We have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that, according to MacNN, last week's Macworld Expo had the highest attendance numbers ever, when it comes to the summer East Coast event: over 64,000 Mac fans flooded the Javits Center over the annual three-day Apple lovefest. The bad news, however, was evident to anyone who attended these things on a regular basis: while the number of attendees keeps going up, the show itself appears to be shrinking.

At first we thought it was just us, but we heard it again and again as we walked the floor: "wow, the show is really small this year." To us, it seems like with each passing year, while there are more and more Apple fanatics cramming their way into the convention hall, there are fewer and fewer actual exhibitors out on the floor. According to our calculations, if things continue at this rate, by the year 2007 Macworld Expo will consist entirely of the Apple booth and a couple hundred thousand attendees sitting around and grooving to Apple's brilliance. In other words, it'll be kind of like the original Woodstock, only with a higher concentration of Mac geeks and maybe fewer actual hippies.

And here's where things get really sketchy; faithful viewer Jim Boulter forwarded us a MacUser UK exclusive in which the publication claims that Apple was actually desperate enough to get exhibitors to show up to its big shindig that it "offered to pay for stand space and expenses for a number of major developers including Macromedia and Adobe." Adobe? Uh-oh... Didn't Adobe say that it was skipping the show due to "financial constraints"? Well, if Apple really offered to foot the bill and Adobe still didn't show up, maybe there's something to those rumors of "strained relations" between the two companies after all.

Then again, what's the point of exhibiting if you've got nothing to exhibit? The article quotes one Expo attendee who said, "Where's Adobe? I really wanted to talk to them about where they're at with an OS X version of Photoshop." Well, given that Adobe's answer would most likely have been "a what version of who?", maybe it's best that fans were simply left wondering. And while there are plenty of reasons why Apple and Adobe may be experiencing a bit of a rift (Apple creating Quartz from the public PDF spec instead of licensing Display Postscript from Adobe, Apple having released Final Cut Pro to compete with Premiere, Apple allegedly working on its own "iPhoto" image editing application that might cut into Photoshop sales, etc.), the marketing director for Adobe Europe claims that "the relationship between Adobe and Apple has never been stronger." Of course, if you make a habit out of believing what marketing people tell you, you've got bigger problems than worrying about the number of exhibitors at Macworld Expo...