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Comment by fusionadvocate | Hacker News Reader

>"[...] and builds user trust with each successful alert"

So the company notorious for killing projects is going to tackle infrastructure grade systems? I don't trust Google to tackle this problem.

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I live in a seismically active (and poor) area. Dunk on Google all you want, they're the only organization who provide earthquake alerts in my area. The government has better things to spend money on (like pervasive corruption), but Google usually sends a notification 30-60 seconds before a perceptible earthquake happens.

Google (and Apple) has been partnering with ShakeAlert from USGS for quake reporting on west coast of US. But that takes network of seismometers and detection system.

I could see smartphone seismometers being useful for areas that don't have all that. OTOH, if phones are useful seismometers, it should be possible to make cheap, dedicated ones.

The closest one (that I know of) is approximately 1000 km away, and it does provide data about earthquakes, but only after the fact. They already have some information sharing, because I usually look up the info on usgs.gov, but almost certainly not in real time.

Note that they're also one of the only ones who can unilaterally choose to preinstall this on a majority of devices around the world. Of course I agree that it's good that they do it, for free and all, but to put it in perspective it's either each government for themselves or one of the two global superpowers that have devices with accelerometers and constant internet connectivity on every square kilometer of this oblate spheroid

We’ve had this Google service in El Salvador for a while, and it’s really cool. The first time we received an earthquake alarm we felt like we were living in Japan. I never thought we would have Japanese-style earthquake alerts here.

iPhone users were a bit annoyed though, because it only worked on Android phones.

Google alone tackling this problem for 10 years and then killing it is still better than no one solving this problem and no one getting 10 years of free earthquake alerts.

big companies doing stuff for free can kill industries.

10 years is enough the ensure that any professional and company trying to make a living from earthquake early detection systems is working on something different.

yeah, someone will pop up after they inevitably kill it, but this stuff can end up delaying progress.

Case in point: Google providing Android for free killed Windows Phone, Symbian, PalmOS, Blackberry, and several other attempts to create a mobile device OS

Which was among the reasons that Google did that, not that the company would say so.

That and the fact that all those other OS were a complete disaster.

Microsoft ran Windows Phone into the ground. I could rant, but WP7 was interesting, WP7.5 was usable, WP8 and WP8.1 were pretty good, and then WM10 was very late and pretty meh. Had WM10 shown up on time and with quality, we would have a different discussion. Lots of OEMs were making phones for WP8, not many for WM10.

Symbian had flirted with Open Source, but IMHO, Nokia's fight with US carriers over shipping a SIP client and the resulting disappearance from the US market of most Nokia phones doomed Symbian... Tech journalism is dominated by US outlets and nobody reported on Symbian phones because they weren't there.

I assume you mean Palm's WebOS, cause PalmOS was pretty stylus driven and ux expectations had moved on. WebOS was neat, but Palm didn't have the corporate resources to support it.

Blackberry certainly had time and resources to compete. BB10 was supposed to be quite good, but maybe a little late.

All of these had what I like to call early mover disadvantage. Being first or at least early to a market makes it hard to adapt when the market changes. Coming in ten years late to smartphones was great for Apple and Google.

Thanks. You’ve made some strong points there

‘early mover disadvantage’ is a compelling phrase

Local government is disincentivized to build a system because they already has something up for free from the Big Tech.

Case in point: No one built a group-chat for our government officials cause Telegram is free.

Local governments are unable to do it right because, well, they are bureaucrats who cant differentiate the left hand from their right hand. Governments IT systems are eternal money sink holes only producing power points and weekly status reports to be forever forgotten.

Are you always this salty, so it is only certain topics that make you do this?

Always curious why people comment like this when they have a choice to, you know, not do it

But isn’t that also what makes us special? Like not everyone is the same and stuff?

I assume you’ve never had the delightful experience of relying on a product Google built or acquired then let decay or killed outright because it doesn’t contribute to ad revenue and the people who cared leveraged it in their promo packet to go elsewhere.

No business has the obligation to keep running what you find useful. If it was that useful, someone else will make it.

If no one is doing it or well, I see no reason to just complain and offer no solution. If there are other solutions and Google is going to hurt or destroy "competition", that's what should be discussed.

You’re allowed to just say I’m right. When Google puts enormous amounts of resources into something like Google Home, then acquires Nest, haphazardly merges the two ecosystems while co-opting the Nest brand for unrelated products, then effectively abandons it except for the occasional update that breaks prior functionality? Sure, no obligation. But I’m not being some sort of whiny brat by pointing out that your experience with Google is driven by what will eventually become forced updates meant to drive you away from a product so they can kill it, because the internal culture/incentives promote launching and not maintaining or improving.

Someone else won't make it because they already have this for free. Well for this particular case, I think having Google product might just be better than none. But for some more critical things like typhoon warning, when people actually make decision based on data from the system, relying on a product that might get killed 5, 10 years later is worse.

If your infra is critical enough, they should nationalized, publicly owned.

> Always curious why people comment like this when they have a choice to, you know, not do it

Not OP, but it's still an important consideration - one can be both glad Google is working on this, but also cautiously optimistic given Google's history. IMO it's right to be wary of private entities taking care of what should effectively be a public service.

But how boring and unhelpful to have someone post it on every product that Google builds.

> cautiously optimistic given Google's history

Did you mean cautiously pessimistic? Or maybe that's my bias from reading HN threads where this is a reliable theme in Google product threads, as well as seeing the list of killed products, while not seeing a list of kept-alive products

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