71–80 of 82 posts
While there's no longer a specific Labs section, they do still have Google Code, and my guess is that you'll still find the odd experiment popping up on there every now and then (and naturally gaining publicity through word of mouth).
I get the feeling that the bean counters are taking over Google and slashing off everything that doesn't have obvious monetization potential. I mean, I know great people who work there, but overall it seems like they're turning into Microsoft circa 2000 - they own the industry, they buy startups and kill the products made by about half of them. Some of their products are great, but a lot of it is just an obvious mono…
However, the way that they can just toss projects aside like this makes me wonder once again why I should bother becoming invested in Google Plus... how long will it be before I get an email telling me Plus is being shut down and I should go download all my content?
Does anything remotely like Bell Labs exist today? Is it simply not possible with everyone tightening their belts? If you're unfamiliar with what came out of Bell Labs, check out this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_labs#Discoveries_and_devel... Or is it the fate of software innovation that it is to be decentralized and happen in our spare time now?
Woah woah woah, you seem to be confusing "small experiments Google hosts publicly at labs.google.com" with R&D. Since your wiki link seems to be about publishing academic articles, here's a list of academic article produced by places that are not Bell Labs: http://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html http://research.microsoft.com/apps/dp/pu/publications.aspx The software industry is also producing patents at an absur…
RIP Google Sets :(
For some reason the results from it just weren't that great anyway. It could never find sets of things that I really wanted to get.
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You would never seen something like "Labs" from Apple, and everyone applauds them for "focus".
Apple did have "labs." One of the first thing Steve Jobs did when he returned was shut it down. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Technology_Group
The optics in this case are somewhat different.
Does anything remotely like Bell Labs exist today? Is it simply not possible with everyone tightening their belts? If you're unfamiliar with what came out of Bell Labs, check out this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_labs#Discoveries_and_devel... Or is it the fate of software innovation that it is to be decentralized and happen in our spare time now?
The Viewpoints Research Institute fits the bill: http://www.vpri.org/ They want to replace the entire software industry, since it's all a huge hack (especially the 100m+ SLOC codebases that are way too common). Goal: a full GUI system (from kernel to applications) in 20k SLOC. Take a look at the progress reports they've made. They claim a 200 line TCP, 800 line graphics system (apparently comparable to Cairo), and lo…
That's impressive (and hard to believe). Are more informations about this available somewhere?
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I'm about as much of a Google fanboy as you can be and unfortunately zdw's words ring true. Also, in spite of Apple's success I'm not sure Google would do well to emulate them. I (and I would guess many others) have loved Google because they aren't Apple, though unfortunately they do seem to be inching that way at an increasing rate.
Are you talking about their recent UX trend of turning everything into a minimalist interface with a lot of whitespace?
In regards to UI, I wouldn't mind if they copied Apple more there but only if they copied the good (great defaults) without copying the bad (no ability for power users to modify the defaults).
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Maps, reader, docs
Maps was bought ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps#History ) and so was Writely, which became part of Docs ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writely ). Dunno about Reader.
It's very hard to identify accurate parentage for anything developed within Google, because the culture (and innovation process) is such that ideas get proposed, refined, merged with other ideas, abandoned, resurrected in other forms, implemented, iterated upon, and finally launched, often by many different groups. Even Google Search (usually identified with Larry & Sergey) isn't really their creation: large chunks were developed by Scott Hassan (eGroups founder and never actually a Google employee, though he had a big chunk of stock), Craig Silverstein, and various other Stanford students and early employees, and the ranking algorithm was completely rewritten early on by Amit Singhal.
Oftentimes the press - or just curious Internet comments - wants a single person they can associate with a product, and so they'll take a name (usually the most famous) and make something up. That's not how it really works, though. Most ideas have many parents.
Google had record profits - why are they killing all their incubators? If they kill "20% time" next then we know their best days are over.