Google I/O sold out in an hour

by Volker Weber

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Lotusphere used to be like that 10 years ago.

Comments

Last year Google and sponsors gave everyone 2 different Android phones that retail $500+ each. I think that might have something to do with the increased demand.

Damien Katz, 2011-02-07

To be fair it might still be like that if it cost $450 and everyone thought they would be given a new top-of-the-line smartphone :)

Kirk Kuykendall, 2011-02-07

it still sucks.. friends of mine tried to register since the first minute (after it was posted on twitter by @googleio), but just got 503 errors for > half an hour until everything was sold out.. not nice.. i got lucky since i attended it last year, i hope people not just registered because the phones were sent out by mail last year and don't even show up..

i don't understand why google hasn't anticipated this and found a better solution than to let users walk through dozens of coldfusion error messages to find out who can attend this year...

Herbert Poul, 2011-02-07

I hoped a quite sarcastic person as Vowe would have mentioned that the registration web site was built on ColdFusion...

Not to say that IBM does not do the same, but Google claiming to be so "different", so "smarter" than the rest of us poor humans...such a shame !

Michael Bourak, 2011-02-07

Perhaps the choice of CF/IIS to serve the registration was a deliberate choice in order to throttle simultaneous requests, thereby extending ticket availability :) Ticket vendors for major music events in the UK do this. Registration on App Engine might well have seen tickets sell out in 5 minutes.

Jeff Gilfelt, 2011-02-07

I expect them to fix it somehow for next year. Ticket sales are a great example for cloud scalability.

Volker Weber, 2011-02-07

I would somehow expect a company that gets 90%+ of their revenue from advertising to be good at, well, advertising.

Lotusphere seemed to peak 10 years in. It'll be interesting to see where Google is in 2018.

Darren Duke, 2011-02-08

Yes, they are selling quicker, but Google is selling only 5500 seats. Which is, to my knowledge, fewer people than Lotusphere has today (excluding students).

Ingo Erdmann, 2011-02-08

I heard it's due to scalpers going in for the freebies then selling on the tickets later on (freebie-less). Google should not give out any free stuff - then the dev guys would get a chance to attend

Chris Coates, 2011-02-09

@Chris : but this is google strategy to give "gifts"...even when we talk about other things than events ! For developers, they release tons of stuff as open source and convince all of them than using them is SOOOOOOOOOOOo much cooler than all the rest of the tools around....

And GMail ? Don't you think it's cool ? I think it's the worst UI design I've seen in years !!! Imagine if IBM had release such an horrible mail "template"...Vowe would have written an entire book about it...

But they are "in the mood"...for now...

Michael Bourak, 2011-02-13

Michael, I am working with this "worst UI" every single day.

Volker Weber, 2011-02-13

Sure, but do you find it that usable ? dare I say "beautiful" ?
(beside being usable from anywhere, from any device, and with unlimited storage...which all webmail offerings provide nowadays more or less)

Michael Bourak, 2011-02-13

I find it very usable. And I made it beautiful.

Years ago I used to run a Domino Server, then replaced it with Cyrus, when I noticed how broken Domino's IMAP service is. Now even the Cyrus server became redundant.

Volker Weber, 2011-02-13

Ah, the IMAP story...but I agree on this.

I find Gmail ugly and not that usable. It breaks some basic ergonomy rules but, when you are the leader, that is some kind of things you can affoard : and if you are lucky, some will even call it innovation ;-) Google wave anyone ?

Michael Bourak, 2011-02-13

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