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Time To Bring Back the Software User Conference (zdnet.com)
Holger Mueller, writing for ZDNet (condensed for space): Every tech company has a user conference these days. And is it just me, or are they all starting to feel the exact same? Same announcements, same message, same speakers, same venue. Rinse, repeat. On top of this sameness, irrelevant gimmicks and lack of substance threaten to drag the tech user conference into obsolescence. But all is not lost. Here are a few areas in which tech conferences are going astray, and a few ideas about how to fix them.
It's about the product. Users attend conferences to learn more about a vendor's software. So product needs to get a lot of air time. Yes, services matter too-but it's the product that people have taken time out of their busy schedules to learn about.
Have a motivational speaker who matters.
Demo software. Many attendees are expert users. Vendors need to demonstrate they, too, are experts with their own product. The best way to do this is to demo the product.
Subject expertise beats celebrity. Yes, user conferences are about inspiration, but a celebrity, soap opera star, or a talk show host is not something an enterprise software user can relate to their work and is definitely not why they spend 3-4 days and a few thousand dollars/euros to attend a conference.
Limit the philanthropy. It's great for vendors to give back to a purpose outside of the software. But it should not be 50 percent of a keynote.
Users want to network. Vendors should give users a chance to network. Not just informally, but in a planned way.
Party hard but responsibly.
It's about the product. Users attend conferences to learn more about a vendor's software. So product needs to get a lot of air time. Yes, services matter too-but it's the product that people have taken time out of their busy schedules to learn about.
Have a motivational speaker who matters.
Demo software. Many attendees are expert users. Vendors need to demonstrate they, too, are experts with their own product. The best way to do this is to demo the product.
Subject expertise beats celebrity. Yes, user conferences are about inspiration, but a celebrity, soap opera star, or a talk show host is not something an enterprise software user can relate to their work and is definitely not why they spend 3-4 days and a few thousand dollars/euros to attend a conference.
Limit the philanthropy. It's great for vendors to give back to a purpose outside of the software. But it should not be 50 percent of a keynote.
Users want to network. Vendors should give users a chance to network. Not just informally, but in a planned way.
Party hard but responsibly.
Sotware products, not smartphone apps.
All those dead are good, but one problem I've noticed at conferences in recent years is, it seems like a lot of attendees are not fully into the material.
Conferences would probably be better if they were smaller but more dedicated. That would limit networking a little bit, but if you had smaller and more regional conferences the quality and usefulness of networking would probably be higher.
I also think most software (development and use) conferences could use a LOT more hands-on training opportunity. You can get a ton of videos on development or using any software these days, so to me real value that brings me to a conference is (A) to get to speak directly to developers to provide feedback and ideas, or (b) to be able to have some hands on the wit truly expert users who can help me with problems I may be having, by working with me in person.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I can see the lawsuits piling up from here, and you haven't even made a conference yet!
Ly! Nut cases party hard.
These user conferences are not about software, it is about bigwigs to go and make contacts. While us working folks, can get our work done uninterrupted.
The last time I been to one of these, I had more interest looking at the other vendors booths to see what they are doing and where the market is shifting. The actual speeches and stuff, were just a wast of time.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Everything was going fine, but then they had to add those last two words!
More seriously, I've seen too many people completely non-functional the second/third day of a conference because they drank too much the night before. And these are adults who should know better (although my guess is the kids just managed to hold the same amount, or more, of liquor better.) Don't go crazy just because [large tech company] is picking up the tab.
In seriousness, the author goes to 40+ conferences a year. Of course he has very different requirements from people who go to 1 or 2. You see this in anyone whose business involves going to a lot shows like this.
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it's sold to management. When it to sales know your audience. If a guy comes into a truck dealer with a hot wife and he's looking for a $15k plain white work truck you ignore him and sell the wife a $60,000 Cadillac.
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What industry are you in? Automotive has them
Same announcements, same message, same speakers, same venue
Of course.
There are a bunch of companies out there that offer conference-as-a-service. From travel to accomodation, venue, decoration to social events - of course taking special dietary, cultural and religious needs into account - you can outsource your conference. Of course they're trying to be unique, but they still base everything on their expirience and "best practice"
bickerdyke
Thats it, im going to dox this troll. And then im going to get the owners of this jungle to ban every IP address. in fact, we will ban anonymous here and have users register known IPs. we are going to stamp this out.
The one and only.
That is because these conferences are run by marketing and sales. The marketing people are using it as a platform to show how useful they are to a company, and the sales people are using it to generate leads. What you want is a technical conference, but tech corporations are rolling in money so aren't very interested in technical things at this point.
A lot of older bands have set up shop in Las Vegas, providing the entertainment at conferences and the like. One time I suspected they brought in a bunch of local kids to dance in front of the stage while pretending to be show attendees.
https://postgresconf.org/
These companies really don't care what users think. They want users to mindlessly consume. They want to imprison users in convincingly safe and comfortable walled gardens. User conferences are all marketing, hype, and corporate image management.
What the software world needs are heckling sessions, where users get to pour out their frustrations over the people responsible for them. That includes the developers who leave software littered with bugs and illogical behavior, UI designers who rearrange the whole interface for no good reason and marketers who force user-hostile behavior into programs.
All of these conferences are useless. Here's what I want to know:
What does your product do?
How much does it cost?
If you can't answer that on a single page on your website, you're full of shit.
Every so often we get these stories that take the normalcy, the status quo, and portray them as innovative. On the one hand, thatâ(TM)s ok - things normal to me may be new to you, and vice-versa. Itâ(TM)s also good to see others doing good things you are already doing. On the other, itâ(TM)s not much fun to read...
The advent of digital platforms for communication has nullified a lot of reasons to have official conferences. Digital platforms are far less expensive to use and you can still get most of the same impact without the cost.
The last time I went to WWDC, I managed to scrounge together a set of technical presentations to go to. I distinctly remember sitting through a Grand Central Dispatch presentation where the presenter really was dumbing things down for the audience. Which was probably fair, because even the "real developers" audience these days contains a huge proportion of people who are only functional when you equip them with a few hundred third-party libraries to do important work like "trim whitespace from the ends of a string". When tech enthusiasts fight hard to get tickets to your developer conference, it waters down the technical chops of your audience, and it also attracts sales and marketing and product-management types, and that's just not what a good developer conference needs.
Same basic thing happened to Google Developer Day and Google I/O. And a bunch of the "conferences" other companies put on weren't even anything more than sales and marketing product-release events to begin with.
Time to bring out a new mod -2, for just this sort of off-topic crap.
I've attended the SHARE conference for the last few years, it's been going on for more than 50. For those not in the know it's a user conference that's focused primarily on IBM System z and its associated ecosystem. Point by point on the checklist in TFA I can say it passes for the most part, there was a bit of a hiccup with one of the keynote speakers last year in San Jose but for the vast majority of the speakers I've heard they've been relevant and useful. If other parts of the computing ecosystem want to see how a user conference should be run I highly recommend they attend SHARE. Great mix of in-depth product demo sessions, hands-on labs and technical sessions that are often delivered by product experts and/or people who have or are involved in development. I can speak mainly for the z/VM and z/OS security content but there's no other conference I'd rather attend each year.
I miss SUCing very much. I wish I'd have an opportunity to be a SUCer again. I just want to SUC so bad.
Then i quit reading.
I don't care.
Websites are developed by marketing. So of course they contain no information.
But you need to buy something to solve a problem.
At the conference, with a bit of luck, you can actually find a product manager and possibly even an engineer. Priceless.