Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise
google.com
google.com
- Build new shiny thing -> promoted
- Support shiny thing -> it's not difficult, everyone can do it
This type of culture is influencing future direction of Google products, they put together awesome team, solve problem and get from 0 to 1, then team moves on, others don't have incentive to make 1 to 100.
I feel like, if this was a startup which highly depends on the success of product for their existence they could have pivoted or come up better ideas for adoption. Maybe, Magic Leap was that company, or they got too much investment and thought they will exist for a quite while
And to make working on new stuff a bit less incentivized, promotions to higher levels need to see at least some realized growth and not just getting v0 out these days as far as I know.
They have the netflix problem (or does nexflix have the Google problem)
they have killed off soo many projects that no one want to invest their time into new ones unless they reach the multi-year stage, and they can not reach the multi-year stage unless they get millions of users...
It is a catch 22, and neither company seems to want to address or even acknowledge is a problem for them
On the other hand, Google plays in a field where maintenance costs are a rounding error. You can basically freeze a product and keep it running forever for pennies, and these products get embedded in our daily lives, which is why killing it looks so bad - I can always pick up a new series with zero effort, whereas migrating off a productive service takes time and effort.
That is part of their problem, and why the cancellations feel even more abrupt and why people do not want to invest time in them. it is hard to tell a compelling story in 6 episodes of TV. So if a netflix series get 2 seasons, 12 Episode. it is just starting... even though to netflix thinks it should have a captive audience. that would just be the midseason of a Broadcast show
Most of the popular shows on broadcast would never had made it to be popular under the netflix model of 1000 shows @ 6 episodes...
Often, if I find out a show is a miniseries (or I guess they call them "limited series" nowadays) I am much more likely to watch it. Too many shows go the route of "how many seasons can we get this to run" instead of "how long will it take to tell this story with good pacing to conclusion?"
I get tired of watching shows that seem designed to run indefinitely. They all have the same sort of pacing that stretches things out unnecessarily just to pad seasons. Shows like that feel like basic cable to me when I watch them. I'll take a good 6 or 8 episode arc over indefinite seasons any day.
I recommend Line of duty.
True Detective season one: 8 episodes and done => one of the most acclaimed TV shows in many years.
Mare of Easttown: 7 episodes and done => one of the most acclaimed TV shows in many years
If you make actual stories instead of trying to create ongoing scenarios, you can hit it out of the park in less than 10 episodes.
But that's tangential to the point: once you've watched the 10 episodes, what is there to keep you subscribing?
I'd say most of their episodes are longer, on average. But that's not entirely relevant anyway, the main cost is in setting up the production as a whole.
> it is hard to tell a compelling story in 6 episodes of TV.
It's even harder to do it in one episode - the pilot.
In the past, a lot of pilots would be produced and never seen by anyone but execs. Then something like 5% of projects would be picked to air, and typically be given two seasons to iron out any problems - because it would look bad on execs who had fought to use a scarce slot for it, so there was a level of continued support for a while. Episodes were very short in length, and being effectively just containers for ads, it was alright to schedule tried-and-tested material, even if performing in a relatively mediocre manner.
Pilots are now less necessary, Netflix will invest on screenplays; but that means that a lot of the selection previously made by execs is now made by viewers. NF execs have less skin in the game, because there isn't a real limit to the amount of picks they can have. Netflix needs subscriber numbers to grow, so it needs big hits more than tv channels did. They have no incentive to continue pushing nonperforming series.
> Most of the popular shows on broadcast would never had made it to be popular under the netflix model
I'd argue that most of the series produced under the NF model would never even have existed on broadcast.
Yes, most streaming-first platforms use shorter seasons than is typical for US broadcast (but that was also often true of US cable, and is also true of, e.g., British broadcast.)
> That is part of their problem, and why the cancellations feel even more abrupt
Mid-season, especially first-season, cancellations on broadcast have always been a thing (as have soft-cancellations by moving—often multiple times in a season—to a less valued timeslot, especially when timeslots mattered more.)
A TV or cable network canceling a show is very different from netflix doing it though. When a network cancels a show mid-season fans get pissed but the network removes that show from broadcast and replaces it with shows that do get full seasons and proper endings.
When netflix puts out an unfinished product by starting a show and then not finishing it, the fans get pissed, and it just sits like a giant turd in their library so that month after month and year after year more and more people will start the show, get to where it cuts off and also get angry that netflix wasted their time.
Even if a netflix show seems to under-perform, it's in netflix's best interest to make sure every story has some kind of conclusion because some percentage of subscribers will still be able to find value in it. A finished product is a win for their library.
Otherwise the unfinished show will just sit on their servers being forever unwatched by anyone aware that Netflix screwed the show's fans, or it becomes a trap that will only make anyone who does start it angry at netflix.
Netflix should either just commit to concluding any show they start, or remove any shows that get left without a conclusion from their library entirely (throwing away all of the money they invested)
That would be nice if it was true, but that is not how it plays out at most tech companies.
