People have been asking me two things all week—What did you think of Apple’s keynote announcements? And What did you think of WWDC in San Jose instead of having it in San Francisco? I largely covered my thoughts on the product announcements, including listening to HomePod, so I thought I’d give you some additional thoughts on WWDC in San Jose.
I’ve been trying to pinpoint all week how to properly explain my feelings on how I felt about WWDC in San Jose, especially for developers that previously attended the conference in San Francisco, but didn’t make it here this year.
The best way to explain it is that when you left the Moscone building in San Francisco, you effectively left WWDC. In San Jose, it feels like Apple set up a little city for developers—even a few blocks away, you felt like you were still at the conference.
There was a wonderful plaza setup out front of the convention center where people would sit and chat, eat, and do some work. The days of people sitting in every nook and crevice at Moscone has been replaced by comfortable chairs and tables that allowed for conversation and collaboration among attendees.
The only thing I would like to see is that the restaurants and bars nearby would stay open a bit longer each night to accommodate the crowd. They all closed pretty early.
WWDC in San Francisco felt like a tech conference. WWDC in San Jose feels more like a get together of friends. I really hope Apple decides to bring the conference back here again next year.
Thanks for the wrap-up, Mr. D.
I really enjoyed the venues and the easy accessibility of San Jose. I didn’t attend WWDC itself but I did AltConf (right next door!) and various other events such as the Beard Bash. 🙂 Everything was just superb. I too hope that Apple does it at San Jose again next year!
Nice. I miss the Boston conferences.
Still, nice to hear how it’s working out, although a little jealous. : P
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Personally I think the Giant Donut(tm) and moving the WWDC to a more bucolic environment are both symptoms of Apple isolating itself in the US exurbs. Yeah, a lot of people in the US live in not-very-dense exurbs where the facilities of the traditional city are not available or are actually banned, getting places by walking is difficult or impossible, and life is 100% car based. OTOH, and of people even in the US don’t live that way, and globally it is not very common. I get the impression that Apple senior management is withdrawing more and more to the exurban part of the country (and even of Silicon Valley) and shutting out the rest.
I did read that Apple took some space in the converted May Company business lofts in downtown LA, which is good. But rather than build the Donut I would advised them to move substantial chunks of their development, customer support, etc to distributed offices in the City of Chicago, Brooklyn, Atlanta (near the Atlanta University Center), Manchester (UK), some industrial cities in France and Germany, etc. Read How Buildings Learn and Cities and the Wealth of Nations and stop the self-isolation.
Ehh, San Jose Downtown itself is the largest urban node in the southern Bay Area, an area of 2 million people, and Downtown is growing faster than the rest of the area itself, so it’s pretty urban in and of itself.
Apple has, and always will be, a very isolated companies. Has worked out very well for them. It is what it is.
Absolutely. The Macintosh team isolating itself from professional users of the MacBook and Mac Pro, and the Photos/Aperture/iCloud team isolating itself from users with non-Apple imaging devices and those with iDevices smaller than 128 GB has worked out excellently.