The gist of it: if you took a drink every time someone at Google IO said AI, you are dead now, and will thankfully miss every Google product with “AI,” patronizing you to a slow death. For one of the fangs in FAANG stocks, Google certainly gave a toothless representation of itself. And if you are focused on the whole, gee, a foldable, here’s my last word on that subject:
Google IO – The Ennui
There is way too much empty packaging to go through to get to the meat of any of the announcements made at Google IO. I tried to distill it down to bullet points and a table below. Feel free to knock yourself reading Google blogs by Kool Aid drinkers if you want to learn more, and if I am wrong, it was a lot of really great, meaningful technology being launched, drop me a line at [email protected].
For now, I wasn’t joking about taking a drink every time someone said AI on the stage. You’d have been passed out within the first two or three minutes. This was the executive suite letting their investors know that they have AI, and the stock price has risen handsomely to acknowledge contentment.
It doesn’t really matter how you slice and dice the application of AI across Google. The company is primarily driven by advertising revenues and you can guarantee some of the greatest minds in artificial intelligence will be put to task to find more efficient ways to show a contextual ad for lawn furniture as an overarching goal of human achievement. What is not clear is how the vast ecosphere of e-commerce sites, publishers, and businesses that rely on Google’s search for traffic are going to get out of it.
When it comes to Android, yes, it’s great that there is something, anything, to take on iOS, but it is also a piece of software that is half open source and half owned, meaning that it never quite knows what it is supposed to be. Quality control, lack of a cohesive strategy across devices, and very inconsistent hardware support are just some of the reasons why it is hard to get excited about Android updates. If you want to see a strategy that works, try Huawei’s Harmony OS. I’m fine with being spied on by a foreign government as long as I get a platform that seamlessly integrates phone, computer, car, and TV. As long as Google doesn’t get hardware, which it has never gotten, then Android is just a default choice for OEMs, sometimes even a cop-out. It’s great that you have Android Auto, but I can’t attest to its likely success because I don’t get the bigger strategy. Automotive displays are going to evolve in their own unique ways, the car OEMs are going to try and avoid having any reliance on companies that they can’t rely on, ie, all the major tech players, and while they may accept a car connect here or there, there really isn’t a Harmony OS-like integration of platforms to be had. If Apple had done an EV, yup, it would have happened, but Apple chose to a mixed reality headset. Go figure.
For mere mortals, there was certainly nothing on the hardware side to amaze. If you want to talk about the Pixel Fold, well, it’s $1,799. That’s a non-starter right there, for a Pixel phone, maybe Samsung can get away with it, and Apple definitely can, but not Google, free Pixel Watch or no free Pixel Watch. Pixel Tablet was a lot more meaningful, in my opinion, but this is Google, again, and you can’t trust the company to have a clear strategy on these products. The company throws hardware up, doesn’t really sell that many, and then just drops them or pretends no one is still using them any more, often catching users totally unawares. The only reason Pixel products exist is because mobile search is a very big deal to Google, and it needs a reference design for its Android developers to promote its own agenda over competing customizations from OEMs.
Ads, More Ads, and Even More Ads
One we learn every year at its developer conferences is that Google is never changing. It is the same company that it was 10 years ago, and will be for another 10 years. It needs advertising revenue, it needs eyeballs, and it needs to leverage the two biggest drivers of those eyeballs: search and YouTube. The addition of AI into almost every service that Google has—from Workspace through to Photos— is eating up the functionality of casual photo editing sites, and some of the crappier, so called AI-powered, content service providers. The only saving grace is that Google may actually be in a better position to identify deep fakes better than most because it has deep pockets, and hence liability issues, and it’s going to be hard for smaller, nefarious sites to compete with its free stuff. Google won’t be driving traffic out of its networks to whole slew of sites. If you want an analogy, you only have to look at how Microsoft killed the competition with Microsoft Office, or Netscape with Internet Explorer: Google is just killing off segments of the SaaS market and a whole band of publishers, bloggers, and content providers.
Shopping comparison, sticking a comprehensive AI-generated answer to a search query, voice control, photo editing—every piece of data that everyone has gladly given to Google over the last 20 years—is now mind-melded into Google’s AI training program. This is a search monopoly, and unless something happens to change that fact, the cost of being seen on the internet is going to grow and be out of reach for many. This is not alarmist. This is, in fact, what has happened over the years with every Google search algorithm update, and every search page redesign: the company has reduced results to mean a handful of top 3s, and added as much content as it could to keep the user on its pages, while adding more and more sponsored and paid-for real estate to each page.
How many times have you done a Google search recently, and mistakenly hit an ad that comes up at the top of the page thinking it was the top result?
