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I was very enthusiastic about Google I/O in the past (around the year 2010). Full of nice tech talks; I learned a lot. These years, I couldn't care less. It's a
by danwee 3y ago
I was very enthusiastic about Google I/O in the past (around the year 2010). Full of nice tech talks; I learned a lot. These years, I couldn't care less. It's all business talk. I guess developers are not the target audience anymore (and for newcomers, perhaps the "I/O" may be misleading).
- numbsafari 3y ago“Income” and “on-boarding” are what those letters stand for.
- gumballindie 3y agoGoogle is a factory and software is manufacturing. They want to sell their goods to managers not engineers. Makes sense if you think about it. Most of what google does is yesterday’s tech, the web isn’t new and they aren’t making bank by selling stuff to software devs. We want free stuff, preferably open source. There’s so much of it anyway that it has zero value. They might babble a bit about how ai can replace workers and further reduce wages.
- capableweb 3y agoAll of that makes sense for Google in general, but Google I/O used to be explicitly a developer conference, with everything targeting developers, which no longer seems true.
- packetlost 3y agoThat was when Google thought they needed the support of the "developer" community that they don't write the paychecks for. Now they make nothing new or interesting, or on the off chance they do, they kill it after it proves not to be a cash cow.
- Andrew_nenakhov 3y agoGoogle had built itself such a reputation, that no developers would want building stuff using their tech. Thus, shift to focusing on executives.
- adventured 3y agoRepresentative of the shift from creation to extraction.
- DrScientist 3y agoSame sort of thing happened to WWDC. I once worked somewhere where the only people who actually went to WWDC where the IT admins and Apple fans,rather than developers. From a developer perspective - online if so good now, why do you need to travel? ( unless you really want 1:1 with Apple/Google Devs ). So the only people who travel end up being the people their for the 'event' and the 'one more thing' excitement.
- vineyardmike 3y agoI think conferences have long been about the socializing and the excuse to travel. “Learning” was the pretend business excuse.
- ghaff 3y agoThe getting away from the day job and serendipitous discovery are benefits in addition to meeting with people and socializing. But I think a lot of conference goers approach it as a sprint to maximize sessions and if that’s your goal online is probably more efficient.
- i_love_cookies 3y ago[dead]
- intrasight 3y agoSame. Google invited me to participate and have a booth - in 2010 or 2011 - because we were an early business adopter of their APIs. It was a cool event. I think the hot new tech that year was NaCl. I don't think startups get invited now just for using new Google tech. And is a reminder that this year's hot new tech will be forgotten in a few years.
- ricktdotorg 3y ago> I don't think startups get invited now just for using new Google tech You're right about I/O. The once-fat "invite adopters to conference" coffers seem to have been transferred to their Cloud Next conferences instead.
- azangru 3y agoI looked at the schedule for the web section, and some of the talks look useful. Much has been done in the browser space: new CSS capabilities and webgpu among them.
- jsnell 3y agoIf you pick 10 random sessions from the program[0], I'd think the odds are that you'll end up with like 8-9 technical sessions or workshops. The keynotes of course target a more general audience, but that's always been the case. (E.g. haven't they been announcing consumer hardware during the keynotes basically from the start?). It seems in line with something like the WWDC, which is a developer conference but with a general audience keynote. [0] https://io.google/2023/program/ https://io.google/2023/program/
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y agoI haven't tuned in for the past few years, but I will today because I'm just curious to see how (if?) Google responds to the ChatGPT phenomenon.
- gabereiser 3y agoI think their response has been pretty clear so far. They don't have a plan. https://bard.google.com/ https://bard.google.com/ https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/01/tech/geoffrey-hinton-leaves-google-ai-fears/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/01/tech/geoffrey-hinton-leaves-g... https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/13/google_lamda_sentient_claims/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/13/google_lamda_sentient... https://www.wired.com/story/google-timnit-gebru-ai-what-really-happened/ https://www.wired.com/story/google-timnit-gebru-ai-what-real...
- cubefox 3y agoAs you wrote this, they announced PaLM 2.
