[PLUG] O'Reilly Open Source Convention "Locals Only" UG Discount (fwd)
Paul Heinlein
heinlein at madboa.com
Fri May 14 06:27:03 UTC 2004
On Wed, 12 May 2004, Alex Daniloff wrote:
>> So, yeah, O'Reilly, the speakers, and the hotel are all making
>> money on this thing. Does that really call into question the
>> integrity of O'Reilly publications? Do *you* work for free?
>
> First of all - Have you ever seen a vendor who charges potential
> customers for demonstration of his products? Have you ever seen a
> car dealer who ask you to pay for a test drive? Why don't you pay
> for every sales pitch?
I'm not following you here. I've only attended two O'Reilly
conferences (1999 in Monterey, and last year here in Portland), but I
wouldn't characterize the sessions as demos or sales pitches. Some
speakers were better than others, of course, but none of them used
their presentation time to sell a book.
> All this fluff and bluff like five star hotels and speakers are the
> vendor's business expenses not his customers'.
Anyone who'd confuse the Portland Mariott with a five-star hotel
either has not visited a five-star hotel or owns stock in Mariott. :-)
Seriously, however, the argument about expenses was mine, not
O'Reilly's. I was just trying to point out that there are plenty of
legitimate expenses to consider when evaluating the price of a
conference.
Admittedly, business-oriented technical conferences aren't cheap.
SANS, LISA, and the rest of them are out of my budget reach. I wish it
weren't so, but I'm not going to call O'Reilly's reputation into
question for trying to compete in that marketplace.
-- Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com>
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