WWDC Ticket Fiasco

(hypercritical.co)

John Siracusa on yesterday's 2 minute WWDC Ticket sellout fiasco:

Apple’s servers performed admirably…for about the first 5 seconds after tickets went on sale. After that, it was a crapshoot. Even if the tickets had sold out in an hour, it’d still effectively be a lottery if that hour was filled with server errors. You’d “win” if you happened to get through the purchase process with no errors.

An actual lottery, pre-announced, with no time pressure for entry, would be more equitable than what happened yesterday. That’s what I recommend for next year.

That would solve the ticket fairness problem, but do nothing for the inherent brokenness of a conference and developer relations program that has not scaled with demand.