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Comment by trident1000 | Hacker News Reader

Google has had no serious innovation in 20 years. Issue the dividend already and stop calling yourself a technology growth company.

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You gotta be kidding. It's hard to find a company that innovated more in the last 20 years:

MapReduce, Spanner, Protocol Buffers, Gmail, Go Lang, Android, Chrome, Microservices, Borg, Tensorflow, TPUs, Google Maps, Google Street View, Google Docs, Google Translate, Dremel, Duplex, Chromebooks, ChromeCast, Daydream, mobile first development, BeyondCorp, V8, Kubernetes, LevelDB...

Those are just some of things I can think of from the top of my head and doesn't include the machine learning research that google and deepmind are doing.

Automatic translation, alpha go, google maps UI, ...

alpha go was acquired if Im not mistaken. Sure on the others.

No and no, unless you're picking a very unusual way of attributing things

It was developed by DeepMind Technologies which was later acquired by Google.

Temporal order is reversed, significantly

No not reversed. This is public information.

Exactly - development began in 2014, it was acquired in 2014, games against Sodol were March 2016. (I'm somewhat cheating here, so it's unfair, but I gotta tell you it's a real headscratcher having a stranger explain this to me while they're not checking wikipedia)

Alpha Go was already launched when Google acquired it. Youre a moron. I dont know what elese to say.

Swipes like that will get you banned on HN. Would you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules?

Your comment would be fine with just the first sentence.

We’re talking about paradigm shifts and not just incremental innovation (both are important, but there is a huge difference).

Paradigm shift can also happen incrementally. Not every revolution is sudden.

Google Fi has been a godsend compared to the likes of AT&T, Verizon, and TMobile.

And then just like so many other Google initiatives, they got bored abandoned it and in some cases left damaged roads in their wake.

https://wpln.org/post/google-fiber-disruptions-have-some-say...

https://www.wdrb.com/news/business/louisville-to-fix-google-...

In the meantime AT&T has been rolling out gigabit up/down for the past 5 years. I got AT&T four years ago and the price has been $70/month no extra fees.

Google Fi is not Google Fiber - it’s probably the least overtly scumbag-y of the US cellphone networks. That said, I switched away from it today after a few years of OK service because they don’t support Apple Watches.

My bad.

I’m looking at their plans.

https://fi.google.com/about/plans/

They look worse than T-mobile.

https://www.t-mobile.com/cell-phone-plans

Unlimited 3G hot spot and $20/month for tablets with unlimited data can’t be beat.

I made the move several years ago when the comparison wasn't close. I haven't had a sim card in years, which is also nice.

> Unlimited 3G hot spot and $20/month for tablets with unlimited data can’t be beat.

It can if you spend a lot of time travelling - Google's data packages (on 4G!) are good in most of the world at no additional cost.

There's also a service aspect - Fi was often better where I am (downtown in a major US city) than T-Mobile (which my work phone is on).

That said, T-Mobile seems to be more customer-centric than AT&T - who even in 2020 seem hostile to doing business, and I'd consider them in future or for my iPad, just for further network diversity.

T-mobile’s standard plans include 3G roaming for data and calls(?) in Canada and Mexico and 2G data roaming in most other countries. You can also get a $5 “day pass” for 3G data and calls in most countries.

As an aside, their rate plans are all inclusive no extra taxes or fees.

I'm aware - but Google Fi offers 4G roaming at no extra charge across a much wider range of countries (importantly for me, most of Europe).

It is an “extra charge”. Don’t you pay for every gigabyte of data that you use? It’s all bundled with T-Mobile. What’s the advantage of that over just getting another sim while you’re out of the country? Especially now with e-Sims being a thing.

They have two packages, one with per GB charging up to a cap and one bundled.

The advantage of using a primary plan (possibly augmented with local services from time to time) is that you have a stable phone number, and a lot less screwing about. For a casual traveler that may not matter. For someone who is in a different country every other week (pre-pandemic) it makes a substantial difference.

Fi is not Fi(ber)

Google's problem is that they try too many things to see what sticks, but no one wants to stick around long enough to make it stick.

google docs as an application of distributed data structures is IMO pretty innovative.

I'm not a fan of google but they've done a handful of things since the turn of the millennium.

Also an acquisition, FWIW.

So was DOS. That doesn't mean Microsoft doesn't get credit for Windows.

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