This article was published 9 years ago
Commentary

Please end the three-hour keynote

Apple keynote iPhone iPad Mac
A stage at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. as the company is set to unveil new iPads. – Image credit: Flickr / Mike Deerkoski

Memorial Day has always been the unofficial start to Summer: a time to reflect, a time to travel, a time to eat with friends and family members. It also kicks off the Summer of developer conferences, where programmers flock to San Francisco to see what Apple, Microsoft and Google will unveil. It also means we have to sit through three-hour keynotes with slides showing if statements.

As I non-programmer that has some knowledge of computer code, what makes me extremely bored is watching a keynote with computer code on the screen and company employees pretending to get excited about FaceTime APIs. Even worse is when someone gets on-stage and actually starts writing code.

For the sake of humanity, please end the three-hour keynote!

This is mainly geared towards to Microsoft, who has to beg people to come to their developer conference. Apple has become the main event for developers – mainly due to the popularity of the App store and amount of money those apps generate – and the only reason people go to Google’s developers conference is to see what free crap attendees get with the price of admission. Last year’s gifts were a Moto 360 and either a Samsung Gear or a LG smartwatch.

Why they think it’s a good idea to make attendees sit for hours will forever be a mystery.

Microsoft was the biggest offender this year when they started this years’ developers conference with Azure – their cloud computing service that goes up against Amazon.

Why was this offensive? It went on for an hour!

AN HOUR!

AN HOUR OF LINUX AND WINDOWS CONTAINERS!

I don’t know why Microsoft started with Azure, especially since Amazon is the dominant online cloud provider. All Amazon does in their keynotes is announce another price reduction and the crowds starts back-flipping in their seats while making out with the person next to them.

I wish more keynotes were liked Google, they did it right.

What I liked about Google’s developer conference was they didn’t cram everything into one gigantic presentation. Day one would be the main attractions and the second day would be lesser known Google services like Analytics or Compute. Sadly, Google is abandoning the spread-the-wealth approach to keynotes and going with the default cram-everything-into-a-three-hour-presentation. I hope it’s not because of the price to rent the Moscone Center.

The good news is that we’re approaching the end. Apple is the last major developers conference and they – at least – make their keynotes enjoyable. And we go through the cycle again in 365 days.

But rest assure, when a random game developer walks onstage and talks about retina and gyroscopes APIs, I have the ability to drive to McDonald’s and order lunch. Those in the audience don’t have the ability to even stand up and stretch during the long keynote.