The dream of Ara: Inside the rise and fall of Google’s most revolutionary phone
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Re: The dream of Ara: Inside the rise and fall of Google’s most revolutionary phone
#2Ara was one of the most exciting things about Motorola, and I really wish Google had at least done us the favor of letting Lenovo have ATAP along with the rest of the company, where it might've had a chance.
> _“To us, it just felt like we had just kinda hit molasses. And I think, to Google, it felt like they were being uncomfortably sped up,” the source said.
Google constantly gets a lot of credit for "innovation", but this is a story I am seeing over and over. Skybox, also bought by Google, said much the same in an article yesterday: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-09/alphabet-...
> Skybox’s momentum seemed to slow following Google’s acquisition, while Planet Labs has continued to raise money and send many satellites into space.
And from Boston Dynamics: https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/17/google-could-be-selling-bo...
> In December 2013, Google acquired Boston Dynamics and a few other robotics startups. The idea was to build a robotics engineering team inside Google and make them work with Boston Dynamics on robotics projects. Since then, not much happened.
As another point, NEST was regularly making large strides and releasing new products, but that effectively ended with their Google acquisition. They rebranded Dropcam after buying them, and that was it, there's been nothing new.
Even for acquisitions Google claims to want to develop, it seems to be a graveyard for tech's hopes and dreams.
Re: The dream of Ara: Inside the rise and fall of Google’s most revolutionary phone
#3Ara was one of the most exciting things about Motorola, and I really wish Google had at least done us the favor of letting Lenovo have ATAP along with the rest of the company, where it might've had a chance. > _“To us, it just felt like we had just kinda hit molasses. And I think, to Google, it felt like they were being uncomfortably sped up,” the source said. Google constantly gets a lot of credit for "innovation",…
> letting Lenovo have ATAP along with the rest of the company, where it might've had a chance.
Who says Lenovo wanted ATAP, or would have given it a chance? And Google bought Motorola almost 5 years ago. If you don't call that a chance, I don't know what is.
Re: The dream of Ara: Inside the rise and fall of Google’s most revolutionary phone
#4Ara was one of the most exciting things about Motorola, and I really wish Google had at least done us the favor of letting Lenovo have ATAP along with the rest of the company, where it might've had a chance. > _“To us, it just felt like we had just kinda hit molasses. And I think, to Google, it felt like they were being uncomfortably sped up,” the source said. Google constantly gets a lot of credit for "innovation",…
I'd speculate there is a combination analysis-paralysis within Google ('we have this thing, what do we allow it to do that doesn't hurt us') and team contentment ('well, our company doesn't have to make money from customers anymore, yay!')
Re: The dream of Ara: Inside the rise and fall of Google’s most revolutionary phone
#5Google mgmt fake releases and then subsequently cancels unlaunched products all the time. They do it to assess market viability and also to stymie competitors. Ara is notable because of the breadth of the project, but it was really just about protecting the android cash cow's flank.
The strategy has worked pretty well. Android was released as open source almost 10 years ago, and you still can't run it on any semi open hardware, like you could with eg. Linux on a PC.
To this day, it still boggles my mind that Intel won't sell an open handset.
Re: The dream of Ara: Inside the rise and fall of Google’s most revolutionary phone
#6I don't get it. This is a IBM PC moment right here. Imagine you could standardize the smartphone. Really divide it into block, standardize the communication bus. Make it a PC. It would be huge, eat up the smartphone world, just like the PC ate up the homecomputers.
I even think this is how Google would have beaten the iPhone. Android as the OS for an ever-evolving phone, where if a user needs more ram he would just add more, if he needs a new processor he would just replace the current, if he needs a higher resolution display the old just would get replaced. Of course that is not easy, of course in the beginning a tailor-made smartphone would be slicker, faster. But then you support it some time and you get loyal users upgrading their device instead of even considering something else.
I know there are limits to upgradeability, just as a PC reaches the moment where all that remains from its old incarnation is the case. But still, enabling upgrades and thus removing consumers from the market would be a huge hit to all other smartphone vendors, probably spawning a more targeted parts industry.
And no: The current module system from LG or what Ara was presenting in the end is not it. Adding a new photo lense interests no one. You need to be able to switch out the core components to make an impact. The Fairphone 2 comes close, but I don't think you can drive real core upgrades without controlling the OS, and thus it ends up with a core module. We'll see. If they manage to add things like replacing the display with a better display, the core module with a more powerful one, that might already be good enough.
Re: The dream of Ara: Inside the rise and fall of Google’s most revolutionary phone
#7I would've liked to see Project Ara continue. I never thought the phone idea was good because the economics didn't seem to make sense. There's no way that a low volume product using expensive parts can compete with the handset makers and carriers on price and finished quality.
The real strength was in the maker space where you can put together components to custom build your own product. Just like a higher level arduino system, you can easily get a lot of functionality without the pain of low level development. There is a lot of potential, especially from the healthcare field, which had a lot of interest in this project. I know of a few people who were working on projects around project Ara before they pulled the plug on it.
Re: The dream of Ara: Inside the rise and fall of Google’s most revolutionary phone
#8Ara was one of the most exciting things about Motorola, and I really wish Google had at least done us the favor of letting Lenovo have ATAP along with the rest of the company, where it might've had a chance. > _“To us, it just felt like we had just kinda hit molasses. And I think, to Google, it felt like they were being uncomfortably sped up,” the source said. Google constantly gets a lot of credit for "innovation",…
Maybe that's why they are so focused about partnering in their Google-X projects and not doing stuff alone.
Re: The dream of Ara: Inside the rise and fall of Google’s most revolutionary phone
#9Google mgmt fake releases and then subsequently cancels unlaunched products all the time. They do it to assess market viability and also to stymie competitors. Ara is notable because of the breadth of the project, but it was really just about protecting the android cash cow's flank. The strategy has worked pretty well. Android was released as open source almost 10 years ago, and you still can't run it on any semi ope…
Maybe Intel and Samsung could finally do something with the Tizen Association?
Re: The dream of Ara: Inside the rise and fall of Google’s most revolutionary phone
#10Ara was one of the most exciting things about Motorola, and I really wish Google had at least done us the favor of letting Lenovo have ATAP along with the rest of the company, where it might've had a chance. > _“To us, it just felt like we had just kinda hit molasses. And I think, to Google, it felt like they were being uncomfortably sped up,” the source said. Google constantly gets a lot of credit for "innovation",…
> letting Lenovo have ATAP along with the rest of the company, where it might've had a chance. Who says Lenovo wanted ATAP, or would have given it a chance? And Google bought Motorola almost 5 years ago. If you don't call that a chance, I don't know what is.
Well the Moto Z is a thing.