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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

#131

Post by dunpeal »

nevir wrote: post #122
_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…

> the cost of keeping them must be at least 50 million per year. There's a high likelihood that at least some of their work will be of value to the company—or, if everything pans out, they get a fancy new platform. The real motivation is probably somewhere in the middle (retention, product development). This is a solid bet to make, especially when you are effectively not worried about the cost (thanks, ads!). A lot o…

Sure, that's more reasonable. You're describing a match between business needs (the potential Android successor - quite an important business target) and a critical mass of senior engineers eager to work on the product.

I'm sure Google is aware that more interesting and ambitious projects do tend to capture and hold the interest of the most talented engineers, and that figures into their business decisions.

What I strongly dispute is this notion that such a project would be subsidized solely for retention. Everyone knows about big Google projects that were shut down when their business case lost its appeal. I've also seen much smaller projects shut down when their value proposition was no longer deemed sufficient, even when their members were talented, passionate, and at real risk of leaving once their project shut down.

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

#132

Post by Skylled »

mitochondrion wrote: post #109
Skylled wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Can't say as I have. My expertise centers around Flutter and Fuchsia, for now.

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

#133

Post by ahartmetz »

ahartmetz wrote: post #77
jokoon wrote: post #25

Apparently it uses a micro kernel, zircon. I'm curious about this kernel, honestly making something new from the ground up doesn't seem like a good idea. I wonder how much of an advantage it was for android to use linux as a kernel, but I guess it was a gigantic advantage, which let them focus on what mattered in the development of android. Other question: any kernel/OS developer here to explain if a micro kernel mak…

I'd like to know how Zircon compares to L4 (implementations). When I asked Tanenbaum at FOSDEM why he didn't pick L4 for Minix 3, he just got annoyed and seemed to think I was asking why he didn't just use the L4 OS (which doesn't exist) instead of creating Minix 3 - or something. In any case I didn't get a good answer. He could have created his own implementation if he wanted, L4 is just a specification with a few e…

Note: I think he thought I thought L4 was an OS, I'm pretty sure he knows what L4 is.

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

#134

Post by AmericanChopper »

kbumsik wrote: post #15

> "Switching away from Android could provide Google the opportunity to hit the reset button on any mistakes they believe they made a decade ago,". "They might be able to regain some power that they’ve ceded to device manufacturers and telecom carriers." How making a new OS achive this? What kind of problems Fuchsia could solve when Linux can’t solve? I personally hope Fuchsia would remain as an experimental project.…

>What kind of problems Fuchsia could solve when Linux can’t solve?

I doubt this is really a big deal for Google, but a capabilities based OS lends itself a bit better to the mobile OS security model.

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

#135

Post by bitmapbrother »

pjmlp wrote: post #111
bitmapbrother wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Not really, they are winning the desktop and tablets (2-1) war. According to tablet market share stats they are clearly not winning that war and not even a serious competitor. >Likewise, Android tablets aren't that good, with most of the apps being phone apps. Most of the Android apps I use on tablets all resize fine to use the extra space. I consider trying to use desktop apps that are not optimized for a touch int…

We would appreciate to see the worldwide numbers of those stats. Well, that wasn't the message being discussed at Google IO, specially at the ChromeOS sessions regarding usability.

Global tablet market share held by tablet vendors from 2nd quarter 2011 to 1st quarter 2018. Microsoft is no where to be found.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/276635/market-share-held...

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

#136

Post by dunpeal »

nostrademons wrote: post #127
dunpeal wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $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. See my comment to nnq. You can't just take "100 of your best engineers", and stick them on some bogus project that regularly gets raided for its best talent by hiring managers. If they'd rather work on a bogus project than on a real product, they're not very useful engineers. The project…

> Have you worked for a FAANG? I was at Google for 5.5 years and was the beneficiary of an engineer-retention project for a year of that. I'm now working on a startup. Think of it from the company's perspective: they have an engineer who has already been "paid off" in the sense of having generated more revenue for the company than they are likely to get in salary during a lifetime, and is likely independently wealthy…

> So their manager asks them "Well, what is it you really want to work on? Maybe we can make it happen here and you don't have to leave all the perks of Google behind." The engineer says "I've always wanted to do OS development, and there's a bunch of neat research developments like capabilities that haven't yet been incorporated in a production OS." The manager says, "Hmm, I know of some guys over in this other department that have similar ideas. Why don't you connect with them and see if your interests align?"

