If you are waiting for a surprise bombshell of a product announcement at Google I/O in San Francisco this week, you may be disappointed.
Speaking to Wired, Google’s new head of Android Sundar Pichai said of I/O, “It’s going to be different. It’s not a time when we have much in the way of launches of new products or a new operating system.”
What does that mean exactly? Are we not going to get a new version of Android? A platform update to Chrome? A new Android Nexus tablet or smartphone?
Events like Google I/O, Microsoft Build, Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference and similar events tend to follow a fairly simple script. The CEO will get on stage, do a little cheerleading and pump up the numbers of units sold, dollars made and developers paid. Then a variety of division chiefs will get on stage and announce new aspects to their products (like Andy Rubin talking about Android at previous I/Os). A few new products will then be introduced and hyped to get some buzz going. After the keynote, there will be about three days of sessions and meetings aimed at developers.
Last year, Google followed this script almost perfectly. Until people started jumping from planes.
Google went off-script in a huge way last year by introducing Glass, its augmented reality glasses that are currently the most-hyped item among the Technorati. Glass was introduced by Google co-founder Sergey Brin and a live demonstration of Glass-wearing stuntman jumping from a plane over San Francisco commenced. It was one of the strangest (and coolest) twists of a keynote presentation in recent memory.
If we can take Pichai at his word, we are not going to see any of these pyrotechnics this week at Moscone West.
“Both on Android and Chrome, we’re going to focus this I/O on all of the kinds of things we’re doing for developers, so that they can write better things. We will show how Google services are doing amazing things on top of these two platforms,” Pichai told Wired.
So, we may not see any exciting new hardware at I/O this week. But we will definitely see a bunch of interesting developer news as Google rolls out tools to make Android richer, Chrome easier to build upon as well as features surrounding games, cloud and Google+. We will also likely see many, many mentions of Google Glass.
We will be at I/O covering all things Google this week. What do you want to see from Google? Let us know in the comments.
