Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge
Microsoft’s annual developer conference has officially kicked off, the first yearly developer conference in the consumer tech world we’ve experienced online. The others are Google I/O and Apple’s WWDC. All three have obviously changed during the pandemic and watching what each company has chosen (or will choose) to do has been instructive.
Google straight up cancelled I/O entirely — perhaps playing it safer, as in the COVID timeline in the Bay Area Google had to make a call when things were looking particularly dire. There will be some sort of online unveiling for Android, at least. Apple’s is still “on” as an online-only event, and though you never know with Apple I suspect it will try to make a splash with new versions of iOS, iPadOS,…