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Comment by retskrad | Hacker News Reader

Google is working on some interesting stuff but their live events aren’t doing them any favors. There’s no hype leading up to them and the events themselves are dull as hell. Google currently has only 40k people watching the live event. Apple WWDC events attract 10X as many concurrent viewers.

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There's no hype because they don't have anything to show that deserves hype. It's all the same: AI to improve photos, AI to improve translations and small iterative improvements to Android that you swear were shown at a Google IO event years ago

Edit: watching the livestream and they've just announced an Android tablet! Honestly this déjà vu is getting ridiculous

Not to mention Google Wallet, an "amazing new" product by the same name of an existing product they keep renaming and haven't finished retiring yet. They could just say they were updating Google Wallet or whatever it's called now, but I guess you don't get promoted for that.

I laughed when the Pixel guy (before announcing the tablet) said they don't usually announce products so far in advance. Has he seen Google I/O?

> said they don't usually announce products so far in advance

gLighting

The tablet announcement is funny too. Another generation of people who haven't been through multiple cycles of this by now are gonna be run through the process of believing Google when they say they're focusing on tablets for real this time, until they launch their tablet and get bored of it a year later and then you wait a few more years before Google makes a totally real commitment to tablets.

The "remove people and stuff" feature for Google Photos that they just announced had already been announced 4-5 years ago. We are still waiting.

Maybe they'll launch a new messaging service.

We're all getting very frustrated at that point.

When are they going to announce "Corporate restructuring with a focus on product dedication"...

It's so consensual it's screamingly obvious and yet Google isn't aware.

The AR glasses bit was especially underwhelming. Basically faked the entire video

Honestly, I preferred the days when developer conferences were for DEVELOPERS and not consumers. Announce APIs, DevTools, demo new stuff developers can use. Back when I/O was "Google Developer Day" and used to be mostly Web-tech, I found it way more interesting, more of a hackers conference. The modern conferences are more about commerce, even on the developer side, and not simply about the Joy of Cool Stuff and Cool Hacks.

These days Apple and Google use developer conferences as pseudo-consumer product soft launches.

IMHO, consumer end user launches should do done at consumer conferences.

Still, compared to Apple, Google's keynotes still contain more stuff of interest to developers like PaLM, LaMDA models, and a change to play with them. Apple's WWDC keynotes are usually so dumbed down, their graphs don't even have numbers of axis labels.

> Apple WWDC events attract 10X as many concurrent viewers

Apple does the best job of anyone in the industry (imho) of building awareness and excitement over their events, developer or otherwise, but I think it is important to note that the WWDC keynotes (not the State of the Union), are also treated as proper consumer-facing product events, not just a developer keynote. As such, the audience is going to be much larger.

Back in the day, when Larry and Sergey were running things day to day, I/O definitely had more of that energy (they year Sergey jumped out of the plane and then walked on stage was bananas) and could pull Apple-like numbers, but that’s not what I/O is anymore.

40k concurrent for virtual conference that could be a series of blog posts and pre-recorded talks is actually pretty strong, IMHO.

Good point about the keynote - I think that’s why this year’s WWDC is basically just that for in person (++SOTU)

All of these events are dull. I don't see why WWDC get people any more hyped except that they have a lot more fans.

WWDC and other Apple events justify more hype because they are market leaders in mobile. When you watch an Apple event you are often seeing things for the first time. Google Pixel is blatantly copying the Apple product portfolio, from custom chip designs to now Airpod Pro clones. Where would Google be with Pixel if Apple didn't exist? It is literally spun up division to copy the most valuable company in the world. We shame Huawei and these Chinese companies for copying, but look in our own backyard.

"Picasso had a saying -- 'good artists copy; great artists steal' -- and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas." -Steve Jobs

The question is: are these companies 'copying' or 'stealing'? Hopefully they can improve on things rather than just copying.

I carefully chose the word "copy" because I know this quote well. It's hard to define the difference between copy and steal but it's easy to see by example. You just feel it when you watch.

The funny thing is the best way to degoogle is to use Hawaii phones.

