About twelve years ago I got onto a coast-to-coast flight in the cheapest seat of the worst airline I’ve ever been on to attend a a tech event. It was equal parts Star Trek and Willy Wonka with promises of futuristic, ambient computers ready to sort your ever whim at the speak of a simple wake word coupled with literal 10-foot tall robot-arm bartenders making drinks on command… all while none other than Billy Idol performed “White Wedding” live just 15 feet from me. Yep, it was an event-slash-party done the way only Google could do, especially at a time when their geekish-whimsy was still in full bloom.
Fast forward more than a decade and things are somehow still very much the same and also wildly different.
Google I/O is still very much a thing… the goal of everyone in the room in one-way-or-another is still to build the computer from the Starship Enterprise… and, okay, admittedly Billy Idol probably didn’t make this one. Substitute A/I or Gemini for Google Assistant, Flow for Google Play Music, and Project Aura for Google Glass and we’re suddenly partying like it’s 2013!
But remember that part about it also being wildly different?
Google isn’t the teenager-of-a-company that it was in 2013. It’s many times larger, sure, but also has many times the pressure, responsibility (to shareholders), and existential threats that seem to mount more and more every day.
Gemini is coming to Chrome… but what if Google suddenly doesn’t own Chrome? Google Beam lets you hold a meeting with someone virtually as if they’re really there… but what if more and more people are just down the hall again to have a meeting with? Google AI Search will do all the Google’ing for you… until there’s no more web pages left to search because no one visits them anymore.
It’s far from a death knell, but it’s impossible to say that the air at altitudes that Google breaths isn’t getting a bit thin as time goes on. But, at the end of the day, Google took the stage, announcements were made, and we’re left (as always) to answer one question… what’s next?
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