grbalaffa

They haven't done the traditional post-session question & answer time in years, so other than the "labs", there is no interaction with the Apple engineers. They could set up a more stringent reservation system for the labs and sell more conference tickets if they wanted.

But, like another poster said, selling out in under 2 minutes makes them look good.

Seems like it was actually less than that. Just enough time for 5,000 (or whatever the max number is) of tickets to be transacted, and then everyone else was locked out.

Lots of SF residents and business got squeezed during the mid-2000s real estate boom too, however there seemed to be far fewer of these sorts hand-wringing articles back then. There is something about tech in particular that triggers a lot more consternation than other types of booms.

That's a valid concern, however departing employees have been telling Apple this is an issue in their exit interviews pretty much since the day the App Store went live. After all this time they should have been able to come up with some level of compromise solution.

I can say from personal experience that Apple started losing people the moment they released the App Store but refused to allow employees to participate. They created an incredibly exciting platform for development and then locked their best people out of it. No wonder some of them left.

The problem is now magnified because today there is much more uncertainty in regards to Apple's future. Jobs is gone, Forstall is being moved out with no obvious successor, Google/Android is taking the lead, the stock price is stagnating, iOS is losing its edge, PC sales (including Apple's) are slowing ... it looks like it could be the beginning of another "beleaguered" era soon. Who would want to stick around for that?

I think we've been here before:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwQkU7jLXRY#t=18s

I remember reading this a few years ago. I wonder if there have been any updates?