All the buzz today in the blogosphere is about Apple's calculated dissing of the Macworld Expo, a traditional venue for Steve Jobs keynotes announcing new Apple products or initiatives. Senior VP Phil Schiller will deliver the final keynote in Jobs' place at the upcoming 2009 event, after which Apple will no longer provide anyone to give the keynote, and will stop exhibiting at the show... a conspicuous absence considering what the show is dedicated to and its history as the venue where such blockbuster products as the iBook, OS X, and iPhone were introduced.

The speculation over motives is rampant but poorly substantiated. Apple has been pulling back from trade shows of late, presumably for exactly the reasons they have provided, which is that they can get the exposure now without the expense. A more intriguing and possibly related speculation, from Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, is that this is an indication of a shift in leadership structure at the company.

If this is the case, then it could also signal a significant shift in the company's approach to the enterprise market, and start a dramatic expansion of Apple products in the enterprise.

The company is already making headway in the SMB sector and a recent survey shows a considerable degree of softness in the enterprise sector for Apple products: half of respondents indicated they had plans to increase their organization's integration with the iPhone in the next twelve months, and an astonishing two-thirds said they planned to allow employees to use Macs as their desktop machines in the same time frame. The iPhone wedge has proven to be sharper than almost anyone predicted; as ITIC analyst Laura Didio (responsible for the survey) points out, these impressive numbers (doubling over the past eight months) have materialized not as a result of any heavy marketing effort on Apple's part, but almost entirely out of end-user demand and the independent realization of CIOs and IT managers that solid, secure, simple systems might be put to good use even if they were being marketed primarily to consumers.

To venture into the realm of unsubstantiated speculation myself, I have always believed that this decision, to focus on the consumer market to the exclusion of the enterprise, was motivated primarily by Jobs himself. It's a model which fits well with his sensibilities and strengths. Apple as a company has flirted with the business market, but initiatives spearheaded by Jobs have always focused on the consumer.

If Jobs is in fact stepping away from a primary leadership role and turning over management functions to others in the company, that represents an opportunity for Apple to devote more resources and focus increasingly on the various obstacles decreasing their attraction in the enterprise market. Throw in a few bucks for marketing, and you could be looking at a serious surge of Apple conversion in the enterprise space... if the company has been able to make this much headway with no real effort, throwing resources into it now could prove to be a tipping point.