As an industry analyst, I get to attend many technical events. Among those, four tech conferences standout – Apple WWDC, Microsoft Build, Google I/O and AWS re:Invent. As a technology enthusiast, I was looking forward to Google I/O. The keynote yesterday gave a glimpse of Google’s priorities for rest of the year. Though I couldn’t make it to San Francisco to attend the event in person, I wrapped up my work early to catch the live stream on the big screen in my living room. When the keynote ended at midnight India time, I was left confused and completely disappointed.
Google is a platform company with many assets under its wings. By the modern definition, a platform company has a few key pillars. Some of them are client computing, developer platforms, tools, and infrastructure. Apart from these, there could be other innovations that are unique to the company. Google has investments in most of these areas. On the end user computing front, it has Android and Chromebooks. For developers, Google has Go language, Polymer, AngularJS, a ton of APIs and of course, Android Studio. Google Cloud Platform is the infrastructure utilized by developers and system administrators to host applications. The startling fact from the keynote is that Google is only interested in showcasing Android. It ignored every other interesting and innovative product and service developed at Mountain View. Is Google all about the mobile OS called Android? I agree that it is important for the company but ignoring other pillars at the cost of Android is doing a disservice to itself and the community.
As a developer, I respect Google for many things. Go language is one of the fastest growing languages used in some of the most powerful open source projects such as Docker and Cloud Foundry. I was disappointed by the attention Google gave to Go. Why can’t it expand IntelliJ IDE used for Android development to Go language to make it the best developer tool? Go language didn’t even get a mention at I/O. The developer in me wanted to see more of Go and its integration with the IDE.
My other favourite Google technology is its cloud platform. Google Compute Engine team is doing a fantastic job that outpaces competition. Shared persistent disks, sustained usage discounts, preemptible VMs, faster boot times are just some of the examples of the innovations from the Google Cloud Platform team. Data services such as Pub/Sub, Dataflow and Bigtable are not inferior to the competition by any means. I was expecting Urs Hölzle, SVP of Technical Infrastructure to go on stage to highlight some of the cool features that his team has built. Google Cloud barely got a mention by Jason Titus, Lead for developer products.
Google lost another opportunity to showcase its investments in Internet of Things - Brillo and Weave. The maker community is buzzing with a lot of action. It is hungry to lap up new tools and technologies to hack around. Sundar Pichai, Senior Vice President at Google chose to show two slides explaining Brillo and Weave. But he left the developers with many unanswered questions. Would Brillo run on x86 and ARM? Can it be used on Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone? Would Weave support ZigBee protocol? A demo showcasing Brillo running on a real world device like a Raspberry Pi and integrating that with Android would have been a powerful way to announce the much talked about OS from Google. As a maker and tinkerer, I am disappointed again.
The most anticipated announcement was Google Glass which didn’t manage to find its place in the keynote. Same was the case with Chromebooks.
Google’s PR might argue that I/O is not an enterprise event and it has separate road shows planned to highlight Google for Work and Google Cloud Platform. But I/O is attended by tens of thousands of developers all over the world. It is the most powerful forum for Google to tell its end-to-end story to a huge community with a big voice. Even if 10% of Android developers start using Google Cloud Platform components like Firebase and Cloud Endpoints, the adoption will skyrocket. By not selling cloud to Android developers, Google is missing out on a huge opportunity.
I can’t help but compare Google I/O with Microsoft Build, which happened exactly a month ago at the same venue. Microsoft stole the thunder with an overwhelming number of announcements. What impressed the attendees was the attention to detail. Microsoft’s marketing machine chose to highlight every announcement through an elaborate demo. Seeing Windows 10, HoloLens, Visual Studio Code, Docker on Windows, and AzureML in action was very convincing. Google is not inferior to Microsoft in any sense. It is its style of messaging and outreach that makes the difference. Personally, I believe Google has the potential to make a huge impact beyond Android.
The new features added to Android M cannot be discounted. Google Now on Tap, App permissions, Android Pay, support for Fingerprint, and efficient power management capabilities certainly take the consumer experience to the next level. This is a big leap for both end users and developers.
I want to end this rant with a disclosure. Google recognized me as a Google Developer Expert for Cloud, a title that’s given to subject matter experts who passionately evangelize Google technologies to businesses. As a developer, administrator, hacker, and an industry analyst, I am disappointed by Google I/O 2015. I refuse to believe that Google is only about Android!
