What do you do when you’re Microsoft, and your biggest rival is throwing their biggest software shindig of the year? Why, you throw an aftershow party around the corner and invite all the attendees.
Anyone for flambéed Apple?
Apple’s next Worldwide Developers Conference kicks off on June 13 at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. It will see the great and good (and just plain lucky) of the development community assembling to learn about the future of OS X, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS.
Microsoft just couldn’t let such an opportunity go to waste, it seems. The company has announced that it’s holding a ‘WWDC Afterparty’ on the evening of Apple’s keynote, just a couple of buildings away from where Apple’s big event is being held.
In fact, this really represents two opportunities for Microsoft. The obvious one is to steal a little of Apple’s thunder. But the second opportunity is to capitalise on all of these developers gathered in one place, and to prod them to keep Microsoft’s platforms in mind.
Related: What to expect from WWDC 2016
Indeed, Microsoft is calling this the ‘Xamarin & Microsoft WWDC 2016 Party’ – Xamarin being the recently acquired Microsoft subsidiary that deals in cross-platform app tools.
In addition to free booze and grub, Microsoft will be offering WWDC attendees “exclusive one-on-one time with a Xamarin Test Cloud Engineer to walk you through the best way to automate testing on your apps.”
Now that’s the kind of party invite you can’t refuse.
Microsoft Surface Book review:
What do you think? Cynical publicity stunt or genius strategy from Microsoft? Let us know in the comments.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
