I agree with everything you wrote -- thanks for taking the time to put it to paper! Two other things: I've been to five I/Os and this year's keynote was absolutely the worst in terms of quality of presentation. It honestly seems like they didn't plan to announce L until it was leaked a couple weeks ago. I'm glad they did and I think, given the lack of prep, it went pretty darn well. Secondly, before they started charging $900/ticket, I'm absolutely sure a lot of locals applied just for swag. I don't think that happens anymore, and you can tell from what they handed out this year that there will be no more free phones and tablets. If there is hardware swag, it will be <i>new</i> tech, not the stuff everyone already has.<p>Additionally, I was truly surprised at the heavy focus on Android at the expense of nearly everything else. I think with Sundar in charge we're seeing a sea change at Google in terms of platform focus, and this is -- while a little confusing sometimes -- a good thing. It also means I/O is turning into truly a hardcore developer conference with a unified theme (or several big themes), rather than a sort of dog & pony show ("Hey, look at this shiny, useless crap we've been working on!") like in the past (Nexus Q anyone? Android @Home? Google TV?). There was no mention this year of anything besides Android platform products & services, except the expected general purpose dev platform stuff (Compute Engine, App Engine, etc). I was surprised at the lack of mention of anything enterprisey, nothing about Google+ or identity management, anything about ChromeOS (just a small plug in the keynote about schools adopting Chromebooks), or any of their X projects. I at least thought they'd have some robots there to ogle.<p>If the keynote was subpar this year, the 'box talks were a highlight. The speakers were almost universally awesome, the open fora allowed high quality engagement, and if one topic didn't interest, it was easy to stroll to the next whiteboard/screen and see if that one did. Jake Archibald's talk on browser quirks was my favorite.<p><a href="http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/speed/script-loading/" rel="nofollow">http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/speed/script-loading/</a><p><a href="http://vimeo.com/77497239" rel="nofollow">http://vimeo.com/77497239</a><p>Btw, I was fully expecting Android Wear to be a novelty I had no use for, but I very quickly came around and already find myself talking to my watch, James Bond style. I completely agree with this Ars post: <a href="http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/06/android-wear-smartwatches-make-google-glass-obsolete/" rel="nofollow">http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/06/android-wear-smartwat...</a>. My wife & I have a "no phones at the dinner table" policy but even my kids have been telling me to "ask Google" for answers to questions. Having the knowledge graph so handy is awesome.