Jamboard, by Google

Great point, I've seen this too. People want to want this kind of thing but seldom use it.

There must have been a 10x developer on that stand, I can't see more than $120 in materials. Makes me think I should be selling stands to Google instead of the stuff I make now.

Totally agree. I've worked in or with hospitals since the mid 80s, and they were some of the first connected organizations; Pharmacy and Lab were first to network, with AP/Patient Accounts coming soon thereafter. And even though hospitals were early adopters, they still don't think of connectivity or throughput as a big deal - until everything comes crashing down.

A coding interview should best be done a keyboard...my opinion.

I think that's a bit of an unfair comparison, Jamboard looks like a collaboration tool, essentially a whiteboard with some added features. It's not a drawing tool for producing pretty diagrams.

I was part of the PBL lab at Stanford which was doing a bunch of research in that space. I think the major benefit is remote collaboration ala whiteboard and replay of course.

We have one at work. Everyone looks at it when they come into the room, and pokes at it. I've never actually seen anyone use it though.

I personally spent maybe 2 minutes trying to get it to work, and gave up out of frustration and resorted back to the glass board.

Because you'd need one per viewer and no good way to handle guests without going well over the initial $5k budget.

magic leap ? didn't they burn up in a haze of fire and lies ?

Because one of these things actually exists and the other does not?

I actually agree. I was using my Vive / Tilt Brush to whiteboard design some systems architecture[0], and it felt very natural to want to collaborate and share with both local and remote parties.

3D is such a more robust experience when designing that it just feels magnitudes of order better.

[0] https://www.facebook.com/dpgailey/videos/10103011916576896/

[edit]

And I'd also say that having "one per viewer" would be just as easy to use the cheaper headsets/phone combos for passive or voice only participants.

Have you looked at any other competing products?

No of course not. This just isn't related to Google's core business which is advertising. And as history has shown us anything that isn't core business is always first in line to be cut. This could be different but of course you should still be a little cautious.

Compare this however to Microsoft where business productivity has been an integral part the company since the very beginning. And so the Surface Hub looks like a more likely product to still be around a decade from now.

It seems like Google has created a chicken and egg problem for themselves.

I won't be willing to take on Google products until they've been around for a few years and become entrenched, but with people becoming more and more reluctant to invest into their products it's less likely to happen.

No, you're not. If people don't wisen up to it and hit Google in the numbers, we'll all keep paying the product killing uncertainty tax.

If I needed one of these, this would definitely factor into my evaluation.

I agree, google is the new microsoft, they try everything they can to lock customers in.

The problem is not that Google is unreliable. The problem is that the servers are not yours, and thus the services that depend on the servers are not really yours.

Therefore, if you write software to match, or foster methodologies that depend on a particular product, you risk writing software or patterning activities around a system that can trivially disappear.

You have no way of estimating the popularity of adoption (is this android?), or how essential this thing may be to internal Google teams (is this wave?), since it remains something of a trade secret, who is using what, and how much, therefore you can never know when or why Google might declare that its offering is antiquated or unprofitable to Google, or whether it will be deprecated, forcing a migration elsewhere.

I was duped and bought an overpriced GoogleTV LCD. It seemed great at first until it was pretty much completely unsupported after a year and all the apps stopped working. Never again.

Google does support now?

This depends on your uses. As a programmer, I mostly just draw. But I'm a fan of the projector onto a whiteboard setup so I can pull up a spec document and draw on top of existing (and more accurate or complete) diagrams. For disciplines with lots of visual data the actual images would be nicer than loose approximations.

While you can import pictures as mentioned, the overall experience seems to be much more. The primary focus seems to be to encourage collaboration and thus increase productivity in a geographically dispersed team. This aspect seems the most attractive from my perspective as a remote employee. Imagine a client meeting where you'd be able to directly annotate client feedback and improve the feedback cycle by making realtime changes that can be synchronized across multiple devices. We already use Google Docs and Sheets heavily in my environment for the collaboration aspect so this just seems to take it one step further by providing another outlet.