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.