Episode 46 - Google I/O 2023

Let’s just come right out and admit it… it’s been a weird few years in tech…

Pandemic-driven development cycles, evaporating supply chains, ever-moving targets around remote work… even the industry-wide layoffs of the last few months… It’s been a bumpy ride.

But the more things feel like they go off the rails, the more reassuring it is when something familiar, something “expected” occurs…

The COVID years saw our favorite moments in tech move to glorified infomercials, and with that went some of the magic of a live, on-stage announcement. But just as the world as a whole has been on a slow, steady march back to “the before times”, tech events have been returning to good-old-fashioned demos, glitches, and highly questionable event wifi…

Google I/O this year wasn’t its first back in the Amphitheater, but it sure felt like the first one where Google was “back” with a lineup of announcements across its verticals… hardware, services, emerging categories like AI… this one has it all.

Now, it obviously remains to be seen how many of these announcements translate into products that consumers actual use or, frankly, ever see a physical or virtual store shelf… But on the whole, while faced with a rapidly evolving frontier of AI and the looming specter of Antitrust, Google came out swinging, and if nothing else that just felt right

Pour a drink (because, like the event itself, this is a long one), and let’s see where Google I/O intends to take us one Bard query at a time…