Wired News calls Macworld "Small and sad," but finds a cool product outside the show

Mark Baard, of Wired News, shares the sentiment professed by many others. He goes so far as to say "This year's Boston event, at the Hynes Convention Center, felt a bit small and sad. A few hundred attendees shuffled about the show floor Wednesday, accompanied by local TV news reporters and folks from the Mac trade pubs.
" Unlike me, however, Baard got more out of IDG spokesman Mike Sponseller than a creepy threat. He got numbers. Sponseller told Baard the show is seeing more exhibitors and attendees than last year. Sponseller said he hoped for about 8,000 visitors by the end of the week. Compare that with the roughly 35,000 attendees who were in San Francisco this past January and the estimated 40,000 that braved New York in 2003 before the show moved back to Boston. In 2001, the New York numbers were more than 64,000!

All was not lost, however. Baard found a guy outside the Hynes doing his own guerilla marketing for his product, the SurfACE laptop stand, which looks as good, if not better, than most of what I saw inside the exhibit hall. Bo Eriksson, the designer of the SurfACE, built it in his basement and said he only came to Boston because he lives in New York, just a few hours away. Eriksson is exactly the kind of exhibitor IDG should be catering to. I'm not saying that the big guys (the Quarks and Lacies of the world, who also have a place there) should be banished, but more representation of the little guy – in mass quantity – would make for a better show in my book. In an effort to put my money where my mouth is, I think I'm going to buy one of those SurfACE stands now. :)