I have now been to every Google I/O, and I will say that this last year was exceptionally disappointing (by which I mean that I feel like it fell off a cliff as opposed to continuing a gradual decline). It used to be that you could go to the "office hours" areas, which were setup like rooms full of the developers that work on various projects, and kind of "hang out" with developers, talking about use cases and issues you had run into.

Last year, these were replaced with "help desks", and while the people there were very friendly (and while I really appreciated the one guy who went pretty far out of his way to obtain a stock image for a Nexus 7 when it seemed like I might have needed to flash one), all of the people identified themselves as "developer relations", not "developers", and none of the people I had gotten to know as key members of their team from previous I/O events were present.

(I also, like others, find the situation of "it is economically incorrect to not attempt to go to I/O due to handouts" ludicrous, and I wish they would stop doing it, even though I know it would make some of my friends who often attend with me sad. Google has tried to improve the situation by having handouts be given as part of talks and having the timing of central ones staggarred across the days, but it doesn't solve the core problem that there is no entrance cost to attending this conference.)

I would love a Google-operated, tech-talk only conference, without the product announcements, give-aways, etc.

>Last year, these were replaced with "help desks" This was my main problem with IO last year. The informal developer gathering office hours from previous years were the best part of IO.

I convinced some colleagues to go last year on the merits of that alone. Was seriously disappointed with the help desk format it devolved into.

Developer relations are normally engineers also on the product, but with more of a focus on Working with external developers.

That has not been my experience with other companies (such as Amazon), and did not seem to be the case for these people at Google I/O (whom I actually had a conversation with about this). Regardless, there is a big difference between someone working on something somewhere in the product and the people in charge of each of the major subsystems (whichb is the specific experience from previous years).