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Project Fuchsia: Google Is Quietly Working on a Successor to Android

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Re: Project Fuchsia: Google Is Quietly Working on a Successor to Android

#101

Post by nostrademons »

_m96l wrote: post #86
remir wrote: post #60

"One person who has spoken to Fuchsia staff described the effort simply: "It’s a senior-engineer retention project." This has been my therory for a while. You see all these different projects competing against each other (multiple messaging apps are a good example) and you think: why is Google so unfocused? But what Google basically wants to do is hoard engineers so they don't leave and go work for competitors and ma…

Per the article, Google has over 100 engineers working on Fuchsia. If these are all "senior engineers" that "Google is trying to retain", the cost of keeping them must be at least 50 million per year. That's a lot of money to pay just for retention of people who are not producing anything of value, consuming many other resources (office space, network, hardware, perks), and deeply committed to a project that supposed…

$50M is tiny compared to the opportunity cost of having 100 of your best engineers jump ship to a competitor or found a new one. Google will pay $50M for a startup with 10 proven engineers and then shut down their product, just so that they aren't on the open market where they can challenge the $50B+ golden goose.

Silicon Valley basically works on the principle of "Never let your employees do to you what you did to your past employer or competitors." There have been multiple cases where a small group of 10 or so engineers has quit en masse and then gone on to found or strengthen a billion-dollar competitor, eg. Shockley => Fairchild => Intel => AMD, HP => Apple => [General Magic, Claris, Radius, NeXT] => Apple, Cisco's revolving door of startups, [Western Digital, PARC, Bell Labs] => Google => Facebook. The cost to the company of this is easily in the hundreds of millions, oftentimes billions, and sometimes existential. It makes sense to blow $50M or so to keep a proven team of tech talent in-house.

Re: Project Fuchsia: Google Is Quietly Working on a Successor to Android

#102

Post by HillaryBriss »

eganist wrote: post #40
drewda wrote: post #32

> "The company must also settle some internal feuds. Some of the principles that Fuchsia creators are pursuing have already run up against Google’s business model. Google’s ads business relies on an ability to target users based on their location and activity, and Fuchsia’s nascent privacy features would, if implemented, hamstring this important business. There’s already been at least one clash between advertising an…

> The ad team prevailed, this person said. Of course they did. A controversial idea, but you know how much easier this would be for everyone if Google offered an option for users to be paid for volunteering your information to them? It's a precedent most fledgling ad companies wouldn't be able to match... even if it's just a few dollars a month, or maybe 30ish bucks a year. It'd cut into Google's bottom line, but it…

> Immediate hit to Google's revenue stream

but maybe only a temporary one. after knifing the babies (i mean honestly outcompeting the startups), Google could discontinue that option and stop all the payments.

at least for a while, until a fresh crop of foolhardy competitors boldly entered that market again.

Re: Project Fuchsia: Google Is Quietly Working on a Successor to Android

#103

Post by jedieaston »

sjm-lbm wrote: post #98
kettlecorn wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Google's self-competition is something they are doing strategically. If you look at the industry as a whole products wax and wane based on market trends. Market leading products often struggle to innovate under the weight of their own success and are eventually replaced by a new innovator that's doing something right. Google, by virtue of creating many different types of products in one category somewhat insu…

If we still look at the messaging example, I honestly think this theory (if that really is what Google is doing) is backfiring spectacularly - the fragmented messaging standards mean that most Android users communicate using SMS, which is a laughably bad protocol in 2018. iMessage - boring old non-developed by a "startup" style-team iMessage - is so much better that I've often contemplated switching to iOS for that r…

I wonder if you look at the stats whether or not SMS is actually the most popular form of communication on Android. I live in the US, where I use iMessage and SMS is the most popular, but I hear all the time on Reddit that no one uses SMS outside stupid America and everyone uses WhatsApp/Signal/(Chinese one I'm forgetting).

Google needs to pick one, no doubt, but I wonder how relevant it is that they do (Android has much of its market share outside the US).

Re: Project Fuchsia: Google Is Quietly Working on a Successor to Android

#104

Post by RestlessMind »

eganist wrote: post #40
drewda wrote: post #32

> "The company must also settle some internal feuds. Some of the principles that Fuchsia creators are pursuing have already run up against Google’s business model. Google’s ads business relies on an ability to target users based on their location and activity, and Fuchsia’s nascent privacy features would, if implemented, hamstring this important business. There’s already been at least one clash between advertising an…

> The ad team prevailed, this person said. Of course they did. A controversial idea, but you know how much easier this would be for everyone if Google offered an option for users to be paid for volunteering your information to them? It's a precedent most fledgling ad companies wouldn't be able to match... even if it's just a few dollars a month, or maybe 30ish bucks a year. It'd cut into Google's bottom line, but it…

The main reason why this won't work is that majority of public simply prefers free ad-infested services over paid ad-free ones. Case in point - YouTube Red and it's abysmal adoption rate.

One might reasonable argue that YT Red just removes ads, but doesn't do anything for privacy / data collection. But I have two questions for them: 1. what makes you think people would gladly pay for privacy (any glaring example)? , 2. even if Google were to offer such an option, would you trust it?

Re: Project Fuchsia: Google Is Quietly Working on a Successor to Android

#105

Post by foodstances »

drewda wrote: post #32

> "The company must also settle some internal feuds. Some of the principles that Fuchsia creators are pursuing have already run up against Google’s business model. Google’s ads business relies on an ability to target users based on their location and activity, and Fuchsia’s nascent privacy features would, if implemented, hamstring this important business. There’s already been at least one clash between advertising an…

I often wonder what kind of amazing company Google could be if only their cash cow was not from advertising, but something neutral and profitable like AT&T was to foster Bell Labs.

