| > Shoreline Amphitheatre That's really too bad. I've been going to Google IO for five years and that venue they moved to last year, Shoreline Amphitheatre, was a disaster. They had insufficient room for all the talks. So I waited an hour for the first talk I wanted to attend, just to get kicked out of line due to the room reaching capacity. Then I gave up my next time slot to wait in line 1 time slot ahead of time for the third time slot, but once I got in they kicked me out saying I couldn't come in one time slot before, everyone is kicked out at the end of each. Throw in a really bad set of key notes - the Android one did have some useful content for developers, but everything else, Allo, Duo, Google Assistant was just Google's marketing arm exploiting a captive audience to try to get future users and wasn't anything useful for me as a developer. Add in a ton of VR talks all citing their special remote control, but they didn't give us one of them, so we all kept developing on our Gear VRs anyway. This was the first Google IO I'd been to with no development hardware. At the end I asked for a refund since I had really gained nothing as a developer and just spent a long time waiting in lines and not getting any content and Google refused. As far as I can tell, it is their intention to make it a music festival from now on and not developer focused. Going to something like AndDevCon would be much more valuable. It's too bad, really, because professional conferences like GDC make sure to poll users to find session interest ahead of time and make sure they plan capacity correctly. Google IO was just useless amateur hour co-opted by Google marketing to exploit some captive press and potential users of their new chat apps no one likes. |