Google I/O is Google’s premier developer conference. A key theme is definitely pervasive: Google feels the Internet is the platform and that developers (the “geekosystem”) are key to its continued dominance.

In the opening day keynote, Vic Gundotra (VP Engineering) had a freshingly blunt answer to the question as to why Google was developing so many free, open source products: Google makes more money. That is, by enabling developers to build better, faster, larger applications targeted at the Internet, these applications will attract more users and more Internet users means more $$ for Google. (Aside: we had a short debate as to whether or not this was true, but the converse definitely holds: fewer Internet users means less $$ for G.)

The primary themes for Google are centred around making their compute cloud more accessible (via Google App Engine), making it easier to develop rich client apps (via Google Web Toolkit) and bringing human interaction to bear in applications (via OpenSocial).

They also have an entire track devoted to Android (their mobile phone platform). Gundotra stated that G feels that eventually, the mobile browser will be their target platform, but until mobile browser capabilities are enhanced, Android is an important project. Android looks cool to be sure, but I couldn’t help thinking that I was looking at a Zune: in countries well connected, the iPhone seems to have so much steam. Ironically, Gundotra pointed out that he felt the only phone that had a sufficiently powerful browser was in fact the iPhone. So perhaps G has no interest in competing with that platform, but only to help the other phone manufacturers get their shit together.

Google App Engine, in particular, is very interesting to me. In some ways, it’s super advanced (scalability is “automatic”), but in other ways, it’s so immature (there is no real way to migrate your data models to new versions). I can’t tell you how many times in the last day I’ve heard people ask for “offline processing.” That said, of course it’s brand new, and they are working hard at it.

All in all, it’s been a great conference with the usual mix of lots of stuff you can find online along with a number of nuggets of information that you just couldn’t get anywhere else. The other important bits are always in the panel / fireside chats – vision/philosophy stuff – so many conference-goers miss these. At the meta level, this conference is very under-stated. Everything is in black/grey/white, there is little to no marketing anywhere, the swag consisted of a t-shirt (black and white) and a water bottle (black and white). I guess, like the G homepage, it’s about simplicity and content