Google reorg moves AR, VR, Starline and Area 120 into new ‘Labs’ team | Hacker News Reader

Google reorg moves AR, VR, Starline and Area 120 into new ‘Labs’ team

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59 pointsadrian_mrd28 comments

Clay Bavor (the VP mentioned in the article) has made fairly strategic missteps at Google. Project Tango was developed under him (AR sensors on a phone), which got canned. Google then scrambled to play catch up after iPhone announced their structured light AR sensors and ARKit. Daydream VR was supposed to compete against Oculus, but shut down before their technology (imo better than Oculus) made it into production to focus on ARCore. Best of luck to him, hope he's learned from his mistakes.

It seems like the issue isn't technical -- but more managerial and lack of putting in the necessary time to see the product go from Lab -> Maturity.

Hopefully this changes soon.

That's interesting, because Niantic went from lab to maturity amazingly well, but only after being spun off from Google during the Alphabet restructure.

It doesn't help that whatever SDKs they put out, are a joke compared with iOS frameworks.

Just compare the effort to use Vulkan, where they don't provide bindings, point out to some random GitHub repository, and wish us luck.

Also like most stuff presented at IO, SceneForm hardly lasted more than one year.

Meanwhile iOS frameworks are usable from all major platform languages, and even if sometimes buggy, way easier to start than doing your own Vulkan based engine from scratch.

I'm still sad they killed Project Tango. This had so much potential.

My rule of thumb is that anything Google launches with the word "Project" in the name usually never gets off the ground. I think it shows they don't really have confidence in it, and they're trying to drum up interest by previewing their cool tech before it's ready.

yeah, it's pretty funny, Google was so far ahead of Oculus/Facebook on AR tech that they made Oculus look like a joke. It's a real "tortoise and the hare" situation

It's always been incomprehensible to me why they went all the way to production on $500 standalone devices with inside-out tracking but no tracked controllers, then gave up and let Oculus/FB/Meta eat their lunch.

They did the hard part (the inside-out tracking)! And 3D input was obviously a game changer and the future (for VR) to anyone who had tried it out, which included basically everyone who had been to a VR conference at the time (and the tech had been done decently at a consumer level as far back as 2010 with Sony's Move controllers).

Why go all the way to production on a platform that obviously has no future? Why give up right before the basic UX factors are met?

And now they're putting the same person in charge again under 'labs' branding?

It's really hard to be optimistic about this leading to products that go anywhere. Google obviously has tons of tech and talent, but sometimes it feels like they manage to be way less than the sum of their parts due to poor management.

It's crazy, man. I'd expect it from Microsoft, but it blows me away that Google went this route

Facebook went from ZERO firmware expertise to where they are today. They're still asking idiotic, irrelevant leetcode questions and filtering out a lot of good hardware/firmware people, but it's entirely possible that in a few years they'll actually have a world class device team up and running.

Maybe Google was just too short-sighted. They kept trying to jimmy VR into all the world's low-quality phones, and then gave up really quickly after that proved unworkable.

Frankly, a problem at Google is that they have a lot of VPs with very long tenures (15+ years) who are simply in these positions because they have been along for the ride.

In other places they would long have been fired for underperforming, at Google they get to keep messing up because core business is performing too well.

Google has had so many opportunities and yet has achieved so little in terms of VR and AR. They had google glass ffs! Now FB has achieved much more (with the go, quest, quest 2, and the now the rayban glasses) with a much smaller team.

Sounds like an opportunity for Alphabet to rebrand as ‘Really Meta’ [s]

How about Peta, as in petabyte? Or they could change their name to Googol.

Google Glass wasn't AR, it had no tracking at all. It's closer to WearOS than anything. Same for the FB Rayban glasses that don't even have a screen, yet are categorized as AR, and the video ad even pretends to project 3D objects in your scene.

This sets fake expectations for the public, which can hurt its reputation later

It’s obvious that fb glasses are the first gen and that they are planning on iterating quickly on this. I’m guessing we’ll see the real AR stuff in a year.

Google are institutionally incapable of entering new markets.

Their current top-level leadership lack any vision and are content to maximize existing revenue streams.

Engineers working on new products all seem to end up treating their projects merely as demonstrations of why they should get a promotion or pay rise, once that's achieved the projects languish in a permanent state of beta or 'experiment'

I was going to disagree, but then I tried to think of a market Google has successfully entered in the last five years and I couldn’t come up with anything. For sure it’s not game streaming (Stadia).

Anyone got anything?

<Promotion crickets> on the project graveyard.

The truth is that google project are dead is by now a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nobody will build a company, which is relying on google frameworks and APIs beyond adtech.

I don't know how you're calibrated for what is significant enough to count. Could you give a few examples from comparable companies? So successful new markets entered by Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook or Netflix in the last five years.

I wasn't sure these were all in the last five years, but when I checked the dates, they mostly are:

- Microsoft: Visual Studio Code (2015), acquired GitHub - getting deep into dev tools outside the Windows market

- Apple: Apple Watch (2015) - wearable health tech

- Amazon: original TV and movies, grocery delivery, acquired Whole Foods (2017)

- Facebook: acquired Instagram (2012) and WhatsApp (2014), Oculus VR

- Netflix: original feature films (e.g. Roma, 2018)

You may not consider all those to be new markets; e.g. Netflix is still pretty much just doing streaming video as far as I'm aware. But it was still seen as a big deal when they started doing original TV shows (House of Cards) and then "proper" original movies.

Edit to add: Google: AI tools & infrastructure? I don't know enough to judge if they're making a big impact there.

This is 2021. Basically everything you listed was older than your own five year threshold (Amazon was in the grocery delivery business since 2007!), or acquisitions rather than in-house product innovations.

And how is vscode a major new market?

Anyway, applying your criteria fairly to also Google, why wouldn't e.g. Fitbit, Nest, Pixel phones, Kubernetes, TPUs, YouTube Premium, Flight search, and Meet count?

For real, it should be pretty damming that even Ballmer-led MS had more product vision than current Google

It's not that bad yet. During the worst days of Microsoft, there was no products that wasn't bad or weren't actively being made worse: Vista, Office with the ribbon toolbar, Silverlight, internet explorer.

Today you might argue that Google is doing that to Chrome (3rd party cookies), YouTube, Search (AMP) but we don't actively hate using Google products yet.

Besides, I feel Google cloud/workplace people seem to have a good product vision.

Office with Ribbon was clearly the right decision. I absolutely despised the menu hell that preceeded it (minus the fact that hotkeys worked a lot better). The ribbon has since been adopted by non MS tools as well, and I'm happier for it.

Also, Windows Phone 7 came out under Ballmer, and it was So. Much. Better. than either iOS or Android at the time. A keyboard that had proper autocorrection, an OS that could run blazing fast on absoulte rubbish specs and a cohesive design (that wasn't skeumorphic).

Ballmer wasn't a god, but this idea that he had this anti-midas touch is clearly bunk.

> They had google glass ffs!

Sounds like you never used one? Yes, they had glasses with small postage stamp display in the corner.

Google's VR strategy is so half assed... Cardboard/Daydream was a great idea that just never went further than a poc/1stGen with no 1st party software to go with it.

Sounds pretty lateral to me. That was already a team.

This is bad news for these efforts. Google Labs and Google X are where stuff goes to die.

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