Make no mistake, Google’s had some seriously heavy stuff to deal with since its bombastic I/O keynote in 2012. The child-like innocence it’s always tried to convey with its bright corporate colours and cutesy logos took a massive beating in the wake of Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations and its unofficial “Don’t be Evil” corporate motto was hit hard by tax avoidance accusations from around the globe. This year’s keynote then had to be all about getting back on track.
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First up in that regard was Rube Goldberg-style countdown timer — something that’s fun, relatable and a lot less threatening than a bunch of people doing extreme sports — which kind of set the tone for the whole event.
The message coming from the various speakers — founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were curiously absent — was that Google still has a good story to tell and that the stuff it’s doing now matters. “We’re the company making sure you can have great experiences on cheap smartphones and the web,” it seemed to be saying, “not the company building deadly robots and alienating large portions of the San Francisco population.”
Weirdly enough, it sounded a little bit like Microsoft.
‘One consistent vision for mobile desktop and beyond’
In fact, the keynote started to sound eerily like the noises that have been coming out of Redmond over the past year or so at a fairly early stage.
No one listening to vice president of design Matias Duarte talk about Google trying to build “one consistent vision for mobile desktop and beyond” with its “L” developer kit wouldn’t have walked away thinking that it sounded like something that Satya Nadella, and Steve Ballmer before him, would say. Then again, it would hardly have been out of place in an Apple keynote either.
You could obviously argue that the world’s just heading that way, but the infuriating thing is that Google’s pretty much been bet placed to implement precisely that kind of vision for years now, but never really seems to have figured out how.
With L, it seems to have done that. Gone are the cutesy, made-for-mobile features and design. In its place is something that is, dare we say it, grown up. Duarte was certainly using grown up language to describe the new version of Android. “In the real world,” he said, “every small change and position in depth creates subtle but important change sin lighting and shadow.”
More evidence of this central vision could be found in the wearables Google launched, alongside Android TV, and Android Auto — which basically brings the Android experience, alongside Google Now, to your car.
The next billion
It’s not just Android features and high-level implementations Google’s trying to fix though. It’s made a lot of noise about targeting the “next billion users” in previous years, but this time it seems to actually have a plan beyond “let manufacturers build cheap smartphones and slap Android on top”.
First up in this regard was Android One, a stock Android experience aimed at emerging market phones and a partnership with three manufacturers in India that will result in the launch of a sub US$100 4.5-inch Android phone.
Any phones built using Android One will also come with features like FM Radio and Dual SIM capabilities, things which are considered vital in most emerging market countries.
Not all business
There were however a couple of reminders that Google still likes to wear crazy underpants and socks underneath its newly-donned grey suit. Anyone who uses their an Android device for fitness tracking would’ve been pretty stoked to hear that Nike Fuel will be publishing its info on the Google Fit platform, alongside the likes of Adidas and Intel.
Perhaps the biggest moment of whimsy however, comes in the shape of Cardboard, an app that that allows you to Macgyver a Virtual Reality experience using your phone and a few scraps of cardboard.
While the vast majority of I/O was therefore about reminding people that Google’s serious about business and not about to be derailed by all the things that have happened to it over the past few years, the Mountain View company also clearly doesn’t want us to forget that it can still gets its running shoes on and play every now and then. So no, there were no skydivers and very little flash, but there’s no doubting just how important this year’s I/O is to Google.
