I sat in the office yesterday with a beer in my hand watching the PDC2010 keynote. I have to say I preferred this to the option of a flight, jet lag and a less than comfortable seat in a usually overly cooled conference hall. With the Silverlight streaming the experience was excellent, especially as we connected an Acer 1420P to our projector/audio via a single HDMI cable and it just worked.
So what do you lose by not flying out? Well the obvious is the ‘free’ Windows Phone 7 the attendees got; too many people IMHO get hooked up on the swag at conferences, you go for knowledge not toys. They also forget they (or their company) paid for item anyway in their conference fee. More seriously you miss out on the chats between the sessions, and as the conference is on campus the easier access to the Microsoft staff. Also the act of travelling to a conference isolates you from the day to day interruptions of the office, the online experience does not and you will have to stay up late to view sessions live due to timezones. The whole travelling experience still cannot be replaced by the online experience, not matter how good the streaming.
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