Google I/O


SAN FRANCISCO—Another Google I/O is in the bag, granting us a glimpse at the gutsiest, geekiest, goofiest, get-shippingest octopus conglomerate in all of Silicon Valley, warts and all.

Make no mistake, Google has warts. Lots of them. But the warts are also what give the search giant character, what make it the necessary yin to Apple's yang in the world of consumer technology. The warts are what make Google still seem like a bootstrapped operation, a startup being run by two brainy college buddies, rather than a profit-gobbling megacorp relentlessly papering over the Internet with ads and in the process compiling scary data dossiers on all of the world's computer users.

The company's annual developers conference was its usual grab bag of awesome mixed in with meh. Speaking of bags, the famous Google I/O swag bag for attendees was bursting with more goodies than ever before—an Asus Nexus 7 tablet running Android 4.1 Jelly Bean ($199), a Nexus Q home media hub ($299), Samsung's new Chrome Box mini-desktop PC ($329), and a Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone ($349) ... plus Sony's new Google TV set-top box ($199), which was handed out at an after hour's party Thursday evening. If you're keeping score at home, all of that gear adds up to $1,375 in gadgetry, or a 153 percent rebate on the $900 price of admission to Google I/O.

Let's take the proverbial 30,000-foot view of the conference and try to suss out what it tells us about the world's most interesting tech company and how it's positioning itself against the competition.

Google Versus Apple
It's impossible to overstate the extent to which Google and Apple have become polar opposites. Google is Chaos, the purveyor of creative destruction, throwing any and all ideas up against the wall to see what sticks in a madcap, never-ending roller coaster ride of anarchy. Apple is Order, carefully doling out incremental, seamlessly integrated upgrades to a minimalist product line that creates and defines an aspirational hierarchy for modern times.

The I/O swag bag highlights one of the many ways Google lives at the opposite end of the spectrum from Apple. The search giant wants the developers attending Google I/O to get their hands on its latest platforms and gear so they can start developing for them. The fastest way to do that is to hand the stuff out for free, right? Not by Apple's lights. Apple barely serves up any swag at all to the hordes who attend its own Worldwide Developer Conference. And why would it? WWDC attendees are going to camp out to buy the next iPhone, iPad, and MacBook Pro anyway—free gear is just lost sales.

Apple lives by the credo, "Leave the audience wanting more." I'm not sure if those specific words have ever been uttered in that particular order at the Google campus.

Nothing illustrated this at I/O more than Google's wild, audacious Project Glass demo on day one of the conference. Not content with giving the audience an unprecedented thrill ride, Google came out the following day and actually did the whole thing over again with a play-by-play from co-founder Sergey Brin. This isn't a criticism—not only is Google to be admired as the only tech firm out there with the guts to do something as risky as the Glass demo, but it's actually endearing that it also couldn't help violating the most basic rules of stagecraft in doing so.

It's weirdly ironic that Google, the tech firm with the most closely guarded special sauce in the business, its search algorithms, is also the one that's always busting at the seams to show us how all its other magic tricks work.

For example, I counted a dozen times at Google I/O that keynote presenters appropriated the late Steve Jobs's "it just works" line while demoing stuff like Google Drive. This is the phrase the Apple co-founder frequently used when describing a new product feature. For Jobs, the line was shorthand for, "don't ask how the yucky sausage gets made, just press the pretty little buttons like I'm showing you and thank me for making you feel superior." It was a conversation ender, our cue to shut up and let Apple sweat the details.

Comically, the Google presenters would often use the "it just works" line as a launching pad for going into all of those gory details. It's almost like they'd been taught a few basic rules about disciplined messaging but once the bright lights came on, they were like, screw it, I'm a geek, I'm talking to geeks, and these people look they want to hear about nested TabHost workarounds for the next 10 minutes.

Branding is another area where Google and Apple have very different strategies—as in, Apple is all-branding, all the time and Google doesn't appear to be aware that there is such a thing. The Project Glass goggles? Aesthetically, they're in the orthodontic headgear stage of design. Steve Jobs would have rather cut out his own right eyeball than let those lopsided prototype glasses anywhere near the face of an Apple employee appearing in public. The Nexus Q? It doesn't say "Google product" so much as it says "refugee from a mid-1980s Sharper Image catalog."

Again, this is not a criticism so much as an appreciation of Google's flaws, which can be frustrating, but without which, Google wouldn't be half as interesting.

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