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I've speculated for a long time that basically anything interesting Google says they're doing is essentially meant to be a jobs program to keep employees from leaving, PR for external stakeholders like investors, media, being attractive to potential employees, etc. They seem to have lots of formal ways to keep employees from leaving/close as well including investments off of Google's balance sheet (not GV or Google Capital) into ex-employee startups and just flat out paying people not to leave (which is the arrangement I'm guessing that Matt Cutts is under). It all seems very Microsoft of old.

Can anyone at Google (or ex-employees) tell me if this is true?

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Flip it around, would anyone want to apply to Google if they weren't doing big visionary things? I've met a lot of people who want to work at Google, not because anything they want to achieve in life is only possible if they do it with Google's resources, but simply because "It's a magical place." as Phil Coulson would say.

So whether or not it keeps people from leaving, if it is effective at getting people to apply to Google first, it meets its goal right?

From my experience working there some of the "moonshot" type projects were rather hit or miss in terms of retention. Some, like the self driving car one, attracted a lot of great talent, some of the more interesting power related ones were only interesting to people who cared about power efficiency. But the feeling that anything is possible is intoxicating until you realize what you have to give up to make something possible. Then its sort of hit or miss.

T.A.H.I.T.I is calling.

"It's a magical place"

Most of us at Google are not working on on moonshot projects, and still have a happy life. Still, most non-moonshot projects that people are working on are growing nicely, have a long term view, and making lots of impact. Also having free good quality, healthy food with big variety all day long makes a huge impact in life quality.

I don't think Google's perks are anywhere close to a differentiator in the market these days.

s/the market/Silicon Valley/

But even the things that aren't "perks" are still way beyond what most non-valley companies offer as benefits (insurance, retirement, education, leaves, parental benefits, internal training/development, etc). None of that is uniquely special, and many non-tech companies have pieces of the puzzle, but imho Google is unique among companies it size with the breadth and quality of employee benefits it offers.

Having a good availability of food which is mediocre (and rapidly declining in terms of appeal, variety, and nutrition) is not a meaningful perk. It is the minimum viable offer when you force most of your employees to work in the middle of nowhere where there are ~no local food options, and spend too much time of their time commuting to justify spending time preparing their own.

In this respect I'd probably even prefer Apple where the food is not free (and the price has generally been increasing) but the quality has been much better maintained than at Google.

Google has lots of offices. I'm at the Zurich office, as this is my preference, but there are enough to choose from. I wouldn't go to Cupertino as I wouldn't like to have to drive everywhere (I prefer a bit of walking and 10 minutes by train), but I respect people who like those places.

Still, I'm not comparing Google against Apple (which is one of the top revenue/employee companies), but against smaller companies, startups and all the other companies in the world that can't compete that easily with the quality of life that these companies provide.

I wanted to work there but after three nonsensical phone interviews and some feedback from ex-Googlers I came to the conclusion, even if I had the skills to be accepted, their culture is not something I would enjoy.

Is the evidence for this view, that they cancel a lot of interesting projects? I think a simpler explanation for that would be that trying lots of new things is just a good strategy, even if you know 90% of them will fail.

Trying and failing is one thing. Trying, announcing, telling everyone it's the next big thing and then failing is quite another.

Is it?

If they intentionally failed, I would agree, but I have seen no proof of that. Many ventures fail, regardless of resources and best intentions.

Certain types of products need by-in from 3rd parties to make them work. I could see Ara being in this camp, so it's better to control the message about it, instead of some 3rd party leaking details. May also help to get those 3rd party companies to reach out to you.

Like Project Vault that was made public at IO in 2015. It looked very promising. From an outsider's perspective, it looks like Mudge left Google a month later, then the project died. I hope there's more to the story because what kind of organization has a product's success completely reliant on one person?

> what kind of organization has a product's success completely reliant on one person?

Hah. Without evidence, lots of them.

This is why I haven't been able to stand the IO hype for years. When are people going to realize it's a tech demo, not product announcements? Do thy not realize most of the announced projects have gone nowhere?

That's basically all that Google produces nowadays, tech demos.

Like the Android ADK, Cardboard, that funny bluethooth ball robot....

I'm not sure they ever said Ara was going to be the next best thing. I only read a few reports, but they always highlighted how it was a total experiment.

"They intend to make a phone cheap enough to be accessible to 5 billion people. To do so, they need to create an ecosystem of hardware manufacturers robust enough that it could literally challenge giant incumbents like Foxconn and even Samsung. The head of Project Ara, Paul Eremenko, says he is planning "the most custom mass-market product ever created by mankind" without a trace of irony in his voice."

http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/15/5615880/building-blocks-ho...

When I hear "the most custom mass-market product ever created by mankind", the first thing that comes to mind is a Subway sandwich.

Telling people something is the next big thing is part of trying to make it so.

Until you become the boy who cried wolf. I now consider anything from google vaporware until proved otherwise.

The biggest part of making something the next big thing is actually producing a product.

