In the excerpt above, Pahlka writes in the Indicative Mood and not the Subjunctive, indicating to me that Jobs has had a relapse of his pancreatic cancer.

Pahlka, have you heard anything more about his relapse? how many more weeks does he have left?

Here’s a sentence I wrote about this subject in an upcoming article: “Jobs’s role model is Willy Wonka. He wants to lock himself up in Apple’s Cupertino headquarters, and not have to talk to people anymore.”

Yes, that’s a joke — but it’s also serious. Apple doesn’t like open, rough-and-tumble dialogue. They like to control the venue and conversation. And if you’re at a conference, people can just walk up to you and buttonhole you and start talking. Yikes!

Thanks so much for a thoughtful, sensitive, and ultimately optimistic piece. I have been a Bay Area-based producer of trade show events for the past 25 years, and have been getting rather sick of the ’sky is falling’ notion that trade shows are dead and gone.

I agree with you completely. They are most definitely not. We are a culture that happily depends and thrives on face-to-face interactions. While many of the bloated trade shows will not survive (remember Comdex?), those with a more focused approach will thrive. I recently produced a show for Supercomputing in Austin and the exhibitors there were thrilled with the traffic they were getting.

I will be forwarding your piece to MANY of my associates as they run amok dodging pieces of the sky ….

Ken Newman