SAN FRANCISCO -- At the Macworld Expo, as at most other tech shows, the big guys get their way. They purchase Caribbean-island sized spaces in prime locations and doll them up with bells, whistles and promises of free stuff.
Everyone else gets crumbs.
The Apples and Palms and Microsofts take center stage in the battle for eyeballs. But where are the mom-and-pop software shops -- the startups who couldn't find their angels, and everyone else who didn't clean up in an IPO?
They're at the periphery. Scrunched at the corners, chilling by the food court, huddled along the Moscone Convention Center's eastern wall -- that's where the small guys are.
Walk over to these neighborhoods of Macworld and you'll see products far less sophisticated than Apple's military-grade cubic supercomputer -- but the stuff here, for that matter, is selling really well.
Take a company like Neato, which makes CD-labeling products. If your hobby is to copy CDs -- of course, only for backup purposes -- and you want to make these CDs look as authentic as the ones you buy at Wal-Mart, Neato is the company for you.
Neato's digs were spare, featuring only some standing racks of products, and a small display table. Yet despite their small-guy place, they were doing a brisk business. Apparently, more than a few people are into this very curious CD-copying pastime.
"The frustrating thing about trade shows used to be that people love your product, and they ask 'Where can I buy one?' and you have to tell them to go to Staples or to your website," said David Kennaugh, Neato's vice president of sales and marketing. "So we decided to bring the stuff here and sell it here."
Indeed, there's a whole lot of selling going on in the Macworld sticks, and not all of the products are as innocent as CD labelers. Yes, there's porn -- or, as the guy at the Digital Playground booth called it, "adult content."
This guy -- who only wanted to be known as Joone -- said that he favors a cross-platform philosophy for red-light material.
"If you go to Comdex, there's a whole floor devoted to adult content," Joone said. "But here at Macworld, there isn't very much. And I know that Mac users are always complaining that more developers don't support the platform, so we always try to make our stuff work on everything."
While not exactly swamped, there were some patrons at the Digital Playground booth, thumbing through the catalogue. A woman was laying out CDs on the desk, and guys lingered over their titles as they passed by.
Do people actually have the moxie to buy X-rated stuff from a Mac show? Joone said some do; Digital Playground has been coming to Macworld since 1993, so it's apparently good business.
Another longtime Macworld participant is Anthro, purveyor of made-to-order office furniture. Called "technology furniture," Anthro's pieces are sleek, modular and expensive -- though Cathy Filgas, a company representative, said that Mac fans go wild for its stuff.
"This is by far our biggest show, and our favorite," she said, explaining that the creative types who like Macs for their design capabilities also have an eye for cool-looking furniture.
Attendees can't actually purchase furniture from the show, but Filgas said that exhibiting each year is still important -- Macworld gets the company name out there, she said, like nothing else does.
Getting a name out there is the reason that Takashi Hayashi came to Macworld. Hayashi is the marketing coordinator of a startup called CValley, which was debuting a new plug-in for Adobe Illustrator. This is the company's first time here.
CValley's booth was decorated tastefully, but it bore the mark of the beginner. The signs were laser-printed on regular stock, and the computer screens featured no flashy graphics. The whole booth covered an area of 50-feet, ballpark. Hayashi didn't have a press kit to hand out.
But he said that things were going really well, despite his booth being so obscure; people were stopping by to ask about his company's stuff, and they seemed genuinely interested. All the publicity was a steal, he said, for the $5,000 he paid for the space.
But even if it's not good business sense to come to shows like Macworld, it's still something you've got to do, according to Eleas Kostis, an employee of a three-year-old graphics company called Pixologic.
"Part of the reason for coming to expos is the prestige," he said. "It's validation in some way -- it lets us see what people think of our products."
Pixologic's booth, though pushed against one corner of the exhibit hall, was definitely a crowd-pleaser. "In fact, they came to tell us to bring the people in, they were crowding the aisles," Kostis said -- referring, presumably, to the show's authorities.
Meanwhile, the billion-dollar firms here appear to be locked in a bitter arms race for your attention.
Apple (AAPL) has by far the biggest booth, covering half a football field of floor space and featuring several banners that reach up to the ceiling. But this is its party, so one can't begrudge Apple some showiness.
What's more perplexing are the extravagances of companies like Palm and Iomega, which don't really need to make a huge splash here. (After all, who goes to Macworld and doesn't know about a company named Palm?)
But these guys took the cake for gaudy hugeness.
There are probably several $1,500 studio apartments in San Francisco smaller than the 'I' in the Iomega sign.
At the Palm booth, there's an actual steel-and-plastic, two-story bridge at the edge of the company's exhibition space, from which two announcers rain down Palm's accolades upon the audience. Up above, a giant Palm disc spins hypnotically for all to see; were it to fall, a few hundred Macheads would never be heard from again.
