Google NEXT Day 1 keynotes
The Day 1 of Google Next keynotes were brutal. They showed lack of preparation, lack of execution and lack of planning. Things went south starting from registration, where the conference organizers had no clue of how many will show up and how to register them. As a result, the lines went around 6–7 blocks and in my estimate approximately 30–40% of the attendees could not attend the keynote. I could see several frustrated attendees in the line.
The keynote itself started on a low energy vibe. It felt like Diane Green does not have her heart into this thing and wanted to get thru the motions of reading words on a screen. They brought in several “enterprise” customers who were not clear about how they are using Google Cloud. They did not articulate the value of GCP to them. eBay was good because it included an actual working demo. Other customers felt like they were thought leadering.
Nearly half way thru the keynote, things changed. When Google Cloud chief scientist came on, she turned things around. She had quite exciting announcements on new machine learning models with Vision, Videos. Honestly, this is the most exciting area in all of Cloud in my opinion. Dr Fei Fei is an exceptional presenter, and I think she should have done the entire keynote ( actually, she should run entire Google Cloud division ).
Eric Schmidt was boring. He repeated things he has been saying for last several years and there wasn’t anything new there that I could see.
Unfortunately, Day 1 keynotes were a missed opportunity — they left several gaps. Failed to portray a vision for Google Cloud. They could have done the following:
a) Explain vision for Google Cloud — where do they see Google Cloud going
b) Identify customer usecases and show sample customer adoption
c) Differentiation from other cloud providers — “we are Google, damn it” isn’t working too well. Neither is taking indirect shots at S3 downtime worked that well either.
d) Where does Google see customer Cloud journey going?
e) Why is Google Cloud most compelling for customers?
Hoping that day 2 and day 3 can recover from this disaster. I wish Google Cloud folks nothing but best of luck. They have the potential, but need bit of discipline and execution to deliver a compelling message.
Thats all folks.
