Winding down of Alphabet’s Loon causes job cuts
mercurynews.com
mercurynews.com
I know that people love the idea of telcos being smashed up and turned over, but when your broadband skips a beat this week remember that Google is part of the reason. Of course the bigger reason is that Telco CFO's spend their lives looking for cash at whatever cost to the underlying business and the social purpose of telecoms, and that telco boards are spineless blobs of jelly who are terrified of the investors and the CFO.
If the regulatory problem was solved then the difficulties of shallow burial are no longer be a significant impediment.
Maybe it is specific to the ones we have- last year a bad storm with 60mph winds caused power lines to clack together and knock out power for several hours.
(Or, the other meaning of the word relates to disruptors - energy weapons from Star Trek, used predominantly by the bad guys in the series.)
Every improvement is a change, but not every change is an improvement. Meanwhile, the whole business world - it's no longer just the startup culture - is regurgitating the lie that all market disruption is unquestionably good. That we should want more, bigger disruption. We believe that, and close our eyes to companies that make whole markets worse.
Some negative consequences are unavoidable. Maybe Loon made telco execs less willing to build networks in rural areas - but I wouldn't want R&D to stop just because the very notion of an improvement to the status quo makes some incumbents nervous. But on the other end, you have "share economies" companies that use VC subsidies to outcompete incumbents on local markets - but then subsidies run out, and/or companies get bought, and we're being left in a worse place than before the "disruption" happened.
The other disruption in the telcom markets in the west has been the action of government - the 3G auctions sucked cash away from the infrastructure developers and providers, numerous interventions in the market promoted as creating competition have in fact resulted in whiteboxers coming in and cherry picking markets and subscribers. Both of these things killed R&D in vendors and infrastructure providers, meaning that Chinese tech is years ahead and the infrastructure providers have virtually no idea about what they are buying.
I don't know anything about wireless spectrum and I have no solid plans to replace what we have but I really dislike the model of spectrum auctions. Does the technology really not exist so that telecoms don't pay (just checked Google) USD 81B and in return we the people can hold them more accountable and allow new players easier access?
I mean anyone can buy a WiFi router but there are still rules about what you can do with WiFi. Why can't we do the same with 5G? At least the real 5G if we can't figure out long range T Mobile sorta kinda 5G?
As transmitting distances get longer I would imagine the chaos would rise exponentially.
As I said earlier, I don't quite understand these things but my understanding is millimeter wave 5G (or "real" 5G) has such a short range that it is practically Wi-Fi anyway.
It doesn't make sense to me to have multiple competing towers with 5G in the same neighborhood. It just sounds a public good to me.
We don't need their money anyway. All Cingular and Verizon do is borrow public money. We (I mean the state) can easily borrow the money directly.
[0]https://web.archive.org/web/20160613172732/http://blogs.z24....
(Apologies for the Dutch source, Google Translate doesn't seem able to translate the entire page so you'll manually have to do it).
A profitable business is more likely to be a positive disruption. At least it is sustainable in theory.
Not really in the sense that Christiansen introduced the word to business.
The op was making an important point. Google makes a stab at something, often with a lot of publicity attached, then abandons it. (I mean this in a normative, not critical sense). Because Google is a high profile corporation and, until recently at least, was regarded as having technical superpowers, various other actors reacted to the announcement and the intermittent stream of updates.
That combination (Google’s often impuissance combined with a set of experienced rentiers well versed in lobbying) had a malign outcome that was the precise opposite of competition.
It’s a common trope that yiu can’t trust Google to deliver but this is a good example of a consequence most people don’t recognise.
> Definition of impuissance: WEAKNESS, POWERLESSNESS
It seems to not be common as an English term. Hilariously, Google's little mini blurb pulls up erectile dysfunction when you look it up.
I'm more of a fan of Peter Drucker. Smash products are lifestyle choices. Target luxury, high end for initial customer; then ride the cost curve down.
Historian Jill Lepore recently got me to revisit my discomfort with pop biz "disruption". I've always been troubled that Innovator's Dilemma had no predictive power.
