Why I'm Looking Forward to Google I/O Next Year

For BetterCloud, this year’s Google I/O was vastly different from the 2012 conference. Last year, I was the sole BetterCloud representative. This year, six team members attended. Last year, we had yet to publicly launch our product. This year, we have a product used by nearly 10 million people. Last year, we hadn’t established any formal relationships with Google Apps resellers. This year, we’re working with some of the leading resellers in the ecosystem.

While it was great to get a sense of the amount BetterCloud has grown and achieved in the last year, a few things about I/O remained constant – the sense of community and the inspiration I always come away with.

Community

Am I guilty of sprinting to get into the epic three-hour keynote on the first day of I/O? Perhaps. Did I record the near stampede on my Google Glass? Maybe. Do I regret either? Not really.

During the keynote, Google launched Google Music, a likely Spotify killer, completely redesigned Google+ with new lightweight photo editing capabilities, introduce a new unified communications platform in the form of Hangouts, astonished the audience with a Maps overhaul and handed out 6,000 Chromebook Pixels – the high end proof of concept browser based laptop.

At I/O, there’s no better place to share your love of everything Google and it’s fun to be in an environment where everyone simply “gets it.” Google Glass was everywhere, everyone knew immediately how to use the Pixel and those still using iPhones received some dirty looks. Since BetterCloud builds for and on the Google platform exclusively, I/O in a way provides me with the reassurance that we’ve made the right choice. We’re all in with Google and every year, I/O provides us with even more reasons why.

Inspiration

While I/O is about highlighting Google’s innovation and its world class engineering team, Google also makes a point of emphasizing how important the ecosystem of third-party developers and partners is to the success of the company – in fact Larry Page made sure to reiterate this several times during the keynote. Page also emphasized the amount of work still left to be done – saying that we’ve only achieved 1% of what’s possible and that too much energy is spent focusing on competition and not enough on innovation.

It’s easy to get caught up in the day to day of running a business and sometimes this keeps you from looking at the bigger picture. I/O reminds you that there’s always more you can be doing – more features to develop, more efficient ways to solve certain problems, a better way of utilizing customer feedback.

Adding to the awe inspiring keynote, informative sessions and abundant product demos, I find that what inspires me the most at I/O is speaking with customers, partners and fellow ISVs face to face. Seeing how far companies have come in the past year and where they’re headed is inspiring. And even with all of the technology surrounding you at I/O, there’s simply no better substitute than the face to face interactions and meetings you’re able to have with people from all over the world.

I’m looking forward to next year!