Are Tech Conferences Overrated? (cnn.com)

"The tech industry has reached a maximum saturation point for conferences, summits and forums," writes CNN's senior media reporter, sharing his general disillusionment after Recode's recent Code Conference: But even at their best, these events fail to generate truly significant news because executives have been media-trained to the point of impenetrability... [S]peakers like Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and Spotify CEO Daniel Ek have mastered the art -- there should be a German word for it -- of speaking for 30+ minutes without saying much of consequence or going beyond their comfort zone... [I]n two days, nothing was said on stage that fundamentally changed the existing narrative for any of these companies... Business executives are more strategic and more cautious than ever in how they speak publicly. The business media needs to be equally strategic in pushing them to say more.
He argues that the best things about conferences happen offstage, when attendees network and talk among themselves. Is that your experience, Slashdot readers?

Share your own thoughts in the comments. Are tech conferences overrated?

Comments

business executives?

[jb_nizet]

If the speakers are business executives and the target audience is CNN journalists, it's not a tech conference. It's a business/media/marketing conference.

Techies speak at actual tech conferences. And I usually enjoy and learn quite a few things in the tech conferences I attend to.

Re:business executives?

[swb]

I think that's the problem generally, though. Most conferences that were once technology oriented have been taken over by business and marketing people who realize it's one more avenue to press their strategic message.

I'm sure there still are conferences that still push the hands-on, more vendor-neutral technology. But aren't these also a lot of BS? There may be side panels or something that can be interesting, but I also find them to full of people I swear are just professional conference attendees, blowhards and schwag collectors.

I sometimes wonder if I'd just be better off checking into a hotel room for 3 days with a flash drive full of new ISOs and a stack of manuals and just using the relative isolation to have a crash course in something new.

No

[phantomfive]

Recode's Code Conference, which just wrapped up here in Palos Verdes, is the gold standard of US tech conferences.

It's not the "gold standard" of tech conferences. What do you think tech is, a place where celebrities try to make news by drinking a lot?

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and Spotify CEO Daniel Ek fail to generate truly significant news

Oh, yes, apparently that is what you think. Even though those are business leaders and not tech leaders, people don't go to these conferences to hear news, that's what a newspaper is for. They go to hear the ideas of the speakers, learn from the minds they presumably admire.

A real tech conference is more like DEFCON or Abstractions.io or SIGGRAPH. People who speak actually understand tech, not how to market it.