Ask HN: Google Next 24 is over. Anyone else disappointed?
* EVERYTHING was about Gemini (Google's generative AI). It became the running joke in the hallways and tram and eating area. News flash: not everything needs or is approprite for gen ai. So at this conference, anything not related to gen AI was left out. There's a talk about XYZ? No. There's a talk about shoehorning gen ai into XYZ.
* So. Much. Marketing. I'm a technical person. I want technical details. I want A LOT of technical details. I need to know how different products interact with other products and what the limitations are so that I can actaully plan out how to use your product. But there was only high-level marketing information given most of the time, so it was a complete waste of time. Don't forget the gen ai....
* The demonstrations often fell into two camps: cringey and useless (not mutually exclusive). Of course these talks are practiced, but it's obvious when someone is reading from a script. Just don't. They were mostly useless, though, because they didn't give any technical details or, when they did, the code was so small that it was unreadable. The guy next to me tried to use his phone as binoculars to zoom in, but then it was still blurry. You have a 30 foot screen... why is your code in 10% of it, and the rest is whitespace? That's right, it's because your whole UI has too much whitespace, too. (Really... just look a the BigQuery studio screen, for example, and notice how much of the page is taken up by useless, non-collapsable whitespace!)
* The app just didn't work sometimes. The app didn't transfer your "likes" from the website. The app made it cumbersome to find out exactly where things were located on the map. There was no direct link, so you had to back out of one area of the app to get into the map, only to find that the name didn't match up directly, so now I had to back out of the map and re-find the thing that I was looking for, simply to have to back out of it again and re-navigate to the map. Yeah.
* One. There was exactly one talk that I went to that had any value whatsoever. I'm glad that I went to it, but out of 3 days of conference talks, to only find one talk (on the 3rd day) that wasn't a waste of time was, in a word, disappointing. Other coworkers also found a talk that they really appreciated (we went to different talks because of the overlap), but that means that it was pretty much impossible for a single person to find multiple talks of value. It's all a gamble (which I suppose is why the conference was in Las Vegas).
* The expo. That was the best part, because Google had their actual engineers there, and they were pleasant enough and polite enough to answer pointed, technical questions. They were not marked. I found the first one by talking to someone, who sent me somewhere else, and that person sent me to a different place, but I eventually found them, and it was amazing! They were then able to point me to other people who could answer questions about other products that I use.
* In short: too much advertizing, not enough technical. Too much "this is what we want you to know about Google's gen AI" and not enough "this will help you to better use out product."
Am I alone? Am I simply jaded?