WWDC 09 Roundup

✎ Published: 2009-06-19 10:30:30

WWDC 2009 revealed notable shifts, highlighting Apple’s brand strength and a transformed audience. Increased participation from women and business professionals marked a departure from the traditionally geek-centric crowd. As the iPhone continues to dominate, the influx of diverse attendees indicates a move towards greater commercial interest and a more varied participant base at the conference.

WWDC 09 Roundup

WWDC 2009 Here's another WWDC roundup. Although there're already very good ones out there I decided to try and tackle things that seem to have been neglected so far. Since this was only my third WWDC I might see things from a different perspective than those die-hard Mac developers who've been attending the conference for +10 years. Gruber already pointed this out, but the past 3 years have been rather iPhony: 2007 was on the verge of the first iPhone release with everyone demanding a SDK. 2008 introduced this very SDK and already drew lots of developers who were bright enough to see the potential of the platform. This year, then, marked an even stronger iPhone theme as the platform grew and assimilated lots of developers very very quickly. The growing of mobile development wasn't the only visible change however. I'll try to address another two visible moments of change: (1) Jumping at the Apple momentum and (2) a changed audience.

(1) Apple has steadily improved and refined its brand. Most current consumer ratings place the Apple brand at the top of the list. Our modern society introduced and needs brands as a method of reducing the complexity that the free market as well as globalization bring along. An unbelievable huge amount of slightly differing and ever updating products for any kind of problem can't hardly be understood and processed by a single person. We're using mechanisms like journalism / reviews, peer information / opinion leaders or brands in order to artificially limit the range of choices we have to process for coming to a purchase decision. Brands are especially interesting as they allow to overshadow primary product dimensions: A great brand makes up for product features, product price or product support. If we have a no-name product, we scan for technical features or price. If we have a branded product, most people don't.

This means that jumping the Apple brand bandwagon sounds like an excellent opportunity to improve sales without improving products (covering problems, so to say). This is why WWDC was almost overshadowed by companies and people trying to feature their products in context of the Apple brand momentum. Around Moscone there were literally tons of people handing out flyers describing interesting up to weird services. There was a truck featuring a big advertisement for a flight simulator game that drove around Moscone all day all week - talk about saving the frakin environment. I even got approached by a 11 year old (or what) advertising his iPhone App Review club or something. And apart from that, there was the weirdest thing of them all: The iPorn Party; a desperate attempt to get developers into a strip club and (sucessfuly!) land articles for a small porn portal in the main Apple related media. The idea of a porn company trying to improve its perception by advertising in the context of WWDC - a conference geared around Mac Development - would have sounded very very awkward just two years ago.

(2) There was a tangible and visible change in the actual people attending WWDC. Sure, there were still the regular geeks with funny hats, witty (in a technical fashion) shirts and (not seldom) interesting beards. But more than ever before, there were two new types of attendees: Women and business people. I think two years ago I could count the attending women by hand. This year there were far more. As someone on Twitter wrote: This was the first time that, in a WWDC session, two girls were sitting next to each other. Probabilistic factors hadn't allowed for such an event to happen in previous years. Not that I want to conclude anything from the looks of a person, but many of them were good looking too, and dressed in a way that, if you'd see them on a street, wouldn't let you think they knew how to fire up XCode (please bear with me here, I'm not in any way misogynic). Apart from this, there were lots of business people around. Wearing suits, sometimes even walking around with Thinkpads and Windows. I conclude from this, that the iPhone halo has put the conference in a light, that will bring along fundamental changes. For next year I expect more business, and all in all a more heterogenous audience. The Mac & iPhone are strongly moving away from a niche or geek market to big money.

Summarizing just like shit attracts the flies money attracts the big business. Let's hope they don't corrupt the very nice Apple culture with their processes, calculations, economics and no fucking clue for interface design.