On Wednesday and Thursday of last week Macromedia Inc. and Adobe Systems Inc. both confirmed that they will not be attending the upcoming Macworld Conference and Expo that will be held July 15-19 at the Jacob K. Javits Center in New York City.
Macromedia updated many of its products this year adding new features and more importantly, compatibility with Mac OS X. The company over the past year has released Flash MX, Fireworks MX, Dreamweaver MX, Freehand 10 and Studio MX. Macromedia feels that trade shows are not the best place to talk to its customers.
A press statement from Macromedia Inc states, “Macromedia is committed to the Community, and has brought out a great new Macromedia MX family of tools, including Macromedia Flash MX, Dreamweaver MX, and Fireworks MX, which are all natively compatible with Mac OS X. While Macromedia as a company has found that seminars and other methods of communicating with our customers are more effective than trade shows, we are still one hundred percent committed to empowering Mac developers to create the most effective user experiences possible.”
Just like Macromedia, Adobe has also released upgrades of their products that bring about added features, mainly OS X compatibility. The release of Photoshop 7 this year (which was unveiled in February) allowed Mac users to fully convert over to OS X as their full-time operating system.
Kevin Burr, the vice president of Corporate Communications at Adobe Systems Inc. said that, “Adobe is not exhibiting at the Macworld New York show this year, but will continue to exhibit at Macworld San Francisco. Like many companies in today’s economy, we’ve re-focused our trade show resources on a few select shows that will give us the most significant return on investment. The West Coast show has traditionally been more successful for us, since we’re able to reach more Adobe Macintosh customers.”
Although the absence of these two companies will be felt at Macworld NY, Rob Scheschareg the vice president of sales, marketing and product development at IDG World Expo reassures the Macintosh community that, “We expect another very strong Macworld in July as it’s traditionally a very well-attended event.”
