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Comment by gautamnarula | Hacker News Reader

Android? Waymo? Tensorflow? I get what people are saying but it's not like Google's been coming out with nothing new and useful for over a decade.

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No, Try Chromebook, Chromecast, Google Docs, Angular

They acquired Android. Waymo and Tensorflow are cool r&d but not businesses.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

Both you and Yegge label things you like as "innovative" and dismiss others as "not innovative" while never clearly articulating what this means.

"cool but not R&D businesses"

Yegge complains that Android was not an innovation but then says "Jeff Bezos is an exception. He innovates all the time, and he doesn’t fear failure. Many of his innovation attempts fall flat, but he almost never throws the idea away."

So somehow Android isn't innovation but Fire tablets are. Seems inconsistent.

Are you suggesting that Google did not innovate at all with regard to Android? That the product they purchased in 2005 was essentially the same as the one they began offering in 2008, or the one today? (just as an example, android was redesigned in response to the iPhone)

Waymo appears to be on track to a business?

Are you suggesting that, with tensorflow, innovation doesn't count if its infrastructural and not consumer-facing?

Android is a bit old of an example, but I'd argue it's not a good one for the parent's point. I would argue Google's last in-house consumer success probably is Google Drive? Circa 2012 or so. Everything newer has been a rebranded acquisition, a clone of a competitor's product, a failure, or a combination of the three.

Google+: Fail. Allo? LOL! (Let's talk about Duo, Hangouts Meet, Helpouts, etc.) The third or fourth rebranding of Google Wallet? Okay. Inbox caused an internal riot at Google when they tried to replace Gmail with it. Currents? Newsstand?

At the end of the day, almost all profit at Google still comes from ads, and all of their success comes from abusing monopolies they developed ten years ago, like Search, Android, and Chrome.

You guys are Oracle. With a brighter colored logo.

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Waymo is built on hype, not substance, it only works in limited areas which are excrutiatingly mapped in advance, and most of the marketing videos showed capability that predated the cars actually being so capable: They're staged. I suspect actual car manufacturers will far surpass Google's own offerings here, they have experience and they get how to make a consumer product that lasts more than three years without needing to be replaced.

With your consistent anti-Google bias, I'm not surprised you posted this. But every large company has hits and misses. You can't name a large tech company without plenty of failures. That's just how it works. They all try things, and many of them don't work out. The projects that succeed are fed, and the projects that fail get shelved.

It's not that they have failures, it's that I find so few successes.

Note that if you have a pro-Google bias, it's pretty easy to dismiss legitimate points as "anti-Google bias". Unless you're going to characterize a 13-year-veteran Googler like Yegge as "anti-Google", maybe you should realize the bias is yours.

Google has 7 different products with a billion users [0]. So few successes indeed.

[0] https://www.popsci.com/google-has-7-products-with-1-billion-...

>Duo

A success by pretty much any metric (no seriously). Yes, its essentially facetime, but I don't really think that matters. It still was the right decision. (and don't get me wrong I have some issues with Google's messaging strategy, but Duo isn't reasonably one of them).

>Inbox

I must have missed that?

Also, you kinda glossed over the whole infrastructure thing. Is infrastructural innovation not innovation?

>At the end of the day, almost all profit at Google still comes from ads,

Sure, but a quick check says that Google's revenue from not-ads today is about the same as Google's total revenue when they released android.

>and most of the marketing videos showed capability that predated the cars actually being so capable

So is your argument that Google isn't the innovator in the space, or that they won't be successful? Because I think both of those are totally wrong, but I want to clarify.

And in both cases, who do you think the innovators were, and who do you think will instead be successful?

>They're staged.

I, don't have words, this is just denial of reality. Tesla staged and inflated its autonomy. Waymo (and, to be clear, other companies, like Cruise) haven't. I see their vehicles driving around every day.

The data on this is pretty compelling: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/disen... (waymo: 600K miles, Cruise ~10K, everyone else: <1K)

Waymo is also active in the most areas (Bay Area, Tahoe, Phoenix, Kirkland, now Atlanta apparently).

I'm curious what leads you to believe that Waymo is somehow not innovative and not successful. Who on earth is doing better?

One of the earliest videos involved a blind user going to a drive through. At the very least, we can safely assume given that a Google car can't even find a parking space, that it operated on a preprogrammed route to use the drive through.

Months after Urmson was bragging about Waymo's ability to interpret hand signals, a Google engineer confirmed to a Slate reported that your cars would run a stoplight if Google's maps didn't already tell it the stoplight was there, and to look for it. And of course, that Waymo cars could not function on a road that wasn't excrutiatingly mapped to centimeter detail in advance.

While Google's marketing their upcoming launch of Waymo as a service being "fully autonomous", the car has to be remote controlled by a contractor when it gets confused.

Google likes to brag, like you did, about the "X number of miles", while intentionally ignoring real statistics that matter. (Driving the same mile over and over can be thousands of miles, but gains you really no understanding of the world of driving. Circling Mountain View isn't really as valuable as you'd believe.)

Contiguous miles without failure is a super interesting statistic for driving capability, but Google would not like to advertise that it fails and needs human help as often as one currently fills up on gas. That sort of statistic has usually showed up in the DMV reports while Google hasn't talked about it much. Hilariously, they're launching their service in Arizona where they don't have to disclose those statistics. When "no accountability" is what leads to the location choice for a product launch, you have to ask what they have to hide.

There's a huge discrepancy in the practical reality of what the technology has been capable of and what Waymo has claimed it can do. It's been so repetitively dishonest, I don't think I could ever trust the company or the cars based on their behavior alone.

I've seen a Google car park. More to the point though: I feel like your definition of preprogrammed route is broad to the point of uselessness. Either that or you don't really understand the difficulty in SDCs.

>the car has to be remote controlled by a contractor

For legal compliance.

I'll repeat the question you avoided: if Waymo isn't an innovator or a leader in this space, what companies are, and what are they doing to demonstrate their superiority?

Your argument appears to be tautological. Google is not innovative, therefore nothing Google is doing can be innovative. If Google appears to be doing something that is innovative, someone else is doing it better or Google is lying.

No evidence can convince you of the contrary, because that evidence is simply Google using its immense power to mislead you or the person you're talking to.

Duo is an app with a 4.6/5 rating and has been downloaded more than 100 million times. I would call that a very successful app by any metric. I realize your anti-Google and like to disparage them at every opportunity you get, but being disingenuous does not help your argument.

Having a lot of installs isn't successful when you illegally[1] require everyone to preinstall it on all of their phones. They have 100 million installs because they've sold 100 million phones since then. Does anyone actually use it? Has anyone voluntarily installed it on their phone because they wanted it?

"Google announced that, starting December 1, 2016, Google Duo replaced Hangouts within the suite of Google apps Android phone makers must pre-install on devices"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Duo

[1] Yes, illegally. Russia has already outlawed this behavior and fined them for it, the EU is expected to levy a fine against Google for it that makes their previous record-breaking fine look small, and it's a blatant violation of US antitrust law, where Google has paid a significant number of politicians to avoid being sued for it.

Does anyone actually use it?

It has more than one million five star reviews, so yes.

By the way, while I'd say Google has been definitively abusing its control of the market with Android, I don't think Duo is a good example; I expect a phone to come with a way to make calls, and nowadays I'd include video calls too. Rather than preventing Duo from being preinstalled, the EU should force the industry to come up with a decent open video call protocol.

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