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Comment by dangero | Hacker News Reader

Wow. I guess I'll be at home this year crying myself to sleep.

The quickness at which this sold out prompts a few questions:

1. I guess only small development houses are going this year because most big companies can't get purchasing approved that fast. I know mine wasn't able to.

2. Is it time for Apple to consider a format to allow more people to attend? Their platform has grown 10x in 5 years, but the conference is still in the same facility.

3. Did Apple release fewer tickets this year to hold more tickets for their partners? I know last year, the conference sold out quick, and that didn't allow big companies time to react. I question if even Apple's purchasing department could have made a purchase this quick if they were invited to attend such a popular conference.

4. Does this mean that people are now going to be scalping WWDC tickets? Their value is clearly much more than $1600.

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Is it time for Apple to consider a format to allow more people to attend?

While undoubtedly not a perfect substitute for attending, they did take a big positive step last year by posting the session videos only a week after and eliminating additional fee for non-attendee access to them.

This is an excellent point. I remember last year thinking that the speed with which they did that was a giant 'FU' to all the devs who paid real $ to go to those sessions. However, given the lack of outrage, plus the speed with which it sold out this year, I guess the devs don't mind. Presumably they feel they're getting sufficient value from the other aspects of it.

Also, with respect to the 'allow more people to attend', I think that would wreck their 4:1 ratio of devs to Apple engineers which they seem quite proud of?

1. Maybe not. I've attended WWDC on behalf of small startups and for Yahoo. In both cases, my managers told me (and the other attendees) to go ahead and purchase a ticket with our personal credit cards as soon as registration opened. The company would then reimburse us later. There was just no other way to secure the needed tickets without charging $20k+ on a corporate card - which would have required weeks of approval first.

Yes, to answer #4:

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sby/tix/2292204668.html

(Edit: Not my CL post. Just something I came across this afternoon.)

I really wish apple disallowed transfers and went with a refunds-only policy to discourage scalping.

Same goes for google i/o

I'm fairly certain WWDC tickets are not transferrable.

> Conference badges are not transferable. The full conference fee will be charged to replace a lost badge.

http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/faq/

Edit: Nevermind. Just read the CL post. Wonder how long that code is good for.

Ok, now I feel like I missed out on something.

Ad 4: If they don't already, requiring developer licenses should, at the very least, work in Apple's favour.

Maybe they can set up some more requirements and allot a certain amount for press.

In other words, they might have to micromanagement and control more - which is very much in the spirit of Apple.

I'd be interested to see if any event experts have some common wisdom on thwarting scalpers.

2. Is it time for Apple to consider a format to allow more people to attend? Their platform has grown 10x in 5 years, but the conference is still in the same facility.

I hope not. Currently, the presentations are done by Apple engineers -- who then typically go and spend the rest of the week in lab sessions to have one on one's with people.

If more presentations are needed, either the lab quality will go down (which is very bad as labs are the best part of WWDC) or the presentation quality will go down because they will no longer be given by the engineers that created the tech behind the presentations.

There's also the immense amount of time that is spent by presenters beforehand in preparing for a session. If you think that Steve Jobs is the only one at Apple who spend hours and hours perfecting his WWDC presentation, you'd be very wrong.

I purchased a ticket personally as it was worth attending from a personal stand point back in 2009 even coming from the UK.

You have to wonder whether the developer part of the conference should be ticketed separately from the keynote, as I would happily miss the keynote for access to the information. From what I heard in 2010 a lot of people only attended the first day to see what would be announced, you would think the price would be enough to deter bloggers etc but apparently not, the same goes for Google IO

It seems to me that most of the innovation doesn't come from big companies anyway, so why should Apple give them precedence for any seats?

My knee-jerk reaction would be to agree, but I think it's also a matter of who can be helped the most. Smaller teams might not be able to afford extensive training from The Big Nerd Ranch or other outfits as much as larger corps might. So WWDC is certainly most useful to indie developers, but that doesn't mean Apple needs to market it expressly so.

The games pushing the graphics limits of the ios hardware mainly game from big dev houses (Think ID, Activision, etc) The software pushing the limits of OSX mainly comes from big software house (Think Adobe or VMWare)

Despite it's success selling it's own software Apple would still have some massive problems if either Microsoft or Adobe announced that they were no longer developing for the Mac.

Indeed. I think they are less important for WWDC as well. I've no doubt that the big companies can go visit the Apple Campus anytime they want and speak to the engineers as much as they want - they don't need WWDC

small sold out events look and sound better than big empty events. also the 4:1 dev to engineer ratio is a major selling point.

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