Apparently someone at Oracle thinks, it’s the perfect time (at the doom of worldwide economy recession) to squeeze some extra money from customer pockets and charge for OOW presentation material. I found their offer one of the most ridiculous (stupid) one that I encountered in the last 10 years. Let’s see what they offer:

• if you’re lucky that you could attend OOW 2008, then you can access pdf’s for free. Big deal, because they’re really not free, considering overpriced registration fee.
• if you attended OOW 2008, but want to get multimedia content (or whatever “On Demand” means), you’ll have to shell out 400$
• of course, you can also get DVD Kit for a mere 200$. (Imho, that’s close to the robbery.)
• anyone who was not a full conference attendee must shell out 700$ to get “On Demand” access. (Yeah right, suckers who missed — or could not afford — OOW will rush and order On Demand access.[grin])

I have a strange filling that Oracle is digging it’s own hole in which it’ll end. If I can hold up with Oracle greedy attempt to charge for multimedia content access, I think it’s unfair to charge 400$ to those who already paid full OOW registration fee. For the first time, OOW pdf’s are not going to be available for free to Oracle community at large. Personally, I think this is not a big deal for us after all, because I’m sure all big names will publish their presentations on blogs. On the other hand it’s certainly a headache for Oracle public affairs department – with such cheap moves they’re casually gambling with their reputation. Nothing new in the West.

Regards,
AlesK

p.s. Next week I’ll attend Microsoft event related to Windows SQL Server 2008 and I certainly don’t expect to be ripped off by them.