My current hunch is that descriptions of "disruption" are more easily explained (analyzed) thru Wright's Law and comparing org's cost of capital.
Which still only covers 2/3rds of the domain. It omits forecasting technological progress. For example, Tesla's original founders saw that in X years time, given the trends, laptop grade Li-ion batteries would be capable (suitable) for electric vehicles. Which help time their entry into the market.
I'm sure that strategy of catching waves has a name. I just don't know it yet.
Do you have examples of this? It sounds theoretically right to me but I can't think of any empirical cases of being worse off as a consumer.
A stronger example that I had in mind are the various food delivery middlemen startups that popped up in recent years. GrubHub, Deliveroo, and many other similar companies. There have been countless discussions outlining their shenanigans in detail, but they ultimately boil down to exploiting the restaurants, already an extremely risky class of businesses, and hastening their demise. These startups care about building up their valuation and eventually getting sold - they don't give a damn about leaving a broken food delivery market behind.
This is the common thread I see, a socially destructive form of disruption: VC-backed startups entering established markets (particularly highly geographically localized ones, like taxis or restaurants), using their infinite funds to offer services below the market price, destroying their competition, and then eventually disappearing, leaving a broken market behind. I see these startups as legal pump-and-dump scams: they don't give a damn about the services they offer, their employees, or customers; their goal is to do anything to pump up the valuation, let the investors make their money back, and then they die, or get dumped onto the stock market, with the public being the patsy left holding the bag.
Yeah I largely see them the same way, but I can't think of a good way to penalize this behavior without adversely affecting something else. Startup pump and dumps are pretty terrible.
Are we in fact worse off than when taxis were around? I know rideshare contributes to traffic, but the consumer experience is infinitely better than taxis (and still way cheaper, IME)
* Well, I can speak to ~8 of them, I didn't check the rest.
a) a bunch of money is not sufficient to build out a residential network; you need a workable plan to get on poles
b) the incumbent telephone companies are capable of rolling out fiber quickly when they choose to
c) if you have underground utilities, you're probably never getting upgrades
d) shallow trenching only works for very specific climates.
If Google had partnered/acquired to get better pole access, and hadn't spent so much effort trying to line up 15 (or whatever) cities simultaneously, they might have built a lasting business. I'm kind of bitter about their ditching of OpenAccess / unbundled local loops, but it doesn't matter much since they barely deployed anywhere. That said, their business objective was really to increase user bandwidth, and that happened, even if it was mostly done by the incumbent carriers.
> “We expect many of these employees to find roles within Alphabet,” the Loon spokesperson said. “In fact, many have already found roles and transferred to different Alphabet teams.”
> “If Loon employees do not find alternative roles at Alphabet, they will be eligible to receive severance pay following their end dates,” the Loon spokesperson said.
Might as well send your application to SpaceX and see if you can reach a higher altitude.
One of my biggest mistakes as a newly promoted manager at Google was to take an internal transfer without asking enough questions as to why that person was transferring. It turns out that sometimes an internal transfer is happening because their current manager is desperate to get rid of that employee, and it's much, much easier to do so via an internal transfer rather than going through a separation.
It turned out that the employee who transferred to my team, while technically competent in most ways, was extremely frustrating to work with because of the degree to which they refused to accept feedback and change their behaviors. While they acted very pleasant and always used the "right" words in communications, if you tried to give them any feedback on their code, they would litigate every single last detail of the feedback and simply would never accept something like, "All of your peers think this change makes the codebase harder to read and maintain for reasons [X] and [Y]. If you did things this other way instead, see how that's more elegant?"
Their response was habitually, "Well it adheres to the letter of the style guide, and there are no specific rules supporting your requests, so I won't change anything you're asking me to change because I don't think that's reasonable."
Repeat that for literally every single comment in every single code review, and you can see how nobody would want to work with this person.
After several months of seeing first-hand what the problematic behaviors were and their pernicious impact on team morale, I was finally able to "read between the lines" in that employee's previous peer feedback, since none of their previous peers felt comfortable being direct and forthcoming in the written perf feedback about how working with that employee made them feel. All of the feedback simply focused on the technical quality of that person's work, which appeared fine for someone in that role and level.
