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Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person conferences

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Re: Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person conferences

#61

Post by blub »

kod wrote: post #37
ansible wrote: post #18

This is somewhat off-topic, but has anyone else been disappointed by O'Reilly's website these days? I was disappointed to learn about them discontinuing the sale of individual ebooks, but sort of rolled with it by just buying them from another vendor. Now it seems I can only sign up for online learning. What is that? Yes, I can start a free trial, but wouldn't it be nice to know what I might want to spend $500 USD pe…

Get an ACM membership. It includes full access to oreilly books.

You mean over Safari or as pdf?

Re: Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person conferences

#62

Post by redis_mlc »

driverdan wrote: post #6

Quite frankly I won't miss large, overpriced, junket confs like O'Reilly's. They were too expensive for most people to justify attending without corporate sponsorship. The expo halls were full of enterprise sales pitches with minimal substance. They also had sponsored keynotes which tended to be sales pitches. If you go to meet people instead of selling your product go to smaller confs put on by local organizers.

Every word you said is true. Yet you entirely missed the point of O'Reilly conferences.

> Quite frankly I won't miss large, overpriced, junket confs like O'Reilly's.

It's not all about you, and you're not the center of the universe.

This isn't commonly known, but the O'Reilly Open Source Conference was specifically glitzy so the global press had a good experience broadcasting it, and promoting Open Source, since around 2000. They also had about 10 simultaneous tracks, which requires a large venue. That costs real money.

> They were too expensive for most people to justify attending without corporate sponsorship.

Their prices are clearly posted on their registration pages, and they offer generous alumni discounts. And most IT people work for ... wait for it ... corporations.

> The expo halls were full of enterprise sales pitches with minimal substance.

Companies pay for those booths. If you don't like their pitch, you can ask for a technical contact to followup. Or not visit them.

Personally, I walked around to each booth and ask for an overview of their products and asked detailed questions, then blogged about it for others who couldn't make it to the conference.

So they are valuable, if you're in the right frame of mind.

> They also had sponsored keynotes which tended to be sales pitches.

The larger sponsors have the chance to do a keynote. That's how it works. A small percentage of keynotes at O'Reilly conferences are outright sales pitches. The rest aren't. The most valuable ones I saw were the 451 Group market analyses of upcoming trends, which I wasn't expecting to be valuable initially.

Ironically, I heard the most complaints about a keynote delivered by a world expert on HA from VMware - the problem wasn't the talk, the problem was he was a decade ahead of most of the attendees. lol.

The Percona Conference does it right: they have a track with a dedicated room for vendor-sponsored talks. So everybody knows what to expect before sitting down. Yet they still get plenty of attendees.

> If you go to meet people instead of selling your product go to smaller confs put on by local organizers.

Or, you know, you could just go to a bar. But I'm sure you would gripe about the wallpaper color they chose, right?

Re: Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person conferences

#63

Post by [deleted] »

redis_mlc wrote: post #62
driverdan wrote: post #6

Quite frankly I won't miss large, overpriced, junket confs like O'Reilly's. They were too expensive for most people to justify attending without corporate sponsorship. The expo halls were full of enterprise sales pitches with minimal substance. They also had sponsored keynotes which tended to be sales pitches. If you go to meet people instead of selling your product go to smaller confs put on by local organizers.

Every word you said is true. Yet you entirely missed the point of O'Reilly conferences. > Quite frankly I won't miss large, overpriced, junket confs like O'Reilly's. It's not all about you, and you're not the center of the universe. This isn't commonly known, but the O'Reilly Open Source Conference was specifically glitzy so the global press had a good experience broadcasting it, and promoting Open Source, since arou…

[deleted]

Re: Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person conferences

#64

Post by andrepd »

matchagaucho wrote: post #47
driverdan wrote: post #6

Quite frankly I won't miss large, overpriced, junket confs like O'Reilly's. They were too expensive for most people to justify attending without corporate sponsorship. The expo halls were full of enterprise sales pitches with minimal substance. They also had sponsored keynotes which tended to be sales pitches. If you go to meet people instead of selling your product go to smaller confs put on by local organizers.

Dreamforce hit this tipping point around 2015 where it just became too big for any practical purposes. Most people are there for the free swag, parties, and booze. The sessions have increasingly sensationalized titles with hollow delivery. The local hotels charge $500 night. Uber and Lyft drivers converge on Moscone center like bees to honey. Local traffic in SF comes to a halt. Sounds fun. Right?

Sounds like websummit to me.

Re: Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person conferences

#66

Post by driverdan »

frandroid wrote: post #39
driverdan wrote: post #6

Quite frankly I won't miss large, overpriced, junket confs like O'Reilly's. They were too expensive for most people to justify attending without corporate sponsorship. The expo halls were full of enterprise sales pitches with minimal substance. They also had sponsored keynotes which tended to be sales pitches. If you go to meet people instead of selling your product go to smaller confs put on by local organizers.

Local events won't pull in luminaries from around the continent/world spending serious time preparing their presentation, though...

You can watch videos of these people online for free. And yes, many of them do speak at smaller events, especially in the Bay Area.

Re: Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person conferences

#67

Post by jen20 »

andrepd wrote: post #64
matchagaucho wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dreamforce hit this tipping point around 2015 where it just became too big for any practical purposes. Most people are there for the free swag, parties, and booze. The sessions have increasingly sensationalized titles with hollow delivery. The local hotels charge $500 night. Uber and Lyft drivers converge on Moscone center like bees to honey. Local traffic in SF comes to a halt. Sounds fun. Right?

Sounds like websummit to me.

Having been to WebSummit and Dreamforce (2014, admittedly, but I doubt it’s changed that much), I’d have to disagree. Dreamforce is huge and likely too big to be useful, but at least it’s a conference that pretends to have technical content and not a multi-level marketing scam like WebSummit and it’s “thought leaders” is.

Re: Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person conferences

#68

Post by ilamont »

lovehashbrowns wrote: post #51
ilamont wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also forced some publishers off the platform, even if they participated in Safari.

Do you know which publishers they pushed off the platform?

My company, for one.

The letter I received was a form letter which leads me to believe others were impacted, too:

We periodically review our partnerships and titles made available through our online learning platform, to ensure appropriate diversification, topic coverage, and audience fit. The learning platform customer base is rapidly evolving and growing, which means the learning resources we offer our customers must as well.

I'm writing today to let you know that while we have greatly appreciated your ongoing partnership with O’Reilly we have made the decision to not renew the contract for the distribution of XXXX content in the O’Reilly learning platform effective XXXX.

Re: Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person conferences

#69

Post by ryansmccoy »

ansible wrote: post #36
ryansmccoy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They discount the subscription 50% on black friday.

> They discount the subscription 50% on black friday. And if I read a dozen node.js books a year, that would be fine. But if I just want to read the one or two Rust books coming out per year... it is not such a good value.

True, make sense. I like being able to search across a variety of books for specific things (i.e. AWS, Go, React, etc) and some of the videos are pretty good. Also, I still buy a lot of books and being able to go through them before I buy them is really nice.
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