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Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

> Jacquard™ by Google weaves new digital experiences into the things you love, wear, and use every day to give you the power to do more and be more.

WTF!? Sounds like the CEO of Google giving the intro to Google I/O. If it was Microsoft, it would have the word ‘empower’ instead of power. God I hate this BS lingo, Steve Jobs would fire the editors over this crap.

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I stopped scrolling down at:

    Every thing
    is extraordinary.

Such a ludicrous oxymoron I'm amazed this isn't The Onion

It's like Zombocom wrote it for them.

    Every thing 
      is extraordinary 
        with Zombocom

No, you're reading it wrong.

It's so ordinary, it's extra ordinary! :D

I like the first few lines in the intro video;

> What if Technology helped us focus on what matters most? Keeping our lives free from distractions. To help us be more present.

Laughable, coming from Google. Or Apple, or Microsoft, or Facebook.

> This thing, we really think it'll help you focus and live free from the distractions of all the other things that we make. We're not going to stop making those things, though. Or change them in any meaningful way, because no one here actually believes anything we say.

I also don’t understand how covering yourself in even more devices constantly buzzing for your attention is supposed to lead to less distraction and being more present.

To me this a first step for not having to check your phone or tablet if nothing needs attention.

This is in particular useful if you’ve already filtered down your notifications significantly, you’ll be able to go stretches of hours without looking at your devices, because you’re mostly sure nothing important happened.

Uninstall the apps. I did, and its amazing how little attention any of it actually needs.

I had to read hacker News comments to understand what this device does, and I went pretty deep into the page.

Seems like they're trying to do too much with this instead of niching down. I have no use for a device I can touch that triggers some tiny subset of things I might want to trigger.

After a minute scrolling the page I gave up and thought "quicker to read HN comments to figure out what this thing actually is" and I was not wrong. Very sad.

It's almost satire. I got to "Trucker Jacket" and burst out laughing.

Yeah, these folks live in an alternative universe.

Hey, it's on the home page: "it's a new Every Thing". Obvious!

it looks like it's a remote button that you can configure and attach to your clothes, then you can tap it and something on your phone happens (like play next song)

Can I configure it to send the notification to my own servers as opposed to Google's?

Probably not considering the blob talks to Jacquard's app. Then again, you are part of an incredibly insignificant tiny minority of prospective customers, completely out of that project's target market.

All in all, as someone who might want to use this product one day, I'd rather Google not spend their project's resources on never-buyers like yourself and instead spend those adding features and driving cost down for people that could be genuinely interested.

> I'd rather Google not spend their project's resources on never-buyers like yourself and instead spend those adding features and driving cost down for people that could be genuinely interested.

Sure. And drop all open protocols and support only the proprietary ones while they're at it?

Not sure what your point is but in that case I'd rather go the obvious third way which is that they would support a subset of open protocols instead of all of them.

Haha, feel free to want that and then 3 years later the big G closing down your service and you wont be able to use it at all.

3 years is giving too much credit, we should be talking in terms of months

It won't even leave Beta.

Can you imagine a Google developer suggesting adding that feature to the project manager?

You may as well just Arduino one yourself at that point.

Somehow sounds way less impressive when you put it like that.

It's IFTTT as a wearable...only expensive, dumber and likely an ethical/legal morass waiting to happen.

At this point I'm not sure there are many people left who want more Google intrusion in their lives.

Concur - after scrolling through the whole thing, I realised I still didn't get what this thing was about.

At least they chose a modest name.

Why not read before commenting? https://atap.google.com/jacquard/technology/

Why not put wtf this is at the first opportunity in the simplest terms?

I have a pet peeve for company marketing people that say “We provide products and services to empower customers”. Well, no shit! It would be insane otherwise.

> Why not put wtf this is at the first opportunity in the simplest terms?

The "Technology" link is literally the third word visible on the page, after the Jacquard logo and a "Products" link.

> I have a pet peeve for company marketing people that say “We provide products and services to empower customers”. Well, no shit! It would be insane otherwise.

Companies manufacturing washing machines don't "empower customers" in that there aren't many differenciators between washing machine brands today. Nor does your average company selling toilet paper, that would be insane.

This project however aims to "empower customers" by introducing a paradigm change: make your clothes smarter (smart fibers woven in the base product) while deciding yourself how smart you want them to be (you choose what actions to take on what gestures).

Whether it succeeds is another thing entirely of course.

> Companies manufacturing washing machines don't "empower customers" in that there aren't many differenciators between washing machine brands today. Nor does your average company selling toilet paper, that would be insane.

Might privileged to assume everyone can afford or has room for a washing machine, for the people who don't I'm sure it definitely would empower them to get more done if they could .

Also there's a lot of differentiation, I never knew how much better front-loaders were till we owned one.

This reminds me of the "futurism" movement in Italy that led to Mussolini's rise where they were so into fashion that they didn't know how but they just knew they wanted milk-based clothing and had to figure it out, and they actually did! It's kind of a cool story, without the fascist dictator throwing a wrench into the coolness.

This also seems like it's totally ripped from star trek, the insignia on their uniforms do exactly that and Jean Luc Picard sounds a lot like Jacquard....

I could see this as a gimmick from Nike, Reebok, or someone already in fashion but from Google it seems... like some weird B-project team endeavor like Google Glass that probably won't go anywhere long-term.

You can't be more wrong about your statement regarding washing machine.

Please take 12 minutes of you life to watch this Hans Rosling talk, may he rest in peace.

Hans Rosling: The magic washing machine https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_magic_washing_mac...

As a general rule, you really should read whole comments and not stop in the middle of sentences, otherwise you will miss half the words and misunderstand it all.

As I wrote, there aren't much differenciation between washing machine brands today. Of course one is empowered by getting a washing machine, any washing machine. That much is obvious. It doesn't mean however that washing machine manufacturers are in the business of empowering their customers , although they certainly were in the mid 1930s.

Nowadays though, the folks who are getting their first washing machines right now are simply catching up with the times, which is precisely what Rosling is saying in that talk. In fact, there hasn't been much innovation in washing machine technology over the last few decades, it's all mostly come down to gradual improvements in their general efficiency. For people who already owned washing machines, those improvements are very small in nature.

This is why this Jacquard project is a different thing altogether: we're currently in the mid-1930s of the smart cloth. Whether it's a fad or a complete paradigm shift won't be apparent for a few years.

A company producing washing machine is empowering users. Period.

I agree with you however that wether smart clothes company are empowering anyone is yet to be evaluated.

> A company producing washing machine is empowering users. Period.

If that is your definition of empowering, so is a company that produces toilet paper.

Nope they are other way around cleaning one's bottom than toilet paper. They are nothing more empowering than a washing machine to clean-up clothes.

Please watch the video because I guess from you answer that you haven't...

Beside my point was just that you choose a particularly bad exemple this is not a thread about washing machine vs smart clothes... (even though washing machine probably win against jacquard which is not water proof)

I worked for a consulting company who revealed their new brand, competitive advantage and mission was “Results. Action. People.”

I raised my hand and asked how this could be a competitive advantage since every single consulting company has the same brand. Their response was that our people were better.

It’s weird how people think these meaningless statements are useful. I expect that there’s some psychology that shows that while bullshit to me, they are perfectly fine to enough people to work.

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