Edible Apple

Tickets for WWDC 2011 sold out in record time, and if you happened to be away from the Interwebs this past Monday, there’s a good chance that you missed out on any opportunity to snatch up one of Apple’s $1599 tickets.

With the rise of the iPhone and the growing number of OS X users, developer interest in Apple’s OS platforms have never been higher. That notwithstanding, Apple has kept the size of WWDC steady over the past few years and has not expanded the conference to accommodate the significantly greater interest in OS X and iOS development.

As a result, some are clamoring for Apple to step up its WWDC game and adjust to a reality where Apple is no longer a niche platform. To that end, Erica Sadun writes for TUAW that Apple is under-serving the developer community at large by limiting attendance to just 5,000 individuals.

To remedy that, Sadun suggests a few possible scenarios to alleviate the avalanche of interest in Apple’s lone WWDC event, such as having separate OS X and iOS developer conferences.

And there are only 5000 seats available? What worked for a niche OS isn’t scaling to a popular mobile platform. Compare with Oracle’s conference, where they entirely shut down streets to serve more than 40,000 participants.

Your resource scarcity is creating irrational frenzies, which hardly serves the community whose entire existence is there to support your company and its products. Today’s scenario didn’t even ensure the best developers will be there — just the fastest with a credit card.

Our take: WWDC isn’t broken, just wildly successful. The allure of WWDC is its relatively small size and the personal interactions it provides with Apple engineers and other developers.