Ask Paul: May 30 (Premium)

Happy Friday! After a hectic couple of weeks, I'm looking forward to catching up and maybe even relaxing a bit. But first...
?‍? If you Build it, you are dumb
train_wreck asks:

Is Build dead? (More broadly, is there a future for big conferences, at MS and elsewhere?)

Before Build, I had had conversations with two people who both expressed concerns for the future of the show, based on low ticket sales. Microsoft cut prices, and I later learned that the internal target was 3,000 paid attendees, a figure it ended up exceeding, but only because of the price cuts. So it's unlikely that it allows this condition to persist. Whether that means changes to the show--perhaps online only, as per Apple, perhaps as one or more targeted shows (like an AI Build or whatever), or something else is open to debate. I assume it's being debated right now internally.

Related to this, .NET is on whatever schedule trajectory, and I've been wondering for a while now if the monolithic annual schedule with major and minor releases every other year is sustainable. Microsoft just changed the Windows App SDK, which isn't part of .NET, such that developers will be able to install individual components instead of the full package, and that will help with agility in the same way that the Windows team can and does deliver new features all the time and doesn't need to wait for feature updates (version upgrades). I wonder if .NET should do the same. Have the core platform on whatever schedule, and just ship language and framework updates separately. That could extend the lifecycle of each .NET release from a support standpoint, which I think developers would appreciate.

I mention that because the current schedule, with an annual release in November, doesn't necessarily make any sense. If Build is going to keep happening, and in May, perhaps the .NET schedule, and the associated messaging, should shift to that schedule too. The .NET releases--and thus the virtual .NET Conf event that accompanies each--are always timed near Ignite, which is primarily an IT conference, and in some cases have actually overlapped, which is not ideal.

But the broader question here is whether Build makes sense as a single big annual show, or whether it should evolve or change into something else. This is a tough call. After the pandemic, many were looking forward to doing in-person events again, and of the companies I follow that do this type of thing, Microsoft moved the most slowly. And it lost things because of that. It lost all the people, in-house and external, that it had contracted with for that type of work, and so it also lost that institutional knowledge and memory about how to best do these shows. It lost contracts with the convention centers that could host such an event, and those places are often booked out years in advance. And it lost a significant portion of those companies that had been willing to pay to send developers and other employees to these shows because they...