Consider yourself lucky...Microsoft Ireland has the following on their events page:
"There are currently no events for Microsoft Ireland."
I'm not sure what the goal is for this event, but I'm surprised that making money is one of them. I would have thought that it would make sense to pack people in at a lower cost and spread the word that bit more.
The price is not exactly steep though. I don't know about where you live, but around here $2000 (£1243) would buy you a 3-day IT training course with a third-rate instructor. Corporate events are not cheap.
I'll think you'll find though that for Chief Information Architects of corporates, and for most software companies of a decent size, there will be enough insightful lectures, inspiration discussions (like 'Microsoft are delivering this technology tomorrow, our company needs to bet its future on that'), to make it excellent value.
I don't think you'll find any empty seats.
Little Weird:
My poit was that the amount of added value from the PDC is nowhere near the amount of added value you can get at a 3 day IT course.
As for CTO's - nothing there they won't be able to get a day later using all the media at their disposale. The only thing left - parties ,networking and clearing up your head a little bit from work matters. It's like summer camp for programmers.
I couldn't agree more, but it's all conferences that are overpriced. I think they charge so much because that's what they CAN get. Like some people who suggest having a more techie COMDEX (which was originally for the techies), maybe it's time for a more techie Dev conference. Get rid of all the keynotes and all but the best booths, and start a dev conferences just for developers - no CIOs, CTO's or business guys. Just talks from developers to developers. I wonder what that would cost?
is still going to be big, because the sites that host these things expect to rake it in on these events.
Business events and corporate hospitality are huge margin events. (Somewhat prosaic example) We had a small barbeque at our company, food cooked by staff. Excellent, good choice of food, cost very low.
We had a professionally catered barbeque. Food inferior (beef burgers and no more), cost much higher.
Business events make the money, just like the business-class airplane tickets subsidize the cost of the plebs sitting in economy. Overall it's good for the little man, because it makes consumer stuff cheaper.
Bottom line: good speakers, halls, hotels, caterers are not going to drop their rates for you.
Hi Roy,
I agree that the conference is expensive but it is not $2000 it is $1695 if you register early. Also the cost of the flight and the hotel will be greater than the cost of the conference.
So why have attended the PDC in the past and probably will do this year is :
(a) In a tight job market anything which gives you an advantage over the next guy is of value. If I can know about Yukon, Longhorn in detail now I have an advantage even if the implementation is a few years later.
(2) The PDC's are technical conferences where you actually get to meet the engineers. It is usually much deeper than a Teched and you get real answers not PR answers.
(3) I can probably read blogs and download a lot of information for free but you cannot beat hearing someone explaining it live to you. Using the Hands on Lab being supervised by people who know the stuff inside out also gives you a leg up.
(4) At conferences you can guage where the industry is going which if you do some consulting can be very important.
My main complaint about the PDC is that is always held in the US.
Really you could say why go to any conference but the conferences I have been to the PDC has usually given the best value.
Martin Spedding
My own feeling is that these conferences are on the way out. Before the pervasive Internet, something like Tech Ed or PDC made sense as a way to get a ton of info I couldn't get elsewhere. Now by the second day I can download everything, so why bother? They're just corporate vacations. Fine for the Fortune 1000, but irrelevant to most of us.
I'd rather read ASP.NET weblogs for a week than go to the PDC. Much better return on my investment of time and money.
Good job Roy. I went to one of these conferences once and it was a bunch of hype with very little subsistence.
It would have been a better investment for me to buy a copy of MSDN magazine. Never again.