The challenge they will always face. Once you get to this scale, there's no way to avoid it. I, for one, don't find it duplicitous - what if Google was a movie studio? The shame that they aren't is that we'll never see a technology giant's Pootie Tang (one of my favorite films, beloved by many, its name itself a piece of pop culture, though it failed on any metric a shareholder would consider)

>there's no way to avoid it

Of course there is, keep it secret until they're close to release.

They were calling for partners to build modules and announcing that they had multiple partners already. I think that's a valid enough reason to talk about it.

There are enough leaked press stories on secret projects they are working on but not announcing until they have gone the distance.

If it is not next-big-thing-worthy, there is no real point for a company like Google to try it in the first place.

Which is just a PR strategy.

It's alomost certain that other companies, like Apple and Microsoft are working of similar things but they just don't make public announcements about their internal hackathon proof-of-concepts

They do sometimes. With the Tay twitter bot for example. It was a ploy to get people to switch to Azure.

Most things are less obvious I imagine.

No one is working on a modular phone because it is a terrible idea.

LG tried it with their G5 model. It isnt very interesting

Completely agree. This is baffling.

> Trying and failing is one thing. Trying, announcing, telling everyone it's the next big thing and then failing is quite another.

Isn't this the modus operandi of startups though? Most of them fail too, but they hardly ever get their feet held to the fire like Google projects.

Probably because people expect better from one of the most established tech companies on the face of the planet?

It's as sad as Facebook's rampant feature theft from Snapchat. Sure, not illegal, not surprising, but also not impressive.

They didn't just talk about it. They called for partners to build the modules and had multiple partners already. If this was a lie from the start, it would've been easier to not go through the trouble.

I think there was reporting about this regarding Andy Rubin. After he was pushed out of Android, Larry Page basically gave him a robotics division to keep him around. He made some acquisitions, there was no real follow through and he left and is now a VC.

I just want to know how pervasive that is across the company.

Trying, announcing, pursuing the project for 3 years and suddenly announcing that the project shows that random ideas are being chased without proper vision & leadership.

Enjoyably Machiavellian.

But in the instance of this phone, a more straightforward strategy seems clear: to break down the monolithic phone market and suppress the unique market position of big competitors like Samsung. As in this quote from a wowed reporter from The Verge --

Just as importantly, though, Project Ara could have a ripple effect on the entire mobile industry. One of the goals is to "democratize the hardware ecosystem, break it wide open, basically disintermediate the OEMs," Eremenko [then the project lead] says, "so that component developers can now have privy [sic] with the consumer."

Fun to read the puff piece in retrospect: http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/15/5615880/building-blocks-ho...

To have that strategy work, you would need zero cost, zero volume connectors that stay together forever if desired, yet come apart easily.

Otherwise, the guy building the integrated system would offer a smaller, sturdier phone at lower cost that suits 90+% of the market, leaving scraps for you, forcing your prices up, decreasing your market even further, forcing your prices up, etc.

There's a reason that, except for a few early suitcase-sized ones, we never saw laptops with ISA/PCI/PCMCIA slots succeed in the market, and laptops had the advantage to start out as desktops, which had slots.

> There's a reason that, except for a few early suitcase-sized ones, we never saw laptops with ISA/PCI/PCMCIA slots succeed in the market, and laptops had the advantage to start out as desktops, which had slots.

Huh? PCMCIA/CardBus/ExpressCard was a standard feature in more or less all laptop until just a few years ago.

Only if by "just a few years ago" you mean "almost a decade or more ago", and by "on more or less all laptops" you mean "some high end models".

Every PC laptop I've bought or used, at every price range (including cheap Acer emergency replacement after theft), had a peripheral slot. Higher end models had two. Even the Thinkpad on my desk right now has a ExpressCard slot.

You'd be very surprised.

Dell Expiron 5520 (2012) http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/review/dell/dell_inspiron_15r_...

Sony VAIO A-series (2012) http://www.digitaltrends.com/laptop-reviews/sony-vaio-e-seri...

ASUS G73JH (2010) http://www.notebookreview.com/notebookreview/asus-k42j-revie...

HP Pavilion dm3t (2010) http://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/laptops/hp-pavilion-dm3t-20...

Just some random models, I literally just put the name of a brand + a date in the past and opened a review. No ExpressCard in any of them.

Maybe you went out looking for laptops with such slots? It was hardly "every laptop" and even less "at every price range" that had them.

No, I didn't. The cheap Acer's slot turned out to be handy for a Wireless G+ card when the builtin wifi stopped working. Most of the time, the little placeholder plastic thing never gets removed.

You could argue that they pay every employee not to leave.

Like any other business.

Generally, the concept is that they're paying for the work you do for them, not that they're paying for the privilege of saying you're on the payroll.

O I C.

Why do they need these people if they aren't working on things that make the company money?

Perhaps better doing nothing for Google than working for other companies, making them money.

Deprives competitors of talent and there are also advantages in having people doing speculative/moonshot work.

Such as prestige.

Sadly, these repeated failed hardware efforts are all totally sincere. There is a sort of pump-and-dump hype cycle but people are really drinking the kool-aid internally. So far they are still a software company failing to create internal hardware startups.

Source: worked at Google for 2 years

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