Google killed a small smart glass maker after acquiring it | Hacker News Reader

Google killed a small smart glass maker after acquiring it

androidrookies.com

52 pointsvvpvijay24 comments

What? This article makes absolutely no sense.

How is buying a company that clearly was not doing well financially (acquisition price at $150m, ~$200m raised with the last $40m being a debt financing, so it is a bail out), in what is clearly messaged as an acqui-hire for talent, in any way comparable to Amazon using its investment arm to acquire confidential information and replicate company products?

Respectfully, the author doesn't seem to understand what's actually going on here, this seems like a standard acqui-hire for future work on a smart glass product within Google. I highly doubt North didn't know they were going to be discontinuing the Focus before the acquisition closed.

What would have actually been unethical is waiting for North to run out of money and then try to hire their people at lower salaries or something.

> What would have actually been unethical is waiting for North to run out of money and then try to hire their people at lower salaries

Why? It would have been riskier. With aqui-hire they get everyone and someone else could scoop them. But at the end of the day the North team failed to make a product that sold.

I didn't say it would be a good business decision =P

Personally I don't see a lack of ethics - the people aren't owned by the company. They have no obligation to the shareholders. Now any IP the shareholders do own and they would have an obligation towads if they want to use it as an IP holder in the system.

(Hypothetical Alpha Centuarians observing and pirating the tech would have no ethical issues at all, there is no social contract, they aren't even accessible and couldn't pay even if they wanted to being lightyears away but that is a silly tangent.)

In the article it says this move by Google is worse than Amazon investing in businesses and stealing info. How is this worse? Google bought the whole company, didn't make partial investment. They can do whatever they want with the company.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23690967 discussion of the acquisition itself.

Given how much was raised by the company itself (~$200M according to https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/north-8daa) the acquisition seems like Google providing an exit opportunity for the company and its investors, arguably much better for the ecosystem than what Amazon does

It’s a terrible article, but I wasn’t aware that they were bought. This is very expensive R&D, and being bought out by the FAANG is one of the very few positive outcomes for a hardware startup. Hopefully they did it for the money.

iirc North did not make any money off the aquisition, as they were failing and Google bought them out for roughly the amount of capital previously invested.

"Worse" doesn't just mean "worse for the companies involved", it can also mean "worse for society". The net result of Google continually buying startups and shutting down the projects is that fewer products receive long-term support, receive any iterative improvements, or can be relied upon to exist later.

It's still too early to say and we don't have enough visibility. Pairing North's tech with Google's distribution would expand the reach and potential of this type of product. North could've been running out of money before the acquisition so Google swooping in ensured the tech lived on. These are all plausible outcomes that would end up being "better for society"

And they paid a lot of money to do that (as much as it was worth, at least), which was parent company's point. Whereas Amazon did not- they made only a partial investment in order the kill the entire thing. That full Google money (fairly, it could be argued) compensates the destruction you describe and allows the recipient of the money to do something else productive.

How so? The company was already dying on its own, Google only vultured and bailed them out from bankruptcy. The product was a "mutant" trying new things that wasn't viable in the end.

That seems to be the problem with increasingly bigger and dominant companies. They kill or buy new competitors before they can get traction. In the end society as a whole loses big time because a lot of innovation gets lost. I really hope there will be a trend where companies beyond a certain size get viewed as a negative and discouraged.

Buying up and killing competitors seems worse for consumers than merely competing unfairly.

These stories about competition being thwarted often seem to ignore the elephant in the room — the companies being acquired weren’t doing well. I’m sure the North team feels like they took the best option they had realistically available to them. We can speculate about what might have been, but unless most scenarios involve them going out of business and everyone looking for new jobs, it’s not very accurate. You could say most startups take the chance despite low chance of success, but North has done that and ended up on the wrong side of that distribution once already, and any further attempt would be saddled with the existing debt and cap table. This is a clean slate for them.

This article seems to completely miss the point. Google paid the founders a lot of money to acquire their IP and know how which they will integrate into Glass. Why would google run two identical products? Nonsense article.

founders probably made nothing actually. Investors and Debt have priority and they got bought for less than was raised. I definitely still agree the article is garbage.

Would anyone have any direction on what kind of projectors North was using for this product? I have no idea where to start searching.

In the same way, I would also be very interested in any further info on Ellsworth's Tilt Five projectors, bottom right-right of [1] (full text of interview [2]). Interesting video with info on the (retroreflective) optics system here [3].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200722042213im_/https://i0.wp.... presumably shows three generations of the product. From left to right board, camera and projector.

[2] https://skarredghost.com/2019/09/24/interview-jeri-ellsworth...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AB4NjMWKV0s

This is a bizarre article. North was unsuccessful in the market and basically ran out of money and time. Google picked up the people and IP and those efforts are now being directed elsewhere within Google. The idea that Google killed off a competitor is not accurate, as North had already failed to succeed. It was a good effort, and like most consumer hardware attempts, brutally hard.

The article doesn't say anything about the internal (to Google) disposition of the team or thechnology -- only that the previous public product roadmap is cancelled. I'm unimpressed.

Would it be worse if they didn’t acquire it, but crushed it in the market? Obviously we won’t know.

Google can't crush shit when it comes to hardware.

Software either (outside of vanilla Android) - They can't make a consistent "ecosystem" to save their lives.

this seems normal, why would Google continue to market a product rather than integrate the tech into their own branded product, I know Waze is still Waze but I think that's far different for obvious reasons

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