Next

I had the opportunity to attend Google Next this year. Week after this event I joined Google. Here are some quick notes in no particular order: Registration was a pain, long lines. My first tech conference where I had to go through a metal detector. Impressive reminder of the core tech underlining Google Cloud (i.e. Borg) and Google’s experience in operating at scale. Serious commitment to ML and Data Science: invest in talent/community (Kaggle), vision/leadership (Fei-Fei Li keynote), powerful APIs (i.e. Label/Face Detection, OCR, Explicit Content etc.) Feels like the ease of use for Google is more important than time time market (see the above DS APIs but also Spanner UX). Clear understanding of data economy’s potential value (goes with the scale comment but the experience was apparent in many sessions/keynotes) Open/partner market makes stronger platform (Sam Ramji’s keynote drilled on this best), early hints of this were probably the main reason why I wanted to join Google Cloud team. Size/quality of the network (both, cables & tech), globally distributed data systems (specifically latency) are perhaps the best example of the user value here.