Financial Crisis Helps Conferences To Get Better

Did you notice how full and qualified this year's IT conferences are telling they are? I did.

Mostly every considerable IT conference which has survived announces the never-before-program full of the never-before-experts having the never-before-record of session suggestions with never-before-quality and generally a never-before-lot of responses to Call For Paper. Do you know why? I guess I do, though it seems very logical and shouldn't get mentioned.

The reason is the financial crisis this year. Experts seem to have much more time since experimental projects have all been stopped or are getting stopped now. Through the "good" years it was a very difficult thing to put an expert on a session since they could just pick up icing on the cake. Now it looks a bit different, and they fight for sessions. Provocation? Maybe. But also a fact.

The main problem and the real dilemma is that experts talk only to experts through those conferences since the customer representatives are not going to those events because they must save money. All those exhibitors are left alone talking to each other without a chance to sale anything.

The technical quality of the conference is getting better, but the sponsors are at least worried. It's a doom loop, and it will never happen that both come in one piece.

So, I think the financial crisis helps conferences to get qualitatively better, but the return on invest for sponsors is absolutely minimal this year. Sounds like self purpose to me.