I have specifically targeted this in my career, thinking about engineering productivity and even spent a number of years working at a company that provided software for manufacturing and explicitly learning about lessons learned in that field.
What usually happens is maintenance costs are not taken into account when building a product and a team is not disbanded after building something. They continue to run the larger teams/orgs until one day some VP looks at the expenses and decides to simply kill the entire product.
So in a world of having hiring freezes, having someone come in to help reduce total costs, from AWS to headcount is a way to free up people and get "new hires" without additional cost.
Some companies and individuals seem to get this instinctively, but many are happy to not make waves and try to improve the system. For some in management, adding value without headcount doesn't mean anything for them individually so they wont.
Increasing the total value over total costs of teams and orgs is my jam. I can take over products that have high maintenance burden, but are valuable, dramatically reduce the maintenance burden, then turn around with my free headcount and go and do it again and again growing the total value produced. This is the 10X-100X game.
Traditional broadcast also just had different incentives than streaming.
A successful sitcom captured a lot of eyeballs that could be translated into advertising dollars. It could also be a magnet for viewers to watch perhaps somewhat less captivating content in adjacent timeslots a la "must see TV Thursdays on NBC."
Netflix, on the other hand, mostly needs to fill its catalog and have enough really must see content so that subscribers keep renewing.
There's overlap between the two models. Both reward series that people really want to watch. But the specifics are subtly different.
Community has crawled through the trenches to get its six seasons and now finally a movie and I wish them the best.
Most traditional series will hit that number in 5 seasons, but obviously nobody wants to make a deal for a dead series; so you produce season 6 too, to make it palatable. By this point, however, your talent bill has probably grown significantly, so making new seasons is less and less profitable - as well as narratively hard. So you pull the plug and start afresh.
If they dont explode as desireable but are sustainable, spin them out.
Then again, maybe we are all over estimating how sustainable these products really are.
The first season almost always has more viewers than season 2, season 2 almost always has more viewers than season 3. The only real difference between the extremely popular shows is that the decrease from season to season is not as pronounced, but its still there.
I was like wow, I'm surprised they even bother with season 2s.
We’re moving to a security culture where a Cloud product not only has to be constantly rewritten to keep its features (not only upgrade libraries but also swap out the old Apache libs), but logs must be constantly inspected to address security risks, and GDPR issues have to be automatically lodged with CNIL. This “let’s keep this service only” has become as dangerous as leaving a Windows XP computer connected to the Internet.
Upgrades and new features often make hardening tougher, due to a combinitorial explosion in exposed surface area.
So if you were in charge of procuring such a solution three years ago and opted not to go for Glass because Google has a history of killing projects, you saved your firm a lot of wasted time and money.
Outside of the tech world Google still has a stellar reputation. Most people don't seem to care/know/notice any of the privacy issues, support issues or product continuation issues.
So I think your statement has some merit for certain types of products - ones that are targeted at the tech crowd - but overall I don't think it's generally true.
There are 283 products listed on Killed By Google. If you're right then Google must have a massive problem communicating with non-techies. What's the point in launching anything new if they're so bad at getting users?
1. YouTube for PS Vita - a YT app for hardware that's been discontinued. Nobody would know of this because the PS Vita was a tiny platform that Sony quickly abandoned; normal people did not own Vitas.
2. Postini - email security software that Google bought, stopped selling standalone, and integrated into GMail. Nobody would have heard of this because it was enterprise software, not consumer.
3. Gesture Search - a toy Android app for searching for contacts / apps with handwriting recognition rather than a virtual keyboard. Nobody would have heard of this because it's a tech demo solving a tiny problem that people just didn't have. But if people had wanted this kind of search, it would have been integrated to the OS.
4. Building Maker - software for making building models on Google Earth. Nobody would have heard of this since it was incredibly niche. How many people want to model buildings into Google Earth? 10k?
5. Google Schemer - some kind of location-based activity sharing. This does appear to be a legit consumer application, though not one I'd heard of.
Specifically I re-bought the Jackbox games which were perfect for it since I could now simply cast them when visiting friends/family. I also recently purchased a budget Chromebook for travelling and probably would have bought more games for that.
Microsoft launched similar initiatives every time for decades even failing at prior tries. In the UI front they "play" with Silverlight, WFP, Windows Forms, MFC and a lot more. Try and retry.
I also think that these issues are worse when you are dealing with hardware: do they open the codebase to continue playing with the devices? I am on the European side of not only repairing youself but opening "dead" code or somethink like that. It is just an idea.
Also note that DevTools is no longer .NET only, rather any language that has tier 1 support on Azure.
People want to get promoted, managers want their people promoted. Inflating impact can quickly become the name of the game.
Maybe you are right, not sure. But this is my impression from working at Big tech. New thing is easy to measure, compare these: "launched X in region Y" vs "prevented possible incident X from happening" (your manager would ask, how do you know if that incident will happen? maybe you spent too much time for over optimizing the solution?)
I wouldn't pay Google for any services right now. I prefer products and services that last more than mere single digit years (looking at you Stadia).
