IEEE Wescon Micro Trip Report
2005-04-12 07:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mdlbearOnce upon a time, the IEEE's Wescon was the West Coast electronics conference and exhibition. They had a fantastic set of panels, a green room where you could not only preview your slides but have your presentation professionally videotaped, a huge speaker's information packet with some of the best advice for presenters I've ever seen, and an exhibit floor that filled both halves of Moscone Center.
I'm not sure when it started going downhill; it was certainly much bigger the lat time I went, which must have been at least two years ago. (It alternates between venues in Northern and Southern California, and I don't normally go to the Southern ones.) This year the trade show occupied the smallest of the Santa Clara Convention Center's three exhibit halls, and had nothing to say to someone whose main interests are currently embedded software, single-board computers, and sensor networks. It seemed to be concentrating mainly on test equipment and interconnect hardware, though even there it was pretty spotty.
It also boasts (if you can call it that) the worst-designed convention website I've ever seen. Any volunteer-run SF con with an attendence of 150 would have been ashamed of it -- compare Wescon's site with GaFilk, Consonance, and SiliCon if you don't believe me. For pessimum results run Firefox on a 1600x1200 screen with a minimum font size of 18 pixels.
To do them justice, IEEE ran Wescon in partnership with various commercial trade-show organizers for the last few years (at least -- I don't know exactly how long, or whether they ever ran it by themselves), and so a few of the Bay Area chapters seem to have gotten stuck with the job of running it by themselves this year. And maybe nobody remembers how it was in the 1970's. On the other hand, you'd think there would be at least a handful of SF fen among their membership.
I'm not sure when it started going downhill; it was certainly much bigger the lat time I went, which must have been at least two years ago. (It alternates between venues in Northern and Southern California, and I don't normally go to the Southern ones.) This year the trade show occupied the smallest of the Santa Clara Convention Center's three exhibit halls, and had nothing to say to someone whose main interests are currently embedded software, single-board computers, and sensor networks. It seemed to be concentrating mainly on test equipment and interconnect hardware, though even there it was pretty spotty.
It also boasts (if you can call it that) the worst-designed convention website I've ever seen. Any volunteer-run SF con with an attendence of 150 would have been ashamed of it -- compare Wescon's site with GaFilk, Consonance, and SiliCon if you don't believe me. For pessimum results run Firefox on a 1600x1200 screen with a minimum font size of 18 pixels.
To do them justice, IEEE ran Wescon in partnership with various commercial trade-show organizers for the last few years (at least -- I don't know exactly how long, or whether they ever ran it by themselves), and so a few of the Bay Area chapters seem to have gotten stuck with the job of running it by themselves this year. And maybe nobody remembers how it was in the 1970's. On the other hand, you'd think there would be at least a handful of SF fen among their membership.
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Date: 2005-04-13 04:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-13 08:34 am (UTC)