Re: Project Fuchsia: Google Is Quietly Working on a Successor to Android

#106

Post by scarface74 »

s17n wrote: post #94
scarface74 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve got a better idea. Google could always ship a product that people are willing to pay enough for where it is a sustainable business without being as supported.

Google is a consumer software company. Consumers aren't willing to pay for software.

The article is not about standalone software. It is about an operating system that will be used to sell hardware. Apple is proof that consumers are willing to pay enough for hardware to keep a company profitable.

Re: Project Fuchsia: Google Is Quietly Working on a Successor to Android

#107

Post by dunpeal »

nnq wrote: post #91
_m96l wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per the article, Google has over 100 engineers working on Fuchsia. If these are all "senior engineers" that "Google is trying to retain", the cost of keeping them must be at least 50 million per year. That's a lot of money to pay just for retention of people who are not producing anything of value, consuming many other resources (office space, network, hardware, perks), and deeply committed to a project that supposed…

> It just doesn't make any sense to retain someone indefinitely if they're not going to produce anything of value They likely will. Whenever a new projects starts, engineers can be recruited for it from the pre-vetted internal pool. Hiring and the ramp-up time for new hires would cost more. Yeah, if you're an ossified compnay rarely starting new projects it doesn't make sense. But if your Google this is not the case.…

This sounds good in theory, but in practice what you're describing will not be stable, sustainable, or at all practical.

You can't really run this sort of revolving-door "talent pool" project for long, certainly not a massive project of 100+ engineers. If every time a new project opens up, its hiring managers get to unreservedly raid the "talent pool" project for star performers, then pretty soon this project will be known internally as a joke, that is at priority zero, and any but its most dysfunctional engineers will be rushing to other projects, either internally within Google or (more likely) outside it.

You'll end up with all the best people quickly leaving for real projects where they can do real work on real products for real pay (bonuses for revenue-yielding projects are much, much higher than for anything else). The project itself will be a dysfunctional joke since you can't run it with the best talent routinely recruited away. The only people who will work on it will be dead weight who don't care to work on real products or even make any progress on a bogus one, which is the definition of the sort of people you should immediately fire.

In fact, the whole initial "pool" of candidates sounds toxic, if the only reason they were given this project is that any other _real_ work would cause them to leave. As a hiring manager, I'd be very skeptical of anyone who seemed to be this sort of indifferent diva, and would not be looking to hire them.

To sum up, it's a fun little theory, but extremely unlikely to work in practice, and I've never seen anything like it. The simple explanation that Fuchsia is an Android successor is much more likely, and there's zero evidence for the far-fetched "talent pool" explanation other than an unsupported comment by some anonymous "one person who has spoken to Fuchsia staff". It's ridiculous.

Re: Project Fuchsia: Google Is Quietly Working on a Successor to Android

#108

Post by sjm-lbm »

jedieaston wrote: post #103
sjm-lbm wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we still look at the messaging example, I honestly think this theory (if that really is what Google is doing) is backfiring spectacularly - the fragmented messaging standards mean that most Android users communicate using SMS, which is a laughably bad protocol in 2018. iMessage - boring old non-developed by a "startup" style-team iMessage - is so much better that I've often contemplated switching to iOS for that r…

I wonder if you look at the stats whether or not SMS is actually the most popular form of communication on Android. I live in the US, where I use iMessage and SMS is the most popular, but I hear all the time on Reddit that no one uses SMS outside stupid America and everyone uses WhatsApp/Signal/(Chinese one I'm forgetting). Google needs to pick one, no doubt, but I wonder how relevant it is that they do (Android has…

This is a fair point, and I wouldn't be surprised if what you are saying is correct.

That said, saying "Google's startups-within-a-big-company strategy has driven most users outside of Google's chat ecosystem entirely" isn't a whole lot better.

Re: Project Fuchsia: Google Is Quietly Working on a Successor to Android

#109

Post by mitochondrion »

Skylled wrote: post #85
techsin101 wrote: post #78

Someone please answer this... I want to learn this. Fuschia is getting swift support Flutter runs on fuschia Flutter uses dart Do I learn dart or swift, personally I want to learn swift. Flutter only supports dart??? Fuschia supports swift Is flutter going to support swift

You can write software for Fuchsia without using Flutter, but Flutter is the most friendly way at present. In a basic sense, Flutter is based in Dart, but if you want to call into another language like Swift, there is a way to do so, called FIDL. I'm not sure if Swift has FIDL bindings yet, but I'm sure that it and many other languages will, in time. Even today Flutter has support for Swift code on iOS the same way i…

Have you encountered Julia, and if so, what did you think of it?

Re: Project Fuchsia: Google Is Quietly Working on a Successor to Android

#110

Post by JTbane »

013a wrote: post #79
wpdev_63 wrote: post #9

I am really surprised Microsoft isn't doing something like this. They are losing the OS war.

They are. The fact that HN doesn't follow it just speaks to the anti-Microsoft bias here. They've had the OneCore project back in 2015-2016 to unify the kernel and core OS pieces, which was a success and is now powering every Windows device out there from Xbox to the PC. They have the UWP, their unified app framework. They are also working on CShell, which is a unified UI/windowing/compositing system that will work a…

UWP is dead in the water.
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