I/O week

I may have made thousands of connections here over the year, but LinkedIn has always remained my least-used social network. With Twitter on the brink and all of the alternatives not quite hitting the mark for me (Bluesky revels in its weirdness, which only a few weeks in is already getting old, while Mastodon remains niche and nobody is on T2), I thought: heck, why not give LinkedIn a try. Since I've been thinking about newsletters for a while, this feels like the right venue for something like this. The plan is simply: link to a few of my articles from this week, maybe with a bit of extended commentary, a few thoughts about other things I've been seeing and reading, and see what develops.

I/O

This week was obviously the week of Google I/O. While the event has changed quite a bit over the years, it's still the company's premiere conference for showing off its latest and greatest. For the first time since the beginning of the pandemic, I/O was back in person, though with maybe half the number of people in attendance and many of them Google employees, it had quite a different feel from other years. It was definitely not the all-out party it used to be. In part, that was because the company cut it to a one-day event and except for the two keynotes and a small number of on-site meetings and conference-style talks, most of it was still online. In part, I think it also reflected a slightly more austere Google. The company didn't splurge on a massive concert, food options were noticeably pared back and the whole thing was basically over by 6pm. Easy for us as journalists, especially given that Google pre-briefed virtually everything ahead of time, but also slightly less exciting. But hey, unlike Microsoft, Google at least invited press to its premiere event.

Here are the most interesting articles I wrote about I/O:

To nobody's surprise, the focus this year was on generative AI. Google's strategy, I think, was long to build this technology into its productivity apps and make it available to developers through its cloud. But ChatGPT forced its hand to launch something competitive and OpenAI's alliance with Bing meant it had to bring generative AI into search, despite the potential consequences for its advertising business, or look like it was missing the boat and suffer the consequences on Wall Street.

I don't think Google really pulled ahead of any competitor this week, but at least it mostly pulled even. A lot of what it showed this week isn't available yet and will only roll out to a small set of testers in the coming weeks and months. It was enough to push Google's stock up in the short run, but with OpenAI's making plugins available to all paying subscribers this week, I can't help but think that Google is still playing catch-up, despite putting on a good show.

Next week

In my world, next week is going to feel like a breather. We're a week and a half out from Microsoft Build and the prep for that is going to keep me busy for at least a week or so.

Cheers,

Frederic