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Comment by mustang-med | Hacker News Reader

My partner is on one of the teams responsible for red tape and cost-cutting at Alphabet. After having frequent conversations about past failed projects, I'm surprised this project got the green light. Personally, I don't see this product taking off. As a parent, I think it looks quite lame, and I don't think anyone at Google knows how to break into product areas for kids. I've seen quite a few headlines concerned about Nvidia being the next Cisco, but as someone who has had family at both Cisco and Google over the last 30 years, I really think Alphabet is more likely to become the next Cisco, where middle-aged engineers go to work for 30 hours a week to keep the internet's backbone afloat.

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Tell her to look at the travel system. At least when I was there a decade ago, they gameified it so that we needed to come in below the average cost for a flight, otherwise we needed VP approval. But if we came in under the average, you could bank the savings and use it to upgrade to first class, etc.

This sounds great on paper: incentivizing employees to reduce travel costs and rewarding them for it! But in reality, you'd have engineers payed substantial fractions of a million dollars in total comp wasting hours booking travel, hoping to bank savings to use on later upgrades.

Travels been in VP-approval land since late 2022. Very different place - 2016-2023 here. You can always just have concur do it, and it's pretty streamlined and integrated with flights

Even if it were brilliant, I have no faith in Google to support a product. I like Android, but so many Google products I early adopted got neglected or abandoned.

Maybe they think the average consumer doesn't care about what Google did with Wear, Chromecast, Daydream etc. But the early adopters are the ones who try these things first and I think they have gotten burned by Google too many times.

I worked on Android Wear many, many, years ago. 2016ish. This segment and use case was quietly huge, massive, in at least China, and I bet it still is. (Left google late 23)

I'd love to hear more about this team for cost cutting, it really messed things up*: external, or internal?

* You may imagine I am finding some humor in "my SO is on the google cost cutting team and I don't get why this team exists, why would anyone want a watch for their kid." I am, but I understand where you're coming from, and I'm sure your SO likely would have learned more about the watch market before making similar decisions

My partner's team works across all of Google's products (e.g., Cloud, Geo, not Verily or Waymo) and is part of the green light process for those launches. I don't want to get into more specifics than that, but let's say a product is not growing year-over-year as expected. This is one of the teams involved.

Just based on the UI, I can see the user age range being limited to 7-11/12 year olds.

Teens won't want this on their wrist in high school.

It is for kids and not teens, after all

> I'm surprised this project got the green light.

To me, it looks just like another example of Googs missing the boat and attempting to play catch up in an attempt to stay relevant by imitating what someone else does. Maybe that's a gross oversimplification, but that's the way it comes across to me. This thing clearly chasing Apple's device. Googs+ clearly chasing Facebook. Of course, there's their rash attempt at an AI. Googs just comes across a company without any focus other than AdSense, but desperately want to not remembered as a tech company that became an ad company.

Which apple device? I didn’t know they made watches for kids. Couldn’t find it either.

You can attach a kid watch to your iphone plan. They get their own number and are part of your family management. It works really well.

At least one parent must have an iphone, though.

There is no watch specifically for kids, we just gave ours my wife's old one (I'm on Android, so ...)

Sounds a bit different than what Google is offering. Google’s look more like imoo. Which is just a standalone device made for kids. So kids can pair their devices and use the restricted set of images (emoji-like but more restricted) and features. Everything in the watch is made geared towards kids (like classroom mode, for instance). That Apple Watch thing seems like an after thought and it seems a lot more expensive. I’m assuming that the iPhone doesn’t need to be near the watch for the kid to use, right?

Right. The watch has LTE and does its thing independently.

It does have kid features like schooltime. It's not priced cheap for kids - cheapest new is almost $500. (Hence giving our kid a two or three year old, used one. :-)

To me, this looks like a riff by someone who knows *nothing* about the smart watch market. (c.f. comment 18 minutes before yours https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40517866)

this is the risk, no matter how useful products are. Google just cuts products at a whim. and sends products to the graveyard. even the one's that wouldn't cost 1 engineer - looking at you - Google Podcasts.

Podcasts would need more than one engineer, certainly more than 0 <= x < 1.

I'm biased here, but "at a whim" seems like a bit of a stretch. I've never been particularly surprised by product cuts – they're always the products that have no real traction or look clearly unprofitable. Now maybe this one won't get the traction, but Android and Pixel certainly do, and Google has committed to very long support timelines on Pixel, something I see as a win, and that I'd hold them to account on.

Don't worry, it may have been greenlit but it'll be cancelled and shut down next year

Cisco is where middle aged engineers go to work 30 hours a week?

Why did they just buy Splunk?

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