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Comment by oconnor663 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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....

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

Hah. Without evidence, lots of them.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Completely agree. This is baffling.

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.

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