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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

#151

Post by izacus »

remir wrote: post #143
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…

Who said Fuchsia was some bogus project and a waste of talent and resources? My original comment was that Google was willing to let its enginners work on duplicate project so they remain at Google instead of leaving to work elsewhere. If Fuchsia turns out great, that will be a win for Google. It's not like these enginneers are just being paid to kill time. Google bought Android, then also created Chrome OS and is now…

RCS isn't an app (and neither it's something that Google built).

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

#152

Post by owaislone »

scarface74 wrote: post #75
eganist wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

They could and it would make them a few million dollars, not billions of dollars.

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

#153

Post by debt »

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…

"It’s a senior-engineer retention project."

First time I've ever heard this phrase. It's funny because it's true.

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

#154

Post by nostrademons »

dunpeal wrote: post #144
nostrademons wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 - h…

> 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. And they all got canceled once their business case became void. None of these were bogus projects. They all initially had a business case, and were run by engineers who proved themselves before. When that business case fail to pan o…

The final risk factor listed on Google's 10-K [1] is:

"We rely on highly skilled personnel and, if we are unable to retain or motivate key personnel, hire qualified personnel, or maintain our corporate culture, we may not be able to grow effectively."

Acquiring and retaining key people is in the interests of shareholders, and Google invests significantly in this activity. I started this subthread with a comment about $50M acquihires where they shut down the product immediately afterwards. That's just one example - others include funding STEM education for children, the Google Summer of Code, multi-million-$ retention bonuses, and constant recruiting efforts.

This is all disclosed on the prospectus and annual reports. If you don't understand why this is important for a tech company, you should probably not be investing in tech, but I will be happy to buy your shares from you.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000165204416...

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

#155

Post by scarface74 »

owaislone wrote: post #152
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.

They could and it would make them a few million dollars, not billions of dollars.

Selling hardware products that people want without advertising or collecting user data unnecessarily seems to be making Apple slightly more than a “few million”.....

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

#156

Post by nostrademons »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #146
nostrademons wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 - h…

I would not characterize fiber as having any notable impact on the country at large's internet speeds/caps.

It worked for Kansas City, Provo, and Austin, and basically failed everywhere else.

I think Fiber was a bit of a miscalculation in that they misjudged where the bottleneck would be. In the early days of Fiber (I worked on it, briefly), the assumption was that key risk factors would be that incumbent ISPs would raise their speeds to match, or that marketing would fail to sign up enough customers to make the build-out economical. These turned out to not be major problems, but the incumbent ISPs blocked expansion to new municipalities through permitting & right-of-way restrictions. The assumption when I was working on it was that if Kansas City could demonstrate a successful deployment, other cities would be lining up to clear roadblocks and bring Google Fiber to their citizens; this didn't happen.

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

#157

Post by derefr »

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…

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

I mean, it's not like Google is inventing bogus projects in a top-down sense, with some middle-manager somewhere coming up with "private works projects" and staffing them with engineers Google wants to keep. Nobody is claiming that.

No, what the GP was proposing is that the projects are bogus in a bottom-up sense: they're projects that are entirely useless to Google's shareholders in both a short-term and long-term sense, but which the engineers really want to work on, and which at least aren't actively harming Google (or perhaps they are, but not as much as Google would be harmed if the same project were developed in the wild.) This is very different from "basic research" (Google X et al), which is useless in a short-term sense, but may yield large positive returns later on. These projects are bogus because the best-case scenario for them is no net effect on Google as a business. (They might have quite an effect on the the world, but if there's no way for Google to convert that effect into shareholder value: bogus.)

Fuchsia is a perfect case: at best, it replaces Android, for no net benefit to Google (since they already dominate the mobile ecosystem with Android.) But if the engineers working on Fuchsia couldn't work on it at Google, they'd have started a similar project outside Google... and then Google would be in the position of a non-Google-owned OS displacing Android's share of the mobile-OS market.

Much better that these engineers do something useless [from a business perspective] that merely keeps stable Google's share of a market, than that they do something that actively lowers Google's share of a market.

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

#158

Post by mr_toad »

muricula wrote: post #34
wpdev_63 wrote: post #9

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

They tried to rewrite the OS in a C# derivative and could never meet the perf needed while still fighting backwards compatibility issues[0]. At this point mobile OS's are a lost cause, but the PC market is stable. Windows server has never been as big as Linux, but all of Azure runs the Windows hypervisor. I'm not sure they're losing at all actually. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midori_(operating_system)

Hyper V is a type 1 hypervisor. It’s not a Windows hypervisor in any sense except that the license is bundled with Windows.

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

#159

Post by nostrademons »

derefr wrote: post #157
dunpeal wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> It's very different from "a bogus project for the sole purpose of retaining some engineers" that OP theorized. I mean, it's not like Google is inventing bogus projects in a top-down sense, with some middle-manager somewhere coming up with "private works projects" and staffing them with engineers Google wants to keep. Nobody is claiming that. No, what the GP was proposing is that the projects are bogus in a bottom-u…

Or more that they're likely useless from a shareholder perspective, but have a small chance of paying off in a large way, and worst-case keep the engineers occupied & employed at the company.

Google doesn't generally allow projects that everyone knows have zero chance of being useful in a bottom-line sense; you can't, for example, build a D&D campaign index on company time even if you're T9. (There was a big debate over this near the tail end of the Eric Schmidt years, when you actually could, and this was one reason for Larry's "More wood behind fewer arrows" campaign.)

But for something with a small chance of having a large impact, like a new OS or programming language or attempt to speed up scientific progress? Google can totally get behind that, because worst-case, you keep the engineers employed and available for future use, while best-case, you've got a computer science breakthrough. Fuchsia fits right into this case, as does Dart and Go and Unladen Swallow and several other projects.

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

#160

Post by amorphid »

nostrademons wrote: post #101
_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…

$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 y…

> $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.

One of the following must be true:

- Fuchsia has perceived product value, and it's an investment

- Google doesn't have enough interesting work right now, the amount of interesting fluctuates up & down, and retaining expensive employees by having them work on "Fun Fuchsia" during the current down cycle is more efficient than hiring expensive employee attrition+recruitment

- Fuchsia has no product value, and Google has too many expensive engineers

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