I am not a great believer in the end of times scenarios for AI, but I am very unsure as to how this is all going to play out in practical terms. There’s a range of opinions on AI and its impact, some to one side where it is not important or relevant at all, and some to the other side, where it will take away half the jobs in the world, and eventually turn into a sentient being that will… I have no idea. It’s all rather jejune. Somewhere in the middle, you have natural language interfaces that will make users feel like they can rely on and trust a source of information—it’s a likely emotional reaction—and you have good and bad sources of information, and no clear indication of how they can be differentiated. It might end up being the new doom scrolling and replace the hours everyone spends on social media. It could happen.
If you have anything to prepare for out of all this it is realizing that organic reach on the Internet will be reduced for many businesses. That means you are in thrall to Google, Meta, and TikTok. I think that will drive the retail sector to look at digital out of home (DOOH) more and more, and I think connected TV (CTV) advertising offers a great deal of hope. I can’t believe I have to be positive after losing a day of my life to Google IO, but for the display industry, there are greater opportunities to be had because Google, Meta, and TikTok are the three horsemen of the Apocalypse. You don’t want to wait for the fourth one to get going (no, not Bing. There’s never been a reaper of souls called Bing and there never will be).
Product Updates and Launches from Google IO
| Device | Display | Processor | RAM | Storage | Camera | Battery | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Pixel Fold | 7.6-inch OLED display (2208 x 1860 resolution) | Google Tensor G2 processor | 12GB of RAM | 256GB of storage | 12.2-megapixel main camera, 12-megapixel ultra-wide camera | 4,600 mAh battery | $1,799 |
| Google Pixel 7a | 6.1-inch OLED display (2400 x 1080 resolution) | Google Tensor G2 processor | 6GB of RAM | 128GB of storage | 12.2-megapixel main camera, 12-megapixel ultra-wide camera | 5,000 mAh battery | $499 |
| Google Pixel Tablet | 10.95-inch LCD display (2560 × 1080 resolution) | Google Tensor G2 processor | 8GB of RAM | 128GB of storage | 13-megapixel main camera, 8-megapixel ultra-wide camera | 8,000 mAh battery | $499 |
- Android 13 is the latest version of Android, and it includes a number of new features and improvements, such as a new design language, improved performance, and new privacy features.
- Android Auto is a new version of Android that is designed for cars. It includes a number of new features, such as a new dashboard, a new navigation experience, and a new way to control your car’s media.
- Compose for TV is a new way to build user interfaces for TVs. It uses a declarative syntax that makes it easy to create beautiful and interactive UIs.
- Google Maps is getting new features, such as Immersive View, which lets you explore a location in 3D before you go there.
- Google Assistant will have the ability to translate languages in real time, among other things.
- Google Wallet is coming back, and it will be a unified way to pay for things with your phone.
- Google Home is going to do more, such as the ability to control your smart home devices with your voice.
- Google Meet will allow you the ability to blur your background and the ability to share your screen with multiple people at once.
- Google Cloud is adding services to train machine learning models on your own hardware.
Product Churn at Google
| Product | Launch date | Discontinuation date | Reason for discontinuation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Wave | May 20, 2009 | August 2, 2013 | Lack of user adoption |
| Google Reader | July 1, 2005 | July 1, 2013 | Lack of user adoption |
| Google Buzz | February 9, 2010 | April 1, 2013 | Lack of user adoption |
| Google+ | June 28, 2011 | April 2, 2019 | Lack of user adoption |
| Google Glass | April 4, 2013 | January 15, 2015 | Technical issues and privacy concerns |
| Google+ Hangouts | April 10, 2013 | November 2, 2019 | Replaced by Google Meet |
| Google Allo | September 21, 2016 | March 17, 2019 | Replaced by Google Messages |
| Google Expeditions | May 18, 2017 | February 20, 2020 | Replaced by Google Arts & Culture |
| Google Trips | September 10, 2015 | September 5, 2020 | Replaced by Google Travel |
| Google Play Music | November 15, 2011 | December 3, 2020 | Replaced by YouTube Music |
| Google Cloud Print | January 1, 2010 | January 1, 2021 | Replaced by Google Cloud Platform |
| Google+ Communities | July 29, 2016 | April 2, 2019 | Replaced by Google Groups |
| Google+ Collections | December 15, 2015 | April 2, 2019 | Replaced by Google Keep |
| Google+ Games | April 10, 2013 | April 2, 2019 | Replaced by Google Play Games |
| Google+ Photos | May 1, 2015 | April 2, 2019 | Replaced by Google Photos |
| Google+ Profile Pages | September 24, 2011 | April 2, 2019 | Replaced by Google My Business |
| Google+ Pages | September 24, 2011 | April 2, 2019 | Replaced by Google My Business |
| Stadia | November 19, 2019 | January 18, 2023 | Lack of user adoption and competition from other cloud gaming services |
| Nexus Q | February 24, 2012 | October 19, 2015 | Lack of user adoption |