> promotions to higher levels need to see at least some realized growth and not just getting v0 out these days as far as I know
I don't think that's very far.
There are exceptions, but those are outliers, not the norm. so as an individual, you have to do what's best for you - that means don't take your chances at improving an existing product, make something new and force other teams to use it.
Sure you can get promoted for launching a new thing, but you can also get promoted for fixing a first pass implementation, for scaling something from a small user base to a large user base, and so on, as long as you can show the "impact" of the change – whether that's revenue, savings, productivity, improved UX, etc.
It's possible that up at the top there's more of a focus on shipping new things, but I don't think that's something that 99% of Googlers need to obsess over, and it doesn't reflect the bulk of the work actually being done.
To estimate the impact, we need to run controlled experiments. And we have lots of A/B testing infrastructure to help us run those experiments when it comes to launching shiny new things. But when it comes to maintaining things, not so much.
So if there are two possible projects of equal difficulty and impact that you could take on, and one is to launch a shiny new thing and the other is to maintain an existing thing, you're always better off launching the shiny new thing because the cost of quantifying your impact will be low, whereas had you chosen the maintenance project, quantifying your impact would be prohibitively expensive.
And that's why building shiny new things dominates maintaining existing things: you get full credit for your work, not a small fraction.
You get promoted for launching hot new products, quickly scaling it or fixing obviously broken ones.
The boring grind in-between them is much harder to show value so few teams are motivated to work on it.
If there is "grind" that is truly not impactful, then why is it being done? I'm not talking about for promotion, I mean why would anyone make changes that have no impact?
I work on Google Play, we've been going for a decade, no sign of stopping now. Much of what I and the many people around me do is maintenance – making things go faster, making things error less, etc. Some of that is done with new features, some is transparent to users (or app developers).
I don't see this culture that HN seems so convinced about. I can see elements of it at a very high level, as I said I'm not really commenting on the top leadership, but for most people at Google, new products do not appear to be necessary for progression.
Stadia failed as a business because it failed to get adoption by developers and gamers / users.
It failed to get adoption by developers and gamers because Google has a reputation for killing things.
Google has a reputation for killing things because it's leadership does not have a vision outside of advertising and its internal culture does not reward long-term maintenance of products.
>> I don't see this culture that HN seems so convinced about.
It started with Google Reader and has become ever more obvious since then.
When Google launches a new product, observers in tech make bets about how long the product will be around before Google kills it.
It has become a meme: https://killedbygoogle.com/
Nonsense. It failed to attract developers because it was an unsure new platform so of course most of them wouldn't spend hours to develop for it. They were always going to need convincing (with money of course), which took Google too long, but around a year or so in there were multiple heavy hitters in the form of Red Dead Redemption 2, Hitman, Ubisoft's entire catalogue (and an Ubisoft+ integration), EA Games' most new games, Destiny 2, alongside a ton of indie games. By the time Stadia shut down, it didn't really have a catalogue problem. Problem is, Google bungled the rollout and took too long to start doing this - they banked on the initial release being highly successful, but didn't start massively investing in games until later on.
For gamers, fear of Google shutting it down played a part, of course. But so did all the extremely negative coverage, from everywhere, that Stadia is dead on arrival which only reinforced that fear. Had Google actually told everyone their shutdown plan (reimburse everyone for all games), a lot of gamers would have overcome those fears (what was there to lose, really?).
Technically, the platform was amazing. To this day the best UX by far of out cloud gaming platforms. Quality upgrades were lacking though.
To sum up, Google failed in their strategy and marketing. Had they 1) promised to reimburse everyone in case the platform was shut down before X years 2) given away Stadia Premiere packs to anyone they can (like YouTube Premium subscribers, etc.) 3) enticed big studios to port games, all things they eventually ended up doing, Stadia would have been a roaring success and would be undergoing a hardware refresh at the moment. Instead, it just reinforces that Google sucks at b2c and shouldn't be trusted.
It is a self-reinforcing vicious cycle. Stadia was yet another demonstration of how Google has developed its current reputation.
>> Technically, the platform was amazing. To this day the best UX by far of out cloud gaming platforms.
That's what is so sad. Google's tech is amazingly good, but their user support and reputation are terribly bad. Bad enough that, in many cases, it breaks the business.
That is exactly what it is: a meme. Look at most products / services / hardware on there. A lot of entires are things that have newer version, were renamed or merged with other services / products, or features included in core products.
Some were discontinued, but they didn't have enough use. Only a few user loved products were discontinued: Inbox, Reader, etc.
Yes. It being a meme is exactly the problem. It just gets repeated over and over with no regard to the facts, in a kind of positive feedback loop.
If you did the same for Google's peer companies like Amazon and Microsoft (using the same criteria and same level of obsession), you'd find that the Amazon Abattoir is doing brisk business and the Murdered by Microsoft website would need pagination. But for whatever reason, when those companies launch a product, their past failures are not trotted out. When they inevitably kill their failures, the reaction is "about time, nobody used that product anyway" rather than the mass hysteria.
