Perhaps just that they have engineers presenting instead of the traditional PR mannequins / executives?

Apple has that as well. In fact Phil Schiller isn't on WWDC.

And would you say that their last WWDC presentation was more natural than I/O? I thought it was often awkward to watch as well. (The Dre call...ugh.)

It's the over reliance on the prompter.

It has all the energy of someone reading a press release.

Ah, now I understand why the guy is not looking at the people, which is 101 of communication.

EDIT: Unbelievable: they all look at the prompter like it were natural. I really cannot believe this is the most important Google public event and the speakers do not learn their stuff by heart.

I like the idea of having more hackathon type engineer presentations that aren't as polished but this seems like a bad compromise trying to get engineering folks to be on message like marketing department. Either stick with the polished messages or be up front that the engineers are going to be a little eccentric and have fun with it.

They lost two of their best presenters over the past year: Vic Gundotra, Hugo Barra

I was so happy to be able to see through the keynote without the presence of these two guys or anybody like them. They were always more focused on wowing the crowd than actually saying anything, always begging for more applause with ridiculous statements such as "It's basically 16 cores!!!" to describe a device with a four-core CPU and a twelve-core GPU. (Hugo Barra, 2012, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2406363,00.asp) For a developer conference, they should respect the audience enough to know that we understand the real specs and adding two unrelated numbers to make a bigger number does not make it more impressive, or even any sense.

Vic Gundotra and Hugo Barra are among the all time worst speakers at Google I/O. This year it again feels like developers talking to developers. Delightful! :)

Agreed. I don't feel the same level of engagement

Not all of these guys are known for their MC'ing.

This is what happens when your company doesnt have a Steve Jobs and forces your engineers to demo.

that was exactly what I was thinking.