> Google Pixel is blatantly copying the Apple product portfolio, from custom chip designs to now Airpod Pro clones.

Google relentlessly copies every other company in the industry, and it's been going on for years now.

>You can look at Google’s entire portfolio of launches over the past decade, and trace nearly all of them to copying a competitor: Google+ (Facebook), Google Cloud (AWS), Google Home (Amazon Echo), Allo (WhatsApp), Android Instant Apps (Facebook, WeChat), Google Assistant (Apple/Siri), and on and on and on. They are stuck in me-too mode and have been for years. They simply don’t have innovation in their DNA any more. And it’s because their eyes are fixed on their competitors, not their customers.

https://steve-yegge.medium.com/why-i-left-google-to-join-gra...

You can do the same exercise for Apple and find loads of copying, but Apple fans will say the Apple feature or product somehow wasn't a copy. Even in your own list, there are Apple copies, like HomePod and App Clips. Earin preceeded Airpods (along with a long line of bluetooth earpieces).

Apple has copied tons of features from Android, Chrome, and Maps over the years, mostly ignored, but as soon as Android gets a feature iOS had, Apple fanboys make a huge deal over it. Apple's been playing this game for decades, all the way back to the era of constantly accusing Microsoft of copying "Redmond, start your copiers!"

Apple literally stole Spotify's entire business model for Apple Music, and then turned around and used their platform ownership to punish them. Apple Fitness copied Fitbit and Peleton. Apple TV+ basically followed everyone else getting into streaming. Hell, it appeared at one point, they were even going to copy Tesla by making an EV.

All major tech companies have a 'copy, acquire, kill' strategy for competition. Apple is not different.

When I did a lot of dual-platform mobile dev, the teams would always watch Google and Apple events.

The Apple ones were exciting, because they'd usually announce a bunch of OS and development-related stuff we could start using very soon.

The Google ones were kind of a bummer, because the (appropriate and justified) mood in the room was "well, this feature might be cool to use... in five years or so." The only people who got excited about them were the hardcore Android fans who weren't excited about dev-facing features, but because they'd always buy whatever new Pixel or whatever that was announced, ASAP.

> "well, this feature might be cool to use... in five years or so."

At which point they'll deprecate it within a year or 2 in favor of their flashy new thing that will replace it

Also, it was interesting how quickly Apple made very good offline conferences after covid, as if they were developing it for years.

Apple's online WWDC content has very good production value, but a bunch of well-produced videos dropped over the course of a week don't really make it a "conference".

Microsoft, with their BUILD conference a couple years ago, actually had the best implementation of a COVID-era virtual "conference" that I've seen-- lots of actual live content (and live chat interaction), and to some extent some of the content was actually superior to a real-world conference because the online format (taking questions via chat) makes Q&A more feasible than it would be in person.

As someone who worked on the programming team for Build in 2020 and 2021, thanks for saying that. In 2020, especially, it was really difficult to pivot with as little time as we had. We did most of our stuff in 2020 live, even though it was remote (a few of us were in the studio but most people were at home), because we didn’t have the lead time to make it a well-produced pre-recorded thing. We were “live” across time zones (meaning people in the US (like myself), were often working at 3am, in order to bring live content to other parts of the world), for an ungodly amount of time, and the fact that it didn’t break was really great. Even though we had more production time in 2021, we still did a lot of live content (with on-demand, of course), across time zones, and focused on more breakout sessions too.

I’m not at Microsoft anymore (tho I might still do some stuff for Build this year, since I’m at GitHub), but being part of the team that got Build 2020 across the finish line is one of the things I’m most proud of. Microsoft was the first to do a tech conference in the pandemic (Google canceled, Facebook might have too), so we really didn’t have anything to base it off of.

Apple, naturally, just knocked it out of the park with the production values, but I’ll always love the scrappy nature of Build 2020.

> There’s no hype leading up to them

I was not even aware Google I/O was today

I literally didn't know it was going on. I usually tune in for at least a little bit each year, and went back when they launched Android for tablets.

The only thing I care these days about Google's announcements is "what did they break in Android this time?"

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