Google’s annual developer conference, I/O, kicks off with a high-profile keynote presentation this morning. But don’t expect Google to try and make big waves, because the company has said it will back off releasing new products this year – and because Google I/O launches have gone so terribly in the past.

Google’s tight-lipped Android chief Sundar Pichai told our own Steven Levy that this year’s I/O will “not [be] a time when we have much in the way of launches of new consumer products or a new operating system... we’re going to focus this I/O on all of the kinds of things we’re doing for developers.”

That’s a marked change from how the conference operated under the man Pichai replaced, unofficial I/O king Andy Rubin. Though those events were targeted at developers, they were also used for splashy announcements involving new products like the Nexus Q, Google Music, the Chrome web app store, and Google Wave.

As you may have noticed, those are not products that have taken the world by storm; Wave, for one, is dead, and the Nexus Q is indefinitely suspended.

The Nexus 7 tablet was an exception to this rule, a strong product that came out of Google I/O, and Google Glass, marketed heavily at last year’s event, could yet make good use of the conference as it goes into wide release. But for now it looks like Google has given up on on making I/O and its keynotes as splashy as the conferences and launch events convened by rival Apple. Google I/O will likely return to being a developer conference in all respects, and that’s likely a good thing for both Google and the programmers who work quietly with the company’s products.