This is Google Glass! A product 99.99% of HN readers would have claimed was killed a decade ago. "Killed by Google" has been claiming it was dead for a long time, but I'm sure will now dishonestly find a way to double-count it.
Everyone here can name Google products they loved which they can't use anymore. For me, the big ones are Google Reader (RSS), Google Inbox (bundles, and the Travel and Shopping email categories), Google Now (flight information), and Google Hangouts (SMS integration).
For other companies, not so much. I can name minor things, like I miss macOS's old 2D virtual desktop grid. And an AirPort router would have been nice. And I'm sad Amazon Go is being shut down. But nothing on the level of those Google shutdowns.
I haven't gotten around to it yet, but my plan was to merge Google Glass entries. The holy trinity of Google Glass Explorer Edition, Glass OS, and Google Glass Enterprise Edition will become "Google Glass."
I just think that "google doesn't reward maintenance" doesn't lead to "google kills products" except in very general examples. For the most part Google is maintaining products, that's most of what most people do.
The reasons for the killing of products are I think much more nuanced and numerous.
I was employed at Google at the time, and within Google this was treated as a matter of fact problem that was not that important. The planning was to support this most likely in the first or second half of the next year. I found this shocking, and to me it made it clear that Stadia was unlikely to succeed if it couldn't even support its main hardware components close to launch.
Isn't that perhaps because you're completely immersed in it to the point where it's invisible to you? To borrow David Foster Wallace's metaphor, fish don't see water either.
What outsiders (like us at HN) see is the external manifestation of culture. People naturally speculate about what they think is going on inside the chocolate factory, but the external part is very clear - a self-reinforcing vicious cycle where things get killed off leading to mistrust in the permanence of future things, leading to their failure, leading to them getting killed off.
The second problem I see is in creative products, if the success bar is 100 million users, how can you take chances on anything, basically before you start your already constraint while small players can grow normally.
Because it's hard to measure and even harder to predict. E.g. Something that fixes Youtube's scam comment problem where scammers impersonate creators and lure viewers into telegram and whatsapp to scam them.
It won't be working immediately, so someone will have to work on it for a while and iterate against the scammers' countermeasures until it gets too costly for them and most of them give up. Should someone pick it up?
It's not immediately impactful as it won't increase engagement and ads, but it's probably going to prevent a big PR issue when some media company picks up the topic and highlights Google's inaction and their decision to tolerate the scammers and their crimes on their platform.
Fixing it has no direct impact on income, and the problem it mitigates hasn't happened yet, why would anyone work on it? And in the real world we see: they're not working on it (or it's taking them longer than a year, who knows).
At a very high level you could argue that the number of people being allocated to each may not be right, but it's not that one or the other doesn't have any resources.
From what I've seen, people at Google are very cognizant of these issues, and the only real reason that the public may see progress come and go is that these are hard problems and the work against malicious content is sadly never-ending.
Amazon had a similar issue a while back where well-rated seller accounts got hacked (or sold?) and started offering vastly underpriced premium items with text added somewhere to get in contact with the seller, trying to get people off of the platform. But to their credit, they dealt with it pretty swiftly, and I'd consider it a solved problem, I haven't seen it since.
In many cases perception is reality, regardless of what the facts actually are.
Which is far easier if the thing is brand new and didn't exist yesterday, then attribution is straightforward, and we're to square one.
For me, it's not necessarily true that showing impact on a completely new feature is easier than showing impact in improving an existing one. It's a lot more work to measure new things as we don't have the tools to measure them yet, or as you have to introduce new measurements to colleagues and get buy-in that they are the right thing to be measuring. On the other hand, saying that I reduced an existing error rate by half is very easy to communicate, understand, prioritise, and even reward.
When you step outside the eng bubble, the incentives problems absolutely apply when discussing issues Google has creating mature products.
If Google has the policy to not work with the DoD, then it makes its options very limited (Magic Leap doesn't have such restrictions as far as I know).
The same way they likely didn't appreciate when they were associated with Boston Dynamics.
So, if you can't sell your product for its main useful usage, then it's a bit difficult :/
The idea behind both is that you pursue a lot of varied opportunities simultaneously and then cull the ones that aren’t delivering dramatically outsized success.
A startups founding team, like a Google product team, may be committed to their product and want to pivot and keep taking fresh angles on adoption, but they can’t do that without money and the money works by different. Your favorite startups evaporate for the same reason.
That said, this approach seems to chip away at Google’s reputation and doesn’t seem to be yielding a lot of standout successes, so it might not be a great idea for them.
Search/ads give them a business with Pablo Escobar margins. They will never go "legit" with a regular product, they will never have something close to their main cash cow, so why not just stop making DOA products and stick to what they actually want to do?
That will save people a lot of time and money.
Sometimes people say those things, but I can't understand for whom it rings true.
What's especially hard about new things? Maintenance on the other hand, can be much more tricky. Especially when taking backwards compatibility in mind you really have to think about every step going forward.