What you describe is simply allowing a well-performing engineer to switch to new project, which of course happens all the time.

It's very different from "a bogus project for the sole purpose of retaining some engineers" that OP theorized.

> Google wins because it keeps these talented engineers off the market, and if the project succeeds they can win in a really big way.

So more or less like any ambitious new project? :)

> This is not unlimited, BTW.

Right, and again, goes against what OP was implying, that Google is going to run a huge project indefinitely just to retain a bunch of diva engineers who wouldn't work on anything else.

As I wrote above: "a rich employer may retain an unproductive employee for a limited amount of time if they expect it to ultimately pay off".

This is exactly what you are describing.

> if you were instrumental to the success of a project that made Google much more than you're ever likely to make in salary, you get one chance at a self-directed project.

Right, and Fuchsia is not a "self-directed project" of this kind. It's a big project with over 100 engineers, the vast majority of whom did not have the impact of Rob Pike or the others you mentioned.

Your comment is good and informative, but ultimately does not lend any support to the notion that Fuchsia really is some bogus project with no business case or future, solely for retention purposes, which is what OP was implying and what I am disputing.

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

#137

Post by SquareWheel »

mattkevan wrote: post #69
bitmapbrother wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google doesn't sell your data. Advertisers pay Google to deliver their ads to the demographic they want to target.

Right. They don’t sell our data, they rent us out to the highest bidder. Much better.

How is that not better?

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

#138

Post by 0xFFC »

Razengan wrote: post #125
RestlessMind wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)? ,…

> The main reason why this won't work is that majority of public simply prefers free ad-infested services over paid ad-free ones. Counterpoint: Apple, one of the most profitable companies. People have been giving their money to Apple before they even flaunted a strong pro-privacy stance, and I have yet to see an ad from Apple that I did not opt in for (although their recent Apple Pay emails have been slightly annoyin…

Please, people don’t buy apple stuff because apple cares for privacy. People buy apple because its products are top notch quality wise.

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

#139

Post by nostrademons »

dunpeal wrote: post #136
nostrademons wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have you worked for a FAANG? I was at Google for 5.5 years and was the beneficiary of an engineer-retention project for a year of that. I'm now working on a startup. Think of it from the company's perspective: they have an engineer who has already been "paid off" in the sense of having generated more revenue for the company than they are likely to get in salary during a lifetime, and is likely independently wealthy…

> So their manager asks them "Well, what is it you really want to work on? Maybe we can make it happen here and you don't have to leave all the perks of Google behind." The engineer says "I've always wanted to do OS development, and there's a bunch of neat research developments like capabilities that haven't yet been incorporated in a production OS." The manager says, "Hmm, I know of some guys over in this other depa…

Wave and Hello.com each had over 50 engineers, and Andy Rubin spent several hundred million (perhaps billions) on robotics acquisitions, all for projects that ended up getting canceled.

At some point the difference between "engineer retention project" and "risky venture that probably won't pan out but could win big" ceases to matter. Larry Page is exceptionally good at "Heads I win, tails I win even more" gambits - historically, these included Google Toolbar (initially conceived as a defensive play against Microsoft, but ended up getting Google Search in front of hundreds of millions of new users - this, BTW, was Sundar Pichai's first big win on the way to CEO); Google Chrome (ditto, with the side effect of becoming the dominant browser); GMail (initially an internal tool to improve productivity, then became a major consumer product); and Google Fiber (worst case, force Internet speeds up through competition, best case, new ISP). It's likely that Sundar & Larry's thinking of Fuchsia is that worst-case, it keeps 100 talented engineers at the company, and best-case, it's a dominant new OS that drives computing forwards. Either one is worth the $50M or so, so they do it.

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

#140

Post by user5994461 »

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…

It depends on the country. Some places you have to pay per SMS, some places it's free. SMS cannot be sent across borders, a big problem when traveling or living abroad.

WhatsApp is free SMS, from and to anywhere. It's an attractive offer for most of the world.

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