Project Jacquard

If you are responsible for developing a new technology, you can claim success if you release something that works as advertised, even if nobody actually uses it ("it was ahead of its time", "naysayers poisoned the market", etc.). Since there is no way to tell ahead of release whether it will succeed in the market, your project and, by extension, your position within the company creating it, are secure. Much, if not all, of the blame can be externalized.

On the other hand, if your goal is to release a usable product, you've just massively increased your personal exposure. First, you have to become very opinionated because any product that tries to please everyone generally succeeds in pleasing nobody, so that means there will be people who hate it, often before it is even released. Second, it is usually possible to tell if a product is useful before it actually releases (if you aren't putting blinders on yourself), so you can find yourself in a position of failure before release, a failure that you cannot shift to anybody else.

Part of the reason the iPhone succeeded was because the person who, ultimately, was leading the project was the CEO. He wasn't worried about what his boss thought, so the entire team could focus on the complete application. But that was only part.

The other reason is that the product, the way the technology would be used, was part of a feedback loop that influenced the technology itself. The advantage of taking on all that risk of failure is that you end up with technology that is better, technology that is more suited for solving real problems.

These are all ATAP projects revealed during a DEVELOPERS conference, so that there can be a collaboration in getting the software in place before general market release.

The overhype is why Google stopped doing device announcements at IO, because all the oversized tech blogs would grab the tickets just to be there to oh and ah at the new device, but not come up with new code and uses for the tech showed. Rather they would often pan what was clearly meant to be early prototypes as if they were the finished product.

Google, and to some degree Microsoft, is doing things the old PARC way. Create stuff, show it off, and if they can't find a use for it maybe someone else will.

Apple on the other hand sit on things until they have a use for it, and if they never find a use for it nobody else gets to see it and find a use for it.

In the end the PARC way of doing gave the world things like Ethernet and the GUI. Personally i prefer this way to the Apple "take my ball and go" approach.

But the press sadly love the coy ones, as they are so much easier to write clickbait about.

That's not to say developers can't add to that baseline, which obviously they have in a major, major way with the iPhone. His point is you have to make it useful out of the gate.

All in all i find myself thinking that Jobs early on had Woz (hell, in a sense Jobs piggy backed on Woz).

And similarly in the gaming world there was ID software and the combo of Carmack and Romero.

I kinda wonders who it was in the background at Bullfrog that did the grunt work that made Molyneux look good.

It's interesting that even Google didn't post a single use case for it...I can't think of one off the top of my head either.

"In other news, Las Vegas Casinos become the primary buyer of backscatter X-ray machines."

The real advantage that advantage these high functioning autistic players have is that they usually don't show any emotion while playing blackjack. Also, These players are usually smart enough to know that "counting cards is stupid" and hate being compared to Rain Man.

Joseph Marie Jacquard was a genius and Google should not use his name without proper acknowledgement. Shame on Google, and on downvoters.

Also, if you could see who downvoted you, you could perhaps start a little war, so I don't think that such a conversation system would be better.

Then bam, a few months ago, someone makes a big deal out of making that a reality. I was very confused.

I guess I'm just whining about the hardware world equivalent of "every idea I have has already been done ten times on the Internet by people smarter than me" sentiment, which - from what I learned over the years - is shared by many people here on HN.

I would like to have a smartphone that doesn't spy on me. I can't, because nobody makes one. So my personal preference doesn't matter; my only choice is between either accepting the spying, or not having a smartphone at all.

Now I get to look forward to enjoying this exact same dilemma when I buy furniture! Hooray.

Unfortunately my choices are only a single data point in the market for consumer goods. The choices most other people make with their dollars far surpass any buying power I possess.

Certainly it's worth me doing my due diligence and try to purchase good tech, but at some point the market can and does remove my choices if more profit is made by bad tech.

You mention "smart" TVs. I recently tried to purchase a dumb TV with good resolution and sufficient ports to be used as I desired. I ended up buying a "smart" TV because the dumb TVs offered were all inferior visually. I wish you luck in avoiding a "smart" TV.

You see the same pressures in online video (YouTube ads are getting obnoxious), music streaming (I can't pay Songza to get rid of ads), etc.

In some ways this is a good and fine thing for the market, but at some point one has to realize the market is flooded with bad tech because it makes more money. And I've never known of a market that doesn't optimize for profit.

That's a noble sentiment and I try to follow it as well.

Unfortunately the time is coming when I'll have the choice of being a Luddite or buying the bad tech because that's all there will be.

I already don't own a smart phone because I can't get one that doesn't have a secure or open source baseband processor.

I don't own a smart TV and by the time mine breaks down I'll probably have to go without a television as well.

The choice to go without rather than own and use invasive technology is not that big a deal when you haven't integrated it into your life yet. But giving things up that you've become reliant on is much harder.

Stallman saw this early on and built his life around it. I doubt many of us are willing to go that route.

Smartphone market is flooded with bad tech. Yes, you can still buy decent ones - if you pay for the highest-end ones, but available devices have much less capability than they could theoretically have. For instance, were producers to drop sensor market segmentation tactics (you have a phone model A with sensors 1, 2, 5 and an alternative phone B with sensors 2, 4, 6) and equip at least the mid-and-high-end phones with all the sensors, we could treat smartphone as a sensoric platform and develop tools for bigger userbase.

But smartphones ain't that bad; the older technology, however, is. It's hard to buy decent, durable things nowadays - clothes, shoes, tools. Everything is pretty and colorful and has some cool new features, but nothing lasts more than a season of day-to-day use, even though things made decades ago can last a lifetime.

I used to think that maybe military has decent hardware, only to realize they're a money-making machine now, and vendors cheat on them even more.

So I guess the core observation is: as any market matures, it turns into a race to the bottom, and products quickly become as crap as possible but still good enough to make someone buy them.

Is there a solution? I don't know. Custom-made things is one option, but there's less and less businesses doing that for basic things, and I don't see how I could get a custom-made smartphone at a reasonable (< $10k) price.

Is it the manufacturers because the device gathered it or is it the users because it describes the user?

Currently, from what I have seen, it's usually argued to be the former and not the latter. For there to be saner balance, users have to a say about how this data is used and owned. The "reasonable expectation to privacy" doctrine needs to evolve to match modern age.

Formatting fix:

1. Touchpad on the side of my sofa, so I can use gestures to control TV and media.

2. Touchpad on the side of my headboard in the same material as the rest with a subtle marking on which I can control / dim my lights. Similar things for controlling alarms.

3. Improving children's toys that require buttons now but do so by having hard things surrounded by some padding. I imagine "tickle me elmo" that was able to say "you're tickling my feet!" would be popular.

4. Would this detect my feet through socks? Run a bunch through my carpets, I'm sure I can do some fun stuff with home automation with that by knowing which room I'm currently in. Similarly for that, I'd like to track some of my habits, how long do I actually spend just sitting on the sofa or how often do I really get up from my desk and go somewhere else?

5. Make some board games. Fabric + some metal pieces, all the complex logic could sit on your phone.

6. Better sleep tracking? Do I curl into a ball, starfish, keep rolling about a lot?

Perhaps Encryption? Then why does ATAP have Project Vault?

Google is a large company with many businesses. How is Google Cloud Platform related to advertising? Nest? Liftware? Google Docs?

Fact is advertising is cyclical, and Google is aggressively diversifying away from it.