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Comment by jpalomaki | Hacker News Reader

Video from Google about the technology (2015): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QNiZfSsPc0

Go big or go home. That's one thing I like about Google/Alphabet. Not being afraid to try completely new things outside the normal comfort zone of their traditional product space, and aiming for the most radical potentially game changing ones at that.

I'm glad that Sergey and Larry have been able to stay at the helm, keeping Google/Alphabet from devolving into just another short term quarterly earnings chasing company and continuing to set up institutions in place that will ensure the culture of innovation which has made the company so successful lasts long into the future.

Go big, let your product stagnate for a couple of years coz it doesn't improve adsense dollar revenue in a direct way and then go home.

reminder that inbox is getting the shotgun to the head this year while gmail still feels like it's stuck in the early 2010s and that's just the most recent one.

any area that google dominates in nowadays feels almost accidental, like they don't actually want to dominate that area but the alternatives don't have their datacentres and thus aren't as good-for eg youtube.

This is, sadly, an accurate comment. Although to be fair to Google, they ported snoozing to regular Gmail and polished the UI a little.

Popular wisdom is that google culture rewards too much the creation of new projects, but not as much their maintenance - which looks comparatively worse in a CV or when being considered for raises. Since they also hire mostly high-achievers, the result is that everyone wants to move into new things and "old" products are soon left to wither.

I'd be curious to know the opinion of actual Googlers about this common theory.

I've yet to see a single explanation why Google is supposed to maintain a non-profitable project/product indefinetly.

If Inbox (or other projects commonly coming up on these whines) would be a startup, it would end up on https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ a long time ago. Why would Google keep maintaining and burning money on an unsuccessful free (!) product? Isn't "fail fast" the main praised mentality of startups here?

I wouldn’t expect anyone to maintain something unprofitable indefinitely, but Google’s reputation is to offer something free long enough to destroy any existing market and then kill it when there’s no one left to fill the void. It’d generally be better if they never offered it at all.

A lot of these projects Google has killed were very obviously going to be non-profitable from the start because they had no business model.

Take Allo or Wave for example, how was a messaging app with no ads supposed to make any money even if it was successful? So why did they even bother in the first place if they're going to kill non-profitable projects?

What exactly is stagnating in your opinion? The Google Ads platform is currently one of the primary means of generating steady income for funding research and development efforts into new future technology, innovation, and growth.

I personally believe focusing so much on advertising is a short term narrow minded way of judging Google/Alphabet as the company is pretty much a fully fledged conglomerate at this point. Even so, the growth of advertising revenue has consistently increased 20-30% for almost 15 years now. Considering it's sheer size, that's definitive and definite success regardless of your qualms with how Google culture encourages employees to try new things even if they might fail. In fact, though it may seem random, it is exactly because Google/Alphabet is so willing to try and do new things that it can succeed in so many immensely different industries and markets from molten salt energy storage all the way to pest control using genetically modified mosquitoes.

>What exactly is stagnating in your opinion?

All of google's email software offerings, all their chat software offerings, their AR platform offerings, their VR platform offerings, does Android things even exist anymore beyond a toy development kit?

i don't even bother with google products anymore unless i see 2 years of concrete support & development. google product early adoption does not pay off

Very cool demo video.

Wonder if phone camera + AI software can do equivalent demo today?

Training to just recognize certain type of fingers movement seems trivial for AI now.

Interesting. This might finally enable those hologrammatic user interfaces as shown in many sci-fi movies.

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