On WWDC Now Being ‘Broken’

Jeff LaMarche, on criticism that Apple should somehow expand WWDC to something like Oracle OpenWorld:

Making WWDC more like these giant, soulless, “enterprise” conferences is not the answer. Scaling WWDC to 10k, 20k or 40k is fixing the problem by shooting the golden goose. Trying to scale up WWDC like that would utterly destroy everything that is wonderful about it.

It sucks that demand now outstrips supply for WWDC tickets, but I’m with LaMarche: I don’t see any way for Apple to change this other than by ruining what it is that makes WWDC great.

It’s the “just keep selling more and more conference passes each year because demand keeps increasing” strategy that has watered down SXSW.

Update: It occurs to me that Apple did make a major change to help those who don’t or can’t attend WWDC: they release the session videos remarkably soon after the conference ends. Watching the videos is not the same thing as being there (no labs, for one thing), but it’s a big improvement over years past, when the videos were released many months after WWDC was over.

★ Tuesday, 29 March 2011