It's much easier to build a brand new highway than repairing an existing one which is in use without disturbing traffic, if the car analogy can be forgiven.
I think the situation here has more to do with Google culture where the are too scared to stop throwing stuff at the wall and see what sticks.
Of course that is pretty much 1% of the journey. Turning that light-bulb moment into an actual product, getting mass market adoption, finding the killer app, that's hard. And anonymous. Keeping customers happy is hard. But again, anonymous.
Are you more impressed with a CV that says "invented iphone" or one that says "worked on iphone 2 to make it better than iphone 1"? Or worse yet "accumulated customer feedback to improve iphone 1, worked with team developing iphone 2"?
So it's not just google (although magnified there.) It's everywhere. You remember who _invented_ the light-bulb, but you've no idea of the people who developed that into a product, with manufacturing, distribution, sales and developed bulb-connector-standards and so on.
In our business it's the same. Here's a new wizz-bang feature. 100% glory. Maintaining feature for the next 20 years, adapting to ever-changing world requirements, keeping customers happy, and using it - anyone can do that. (and nobody wants to - it's too much like hard work.)
Glory is where you place it. And Google, like most of those Companies nowadays, are putting glory on the simple path of new creations, not the hard path of everything else.
> Are you more impressed with a CV that says "invented iphone" or one that says "worked on iphone 2 to make it better than iphone 1"?
Neither. If you have a speck of competence, you will evaluate actual skill, not the outcome of a whole team's work, of which you were just one screw.
But if you know history, or care for your companies future, I would be more interested in the second, because the first iPhone wasn't really that impressive or groundbreaking. The later iterations had more substance for the company.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Proteus_Steinmetz
[2] https://americanhistory.si.edu/lighting/20thcent/invent20.ht...
None of those are impressive in isolation, honestly. What's impressive isn't what product you worked on, but how well you worked on the team, how well you technically performed, and whether the skills you were using are relevant to the position you're applying for.
Because it doesn't exist yet, you need to investigate previous approaches/research, come up with architecture/design, evaluate pros/cons, hardware requirements, staffing and so on.
When things become clear, it is easy to build it.
Support is harder in the sense that it takes a lot of time and digging into the platform to understand how can you solve it, but for a small gain (0.5% users will not see this issue again, unless you introduced new bug). Imagine solving 100 different support tickets, you need to solve at least 10 of them to start seeing the pattern, if there is any, to come up with generic solution. But at the time you solve 100 tickets, someone with experience can build solution which can make your product obsolete.
Support vs new has different trade-offs.
- Support -> takes more time and persistence, very small incremental improvements (88% -> 88.4%,..). But happy customers
- New thing -> takes more time on how to approach the problem, after problem/solution is clear, much faster to build for 85% cases
Staffing and hardware requirements aren't terribly important for greenfield development without any users yet. New products can be brittle and constantly in flux and that's probably ok.
Actually scaling the product once it exists and have users, building out new features without disturbing existing workflows, that's the hard work.
Which do you think is harder, inventing twitter as the fail whale product, or going from that to a hundred million users without disturbing the customers you got? I can't imagine the difficulties can even compare.
I've noticed that some programmers live for the front-end of a project. When you have a clean slate, are doing design, developing the data structures, approaches, all of that creative stuff. By the time the project is mature and the big problems have been resolved, they tire of it and want to move on to another new thing.
But there are others who hate that front-end stuff. They love taking a mature product and maintaining it. Debugging, adding new features, etc.
A successful product absolutely requires both kinds of people. A company who devalues one or the other is a company that is shooting itself in the foot.
In software world, new highway is not a new thing, it is just a copy/paste. In software new thing is mostly relates to inventing a solution for specific use case, solution itself could be invented long ago, but using in your area could be novel.
Even in construction industry, building new highway is not 100% new thing, processes, structures, materials, rules are already defined. You spend time for different type of thinking (where to build, which road to buy,...)
This is not a truism, even though many managers see it like that. Dealing with someone else's mess is way harder than to deal with your own.
Which is, I think, exactly the point that OP is trying to make. Incentives are defined by managers, after all.
Managers are too much focused on new thing, because it is much easier to see impact on new thing.
Quantifying impact on support is much difficult and it seems big tech mostly gave up on trying to quantify it, hence people get praise when they are incident commanders, but when you go above and beyond to avoid it from happening at all, you are just doing labor work
-Build shiny new replacement -> HN front page, exposure, kudos -Fix bugs in existing thing -> No recognition
Rewriting is so much more fun than hunting after obscure issues
That’s exactly the meme/complaint: Google seems to value innovation more than success.
What could be just fine small company doing their product is canned and engineers are moved to look for another big thing or to support other big thing
- Support shiny thing -> it’s not incentivised, valued, or promotion-worthy
I don’t think it’s a necessarily a value judgement on support or maintenance being easy (it’s not, necessarily) - it’s just not Google’s current culture/process to value this work.
