microsoft is looking much less evil these days, now that Apple is bigger than they are, and Google is the company that the European Union targets in its anti-trust investigations. I met Microsoft in a hotel room, as if it was one of those companies that couldn't afford a booth on the show floor. They've had a few tough years, with the failure of Vista and the failure of two mobile phone platforms. So I was sympathetic. Microsoft launched Office Web Apps last June. Although it's a few years behind Google Docs and has some catching up to do, the Redmond folks made a good case. If you're like most people who use a computer, you use Microsoft Office. Office Web Apps look and feel like Office for Mac and Windows, though simpler (and not as powerful). If you know Office, there's almost no learning curve with Microsoft, while Google Docs takes a little study. And Google Apps requires a certain amount of conversion between it and Office desktop files, and displaying Office documents often is compromised. This is pretty seemless with Office Apps, and display of your desktop files is near perfect. Microsoft also demo'd Outlook for Mac, which seems to be a successful Exchange client for Mac, despite some griping about missing features. (If you disagree ) Tweet MacWindows_com CrossOver is software that enables Mac OS X to run Windows apps natively on a Mac, without Windows. The company released a major new (and much improved) version, CrossOver 10, at the show. CodeWeavers is not as well known as VMware or Parallels (who did not have booths at the show), so but it needed a way to attract attention to CrossOver 10 without blowing a wad of money. This is why Chief Operating Officer Jon Parshall manned the booth in a wig, heels, and a dress. Seeing men dressed this way is not uncommon in San Francisco. But I've never seen bearded VMware executives dress this way at a trade show. But, it worked. I could not get near Jon Parshall, who was surrounded by trade reporters and TV podcast cameras and show attendees. And I couldn't get near the Mac demo'ing CrossOver 10. I could barely get near the booth at all. From a distance over the heads of other attendees, I could see that a demo was running, and that it looked like it was an iMac and not an iPad. Tweet MacWindows_com Wandering down the hall to the press room, I was drawn to the auditorium by the amplified sound of a cello improvising over repeating loops of herself in a manner very reminiscent of guitarist Robert Fripp. Zoe Keating would play a phrase, which would then repeat while she layered something else on top. In the 1970s and 1980s, Robert Fripp, the founder of the rock group in King Crimson, used to do this in live performances with two reel-to-reel tape recorders, creating an ethereal sound he called Frippertronics. Of course, Zoe Keating uses a MacBook to create the looping effects, not two reel-to-reel tape recorders, which was ostensibly the reason for being at Macworld Expo. But the Mac justification was thin -- Keating and other artists were there to entertain and delight the audiences. She didn't pretend to be teaching the audience how to do perform Frippertronics on a Macs. The point of my tweet was that music seemed to be everywhere in this expo, in session rooms and auditorium and on the show floor, where it seemed there were more than the usual number of developers with products for making, producing, and enjoying music-on both Macs and iPads. It's not in my beat, but it is a nice change from Active Directory integration.
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