- gabereiser 3y agoYeah, and I realize my point of view is unpopular here. Integrating across all their services is just doubling down on what they already took from GPT. I didn’t see anything that wowed me. Cool, so I can LLM in Gmail and workspaces. Cool, so I can build a job description based on what others are hiring for instead of my company’s needs. I’m not saying that any of this is easy, just that it’s simply novelty. PaLM 2, we’ll have to see how it performs but it looks promising but it’s just another GPT-4 competitor. Where’s the “while the world was ogling over GPT-4, we built this”? PaLM 2 isn’t distinctive enough for me to say they are paving the way. They totally get it, but they aren’t paving the road forward. Maybe next year.
- m0zzie 3y agoHeh, yours and other comments here disparaging I/O as "business" or "corporate" talk these days come across as quite ignorant - and I don't mean this in a nasty way, more in a literal way. It seems perhaps you're missing the fact there are many different styles of talks for many audiences. At every I/O there is a "keynote" and a "developer keynote", and similarly there are business / product talks and developer-focused talks. In fact, they even create entirely separate playlists on YouTube for the dev/non-dev talks. As a Staff Eng who leads and mentors engineers who live in a world where they have no choice but to use Google SDKs and services, I find many of the developer-focused talks invaluable for getting others in my team up to speed on what's new and what's coming soon. Most of these talks are given by engineers and involve concise code examples which quickly convey the gist of new functionality.
- echelon 3y agoGoogle can pretend they're not IBM, but that doesn't make it true. Google no longer innovates or launches products of note. They throw ideas at the wall, like spaghetti, and hope things stick. Perverse incentives create competing products, dead end projects, and invariably everything created winds up getting cancelled. Google got drunk off of easy search ad revenue. Their founding leadership went off to do zeppelins and politicking. Now that golden goose looks like it may be cooked. Google had the Bell Labs of AI research, but their ability to build product around it looks a lot more like IBM Watson. Over the next half decade, their top tier talent will leave and get venture funding to do their own things with their own equity.
- m0zzie 3y agoDid you mean to reply to a different comment? I'm not sure what relevance this has to my comment which you're replying to?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- echelon 3y agoI meant it in response to your comment. > As a Staff Eng who leads and mentors engineers who live in a world where they have no choice but to use Google SDKs and services, I find many of the developer-focused talks invaluable for getting others in my team up to speed on what's new and what's coming soon. This sounds identical to IBM developer outreach. Or Ballmer-era Microsoft. Similar straightjackets, captive audience. We'll see if Google can excite people about AI here, but I'm doubtful.
- WhereIsTheTruth 3y agoSame here, I lost interest
- mooreds 3y agoIt wasn't always tech talks. I remember going to Google I/O in 2008 and sitting in a bean bag chair about 30 feet from "Flight of The Conchords", who were performing live. Fun times. Ah, look, I blogged about it: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/475 https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/475
- atonse 3y agoI was at Google IO 2008. Amazing times. Wore the t-shirt until it was so badly faded and torn. But back then Google was at the forefront of open standards and pushing the web forward. It was an exciting time for sure. Far from the Google of today who can’t seem to run a project for more than a couple years.
- malermeister 3y agoIf you want tech talks from Google, Android Dev Con is great. I wonder if there's anything like that for other parts of their business.
- kellengreen 3y agoI completely agree. I'm a multiple year attendee, and couldn't be bothered with the announcements these days.
- whalesalad 3y agoit's actually really depressing for me to watch. it feels like google is a shell of their former selves.
- pjmlp 3y agoSame here, it used to be quite cool, but with the multiple reboots on Android frameworks, lack of updstes enforcement for OEMs, how the Kotlin advocates talk about Java, and the sorry state of NDK tooling, I lost interest. Only the Web talks are relevant, as the Web is now basically ChromeOS.
- Analemma_ 3y agotbh, I kinda blame the media for this. At some point the media decided that I/O was Google's competitor to Apple's consumer keynotes, and so it was forced to become that in order to avoid weeks of "Google disappoints at I/O" headlines.