If Google switched to incentivising (something like) cumulative user engagement or happiness, it would both incentivise longer-term thinking (as growth in users and also growth in engagement over time would be valued) and also probably help solve their reputation for poor customer service.
https://valleywag.gawker.com/meet-the-google-founders-mistre...
When it comes to launching new products, whether innovative or not, they seem to have launched some of the most used products out there: Gmail, Google Calender, Analytics Google Play, Chrome etc.
They also did their fair share of copying: Galaxy, Cloud etc.
Software wise they've launched Go, Angular, Kubernetes, probably some more.
They've succesfully launched more products than any other corp out there. Even though nothing rivals their search revenue.
Although of lately they've been getting a bad rep with killing projects. Startups we often push to move fast and break things, but from Google we seem to expect more.
Regarding Stadia they handled it nicely, got a full refund after using it for almost a year (except for the subscription which is fair)
For Google, independently it might feel like "only 10M users" will be impacted by deprecation, but in total 500M people might get impacted by deprecating 50 smaller products. Google might think, it is less than 1% of our user base, but in reality they impacted 16% of their user base.
1 out 6 people will know that new google product will be killed in 3-4 years. They tell about it to others, eventually it becomes a meme.
But then give them shit for their failures, even if fairly handled. After failure startups leave customers & employees empty handed, Google refunds and pays all.
Even though they've killed many, their successes are really impressive.
This is their graveyard: https://killedbygoogle.com/
Most are small project, or large project that found continuation some other way. (angular, fitbit etc, who cares about hangout?).
Innovation wise Google is still the most diverse out there. FB, Apple etc. are not creating a very diverse list of products.
And yeah and a lot of products fail, but for most large projects they've handled it nicely.
FB also discontinued a lot of products and became a meme. In the end I would rather they keep trying to create something useful instead of just milking their search revenue till the end of time.
People can't give Google a chance all the time, especially when it comes to their livelihood and businesses. I know people who built product on top of Google product, which got deprecated later and hurt their product. Do you think next time they will choose Google immediately again?
> who cares about hangout?
Remember Google Talk? it was awesome, far ahead of its time. If they kept investing to Google Talk, probably WhatsApp, Telegram and other alternatives will be struggling to get users and momentum. Now Google has how many chat apps? 8-9 or 18?
Analytics was indistinguishable from Urchin On-Demand at launch. They took a successful $500/m service and made it free w/ an AdSense/AdWords account.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Labs
Area 120 may try to revitalize that, but it seems to feature more Press Releases than actual demos.
How many times have people just given up on doing the extra mile? I know I did.
What I would really like was a product that was developed to be affordable, fairly open so you can easily integrate it into your own system, write applications that can run on the device without need to call home to the mothership etc.
There are lots of situations where it would have been very convenient to have access to an affordable, ruggedized, light-weight product that provides both a head mounted display, a decent quality camera and a user interface that can be operated while wearing gloves.
For instance, right now I'm involved in a project where we help build a huge piece of machinery (the size of several intercity trains in terms of size and mass). The team is spread all over the world while the building of the actual machine takes place in a backwater that takes about a 24 hours to travel to. It would be really useful if the onsite engineers could stream video of what they see while working on the machine rather than having to use handheld mobile phones. It would also be useful if they could see telemetry and parameters in the display as they work on the machine without having to move to look at the various displays. Perhaps also see the video stream of other engineers working at the same site.
The founder initially fell in love with Google Glass and went on to build an AR/VR startup around it.
They are life sciences focused, but I see no reason it couldn't fit your use case.
I explained the my application was remote support of engineers /customers working in on our hardware microscopes (similar to an electron microscope).
The sales rep says they are only interested in selling life sciences /drug companies. So I would recommend against anyone contacting them who want to use this for general purpose AR.
Besides it doesn't look like they are primarily focused on selling the device itself.
For a device to work for us it would either have to be so small it can be worn with a hard hat, and not stick out beyond the helmet and incorporate safety glasses, or it would have to be a lightweight helmet mounted system that can be folded out of the way when not in use so people don't have to change helmets.
With a helmet mounted device you could incorporate the camera(s) in the helmet and perhaps even include an IR camera as well. For the stuff we work on on that project, having an IR camera, would actually be of immense help. Both for on-site work (being able to see what temperature different parts of the machine are with some accuracy), for remote observation and for documenting.
Angelo, the founder, has a deep passion for VR/AR so I'm sure he'd love to hear your use case.
As a bonus: their focus has been on adding evidence capture (documentation, really) in the flow of the process. The primary use case is pharma manufacturing execution systems (e.g. installation, configuration, and validation of a new production line).
Fortunately, dedicated teams outside of google have built similar products and been much more successful in the market.
I think that Vuzix[0] or Realware[1] might have exactly what you need: a rugged head-worn camera and lightweight 2D display/hud that can stream video/audio/files over the internet. They're in use today for use cases just like what you describe and are definitely glove-friendly.
If you need 3D interactivity/perception, it's a more complex case, but there's products for that too using hardware like the HoloLens or iOS pro devices.
