I was over on Ryan Stewart's Blog reading his latest blog entry about how Adobe wants to charge MAX conference attendees $10 for a poster of a visual map of the class inheritance in Flex and of AS3. Now, this is a conference where the average attendee will spend $1200 to $2000 just to go and additional $$$ for incidentals. So on top of all that, they now have to pony up $20 bucks for posters? Are you kidding me?
Mike Potter and John Dowdell of Adobe try to rationalize this by saying that “attendees will ask for more than one poster” and “its coming out of a technical marketing budget”. SO WHAT! For pete's sake, Adobe talks about how they want a million Flex developers in the coming years and now they're getting cheap on posters?? This from one of the largest software makers in the world??? That's pathetic.
This is not a matter of watching the pennies. This is just plain being cheap, especially for such a costly conference. I've attended events from Sybase, Powersoft, & Microsoft where they've given out posters, books, software and cool gadgets all in the name of getting mindshare. Even if nobody bought anything, chances are that they landed several developers that will, down the road, endorse their products.
I have to say that ever since Allaire was acquired by Macromedia, this “squeeze blood from a stone” mentality has persisted and its a shame. People loved Allaire because they made it easy to get the information you needed to be successful.
Luckily, there are a few folks at Adobe that “get it” like Ben Forta and Sean Corfield. They get that us developers need information and that we're not “rich” and that not all of us work for big corporations that have big budgets to arbitrarily buy posters or even attend conferences.
So yes, I find it “PATHETIC” that Adobe would charge MAX attendees who are flying out on their own dime for information. Your marketing department should be ashamed.