Eventually after enough damage was being done, my own management asked him to transfer to a more experienced manager elsewhere in the org who then helped "manage out" the employee after their behaviors yet again caused rifts in that new team.
Lesson learned. I will never again just look at the role, level, and historical performance scores of an internal transfer candidate and "trust the system," but I'll instead really dig as deep as I can and try to arrange for some trial tasks with the team before accepting a formal transfer.
For the record, just looking purely at the statistics of my team over several years, the new external hires ended up being less of a risk than the internal transfers.
I fully appreciate that it's no fun for anyone to manage that kind of a situation, but the strategy I use is to just be really frank with the employee. Their attitude is a net negative to the team and if you don't see that changing they're not going to meet expectations.
They need a kind of intervention which would be inappropriate in a workplace.
The ease of transfer is only for like for like. E.g. l5 swe to l5 swe. Lots of loon employees were not classified as SWE
> “The separation of employment of the affected employees with the company in connection with winding down the company is expected to be permanent”
Both fibre itself, and equipment prices fell through the floor around a decade ago, when fibre manufacturing reached China, and India.
It's usually the network hardware which makes a bigger impact on the pricetag today.
I knew myself a trio which started a small fibre ISP with few thousand dollars, and 2nd hand network equipment.
Despite a massive investment Google itself couldn't pull it off with Fiber, and I doubt startups have much of a chance.
For long straight runs it will beat copper on cost god knows how many times.
In dense urban areas it is expensive to retrofit a network. You have to maintain the existing while you run the new, won't have a lot of space, any digging or new poles is expensive as there is a lot of infrastructure in your way, salaries are much higher, etc. Europe is a good example of this. DSL remained in most areas because dense urban areas are expensive to convert.
In less dense (sub-urban) areas, fiber has much lower ongoing maintenance costs versus copper, labor costs are lower, it's less prohibitive/cumbersome when you need or prefer to dig, and pole attachment is cheaper/easier.
In very rural areas, customers are so sparse that it's a money loser whatever you do. Installation of the copper phone lines was paid for by government programs, and the USF fees continue to subsidize their continued operation. While fiber has lower operating/maintenance costs than copper, the payoff period for the conversion is many decades, so decidedly uneconomical.
When FIOS first came out, it was unsurprisingly the sub-urban areas which were the first to be converted. They are the sweet-spot for most profitable FIOS conversion. Urban areas remain expensive to convert, but internet service has become more profitable over the years, and losing your customers to a competitor which did the investment is bad all-around, so conversion happens regardless of expense.
Most telling fact is Verizon opting to get out of wired service entirely. It's a lower margin business than most, requiring high up-front investment with long/slow payback... at least in areas where there is any competition.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-lawsuit-that-could-pop-alpha...
https://9to5google.com/2017/07/10/project-loon-patents/
https://www.law.com/therecorder/2019/07/29/google-settles-ip...
I'm sure there's a more complicated argument but that method has been in use by balloonists since the 1800's; it's pretty much the only way to steer an unpowered airship. Slapping "computer" on top of an obvious method is just riding the broken patent system.
Obviously lawyers feel differently.
But based on this article of the original complaint (https://www.theverge.com/2016/6/15/11945318/google-project-l...), I am guessing that the patent in question (on the Space Data side) is https://patents.google.com/patent/US6628941?oq=6%2c628%2c941
The patent is not "just for" the use of this method, the patent is for a system that makes use of this method for the purpose of creating a lighter than air communications network of nodes that operating in predetermined altitude ranges with no lateral positioning control. (specifically, look at claim 40 on page 28, and claim 1 on page 26).
(Not defending the patent... just throwing more context).
I mean, it also looks like this patent is expired now...
Or rather they would be if our patent system did not allow you to repatent things by slapping “in water” or “wireless” on things that were already patented before.
it still amazes me how much press google gets for basically vaporware. one could make the point that all google does, except ads, is a moonshot.