Exactly. Why isn't this their norm? So dumb.
Expand scope of Google Ventures. Or create "Google Spinoffs" with a tighter focus.
I'm certain they'd have plenty of Googlers/Xooglers who'd jump at the chance.
That way they can give the product a chance, motivate the people who jump aboard and have the option to buy back the company within a reasonable time frame if it proves to be a success. It would also give Google an incentive to promote the company to some degree and perhaps channel business opportunities their way.
(Or some variation of the above).
Back when I left Google I would have been happy to take a deal along those lines.
(I worked at X 2013-2015.)
Unfortunately, glass was a pet project of Sergey's and he decided to exit stage left fairly quickly once some of his unsavory behaviors started becoming known publicly. This was just a few months after the launch. Once he was no longer hands on, the entire endeavor was left the languish without clear direction.
This let me think that google never intended this as a real product, just for the media attention.
My findings were:
- couldn't get them onboarded into intune/active directory
- camera wasn't good for task past 1.5m or so
- screen was too low res for required use (see features on a chart)
They were cheaper than the latest iPhone... I think this is the error that they made - if they had gone for a top of the line device then they would have been closer to the expectations that our customers had.
Things like Starline are where Google will shine for now. They can come back to AR.
I had to Google-fu because I never heard of this before.
Turns out it's buried beneath at least five other companies/brands named Starline, and the thing I did eventually find was a single non-descript Google blog post from 2021.
Suffice it to say I expect whatever the hell Starline is to be another of many on the Killed By Google(tm) pile.
Remember, Google is a company that shuts down even some of its relatively successful products, so it's hard to imagine Starline ever succeeding as an actual Google hardware product.
I see others say that its just another product Google killed. I have to disagree, >10 years is quite a long time to see if product works or not. This time its a bit different.
Google is a cool company. Maybe not as cool as before, but certainly an order of magnitude better than Microsoft. I wish them all the best and hope they can come up with new exciting stuff
I'd love to see AR succeed but with the current price I doubt it'll gain popularity in the near future.
* Musée de la Libération de Paris - musée du Général Leclerc - musée Jean Moulin - yes, that's actual full name
I'm sure AR will be back eventually, maybe all the factors align next time.
Am I the asshole here for being happy that future never came to pass?
People are already zombies addicted to their phones, tracked and monetized to hell by advertisers, so I feel like gluing it to their eyes with cameras constantly scanning everything they look at, is some dystopian nightmare I never want to see.
It sure might be a dystopian hellhole. But at least some shareholders got rich.
Credibility and excitement for Google launches is massively reducing ever since the G+ debacle and something, I feel at least, they should try to get back.
Its always the same pattern. A lot of pre-release advertisment, followed by a release of a beta version and another press release declaring the end of the product.
At this point, I wouldn't adopt any Google offering because I sort of expect by default it will go away in 6 months or 12.
And now, roughly 10 years later, there is no real self-driving car in sight, which is a good thing IMO.
To me, it looked like Google and other SV companies were using the media to hype up the self-driving car thing to get VC money for these projects, which are obviously long term, that is where we agree....
All I remember was a lot of glass hype, followed by the message that Google has actually stopped selling glass for "normal" customers...
So at least in my world, the pattern still fits.
So why would Google want to run two teams (Glass and North) in parallel when they can discontinue Glass and merge both teams into one? It would be news if they closed down their newly acquired AR glasses by North [1], but they are still in the AR glasses race.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/30/google-acquires-north-augmen...
[1] https://9to5google.com/2022/05/11/google-ar-glasses-translat...
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/5/16966530/intel-vaunt-smart...
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/17/18144221/north-focals-in...
[2] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-a-vision-fa...
It would be a total failure for Google if they discontinued all their AR glasses products; signalling their exit from the AR glasses race in general. Thanks to that acquisition, that is not the case.
Intel's tech. And it hasn't replaced it.
No announcements as of yet for their future roadmap. We don't know if it'll replace or supplement the in-house tech Google has. All we know is they are shutting down their existing sales channel for AR glasses. It's impossible to buy a pair with either tech on it at the time.
For all we know, they could bundle these patents and sell them to Samsung or Xiaomi or any other OEM.
Is there a product — perhaps some kind of goggles — that I can wear on my face which will simulate the experience of watching a big television? I don't want virtual reality or augmented reality or anything like that.
I just want to be able to sit on a long-haul flight and isolate my eyes and ears in such a way that it feels like I'm sitting alone in a dark room watching a movie. The movie should play from my iPhone.
I don't want any of that. As the adjacent commenter surmised, I just want a television strapped to my head. I don't want other tourists in my peripheral vision, or screaming babies in my ears.
Also ideally I'd like to be able to watch a movie with my head at any angle. As I understand it, some (most?) VR headsets will keep the movie screen in the same place, so if you recline your seat and your eyes are pointed more towards the ceiling, the headset allows you to look at the ceiling of the virtual room you're in. I don't want this.
That's kind of the selling point of a VR headset, yes. That's the sort of functionality that got most people interested in it.
> I don't want any of that. As the adjacent commenter surmised, I just want a television strapped to my head.
This product category has existed for decades, eg:
https://www.amazon.com/I-O-Display-iTheaterN-I-Theater-Displ...
It should be possible to find an HDMI version somewhere.
I don't think they ever got any traction, because this particular use case is so limited, but I'm sure they can still be found somewhere (try ebay, or look for cheap chinese brands taking advantage of interest in VR)
That said, IMO the best solution available is the Quest 2. I don't think you'll just find another headset that's going to be affordable and have a good image quality. The hardware in it is excellent.
It does all the VR stuff you don't want, but all you seem to need is a video playback app that will make sure to keep the image in front of your face regardless of head position.
You won't have company if you don't want it to, the included app simulates an empty cinema except for yourself in it.
I guess they want to feel like a TV is strapped to their head instead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasstron
They stopped making them at the end of that decade.
It also says it isn't actually available for purchase yet.
Do you know any that will fit an iPhone 13? I have some decent noise-cancelling headphones already.
There's also the whole thing where Quest 2 is quite a bit worse than Quest 1 in some aspects that relate to comfort, such as the lack of precise eye distance settings.
Whereas Microsoft will support you for decades and is a very safe bet for your business.
As much as i hate Apple products, I can't deny that most of the time they are the leaders and the rest are just copies.
Apple is almost always a follower and rarely an innovator. They take something that exists, and polishes it. They are very successful at it, but a leader definitely not.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/01/21/ms-layoffs-effect...
Hololens is full 3D AR. Much more impressive. The only issue with Hololens was it had a really tiny field of view.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IK-zU51MU4
I had Glass in 2014 and I used it a bit but people continually bothered me when wearing it so I retired it after a couple of weeks. Couldn't do half the stuff the Enterprise edition apparently could.
Speculation: Google is consolidating talent and doubling down on an internal VR/MR headset and metaverse to compete with Apple. It will be tethered to a "Puck" that runs android and clips to your belt or is in your pocket. It will be an important moonshot for AI, metaverse, and virtual Office.
YouTuber Sadley It's Bradley is a great follow for Optics and inside baseball of this space.
The original vision of augmenting human vision without a bunch of caveats and limitations is not doable today.
Spectacles by Snap is a cool accomplishment, but mostly the form factor is useful for recording video form a human's perspective and not augmenting one's vision.
I want to provide remote instruction and see through a user's eyes to help them fix/debug hardware. 2D AR is good enough.
Hololens is winding down. What's the next best thing?
It’s very simple; is it an ad? No? Then Google will scrap it.
There was a Black Mirror episode about (iirc) contact lenses that offered always-on, high fidelity recording. They were used to turn people into self-survelliance machines with no privacy, whose every experience was subject to review. I suppose any time a thought along the lines of "I'd like that thing from Black Mirror, but..." occurs, it's worth stopping to wonder if you've missed the point. I digress.
I've had dozens of times in life where I wished I essentially had a dashcam for my face. It's such an appealing idea to be able to share "Let me show you just what I saw, as I saw it." Not all the time, but sometimes. And not with everybody, just with some people. The last time this desire occurred to me was during an early morning seven hour car + train + plane + bus + bike + (gratuitous) ferry + walk journey I was taking from North Georgia to Midtown Manhattan. Aside from the intentional bonanza of modes of transport, there are a ton of amazing vistas along the way; going from the woods in moonlight, rounding the curve to come into Atlanta lit up at night, seeing the sun come up over the clouds, the view of Manhattan on the final approach into LGA, etc. As it stands today, at points where I'm not biking or driving, I'll get out my phone to take a picture. "Look, here are three pictures I took" doesn't actually communicate what I want to communicate though. What I would really like is seven hours of footage, mostly played back at 50x speed, but slowing to closer to real time at the interesting parts. When those interesting parts are panoramas, those are the places I'd get out my phone for a picture today. There'd also be parts where nothing individually was particularly picture worthy (say, biking down Ditmars Blvd), but in toto it might be interesting to people.
What I wish I had was something natural-ish looking (i.e. I don't want to take a video of what I see on this trip, not of people staring at a camera rig I'm wearing while trying to take a video of what I see on this trip), in a form factor that I can safely wear and passively use while biking and driving. It would also need the ability to capture seven plus hours of good looking video. And also somehow privacy respecting and not dystopic.
https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/when-talent-is-not-enoug...
explains how this happens (Hello, McKinsey!)
Whenever this tech matures (and it will eventually), I rather it not be done by the company whose only goal is to capture even more data about you (and whose OS will be full of other, 3rd party, spyware).
If done by a startup, there is a chance, however tiny, that they can create enough market that a non spyware version of AR glasses will be available for those that want it.
If Google or Meta (or MS) create the AR glass first, they will somehow promote a unhealthy walled in network, and people will not even understand what is wrong till after the next Holocaust.
Another one bites the dust
And another one gone, and another one gone, Another one bites the dust
Must be weird.