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What is Google doing with its open source teams?

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Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#91

Post by ocdtrekkie »

fidgewidge wrote: post #87
adra wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft didn't miss mobile, they supported many or all verticals of mobile probably 10 years before it ever really took off. They absolutely bungled it and pulled 3-4 various strategies that all seemed to fall flat by miss-judging the market or self defeating strategies to protect their other products/partners. I do see some similarities with the companies though. It's hard to say or blame this on CEOs, but rather…

Did they misjudge the market? Windows CE was quite popular in the smartphone segment before iOS and Android steamrollered every existing incumbent. The idea that having a computer in your pocket was important, that was classic 90s era Gatesism and they were right on target. Microsoft lost (not missed) mobile because the Windows team had been losing the ability to execute competently. iOS was essentially macOS for mob…

Android is just now catching up with where Windows Mobile was years ago. Execution wasn't the problem. The problem remains that Gmail and YouTube are monopolies and Google aggressively interfered with them working on WinMo because it was Android's only real competitor (an OS licensed to phone OEMs).

Microsoft obviously has it's own monopolies but it failed to leverage them on mobile. Shockingly, a great experience using Excel on a 4" screen isn't a huge selling point.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#92

Post by klodolph »

mike_d wrote: post #34
bushbaba wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pichai never fully supported google cloud either. The fact google cloud exists is thanks to Amit Singh’s leadership. Palo Alto networks is lucky to have such a visionary CBO at their helm.

Google should have never been in the cloud business to start with. It is a race to the bottom, and revenue depends on your ability to scale up staff - a model Google doesn't have in any of it's other businesses.

IMO it makes perfect sense for Google to be in cloud. Cloud infrastructure services are a race to the bottom—storage, compute, etc. You get people into your ecosystem and upsell them on SaaS offerings that integrate with your IaaS offerings. You have to be able to scale without growing staff linearly, which is already Google’s model (although Apple and Amazon are better at it).

Google’s main problem IMO is the lack of customer focus. The products are good, the experience is not as good.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#93

Post by downrightmike »

bbor wrote: post #36

As a google employee (who obviously has no privileged info) I really don’t buy this whole activist-investor explanation for the layoffs. Besides the fact that the investors in question own I’m much more convinced by the argument that they saw this sector-wide wave of layoffs as an opportunity to scare their engineers and change the culture to be a more intense, hierarchical one. Google engineering culture has long be…

It is a Capital Revolt. Workers were getting too comfortable, and now Money is teaching them a lesson

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#94

Post by unity1001 »

So the problem with Google's earnings was that its exorbitant profit did not stay or grow at the same rate. During a pandemic followed by a global crisis prompted by a war. And they are laying off people. To make hedge funds and shareholders happy.

...

What a destructive 'growth at all costs' economic culture. I guess those hedge funds and shareholders will pick up the slack in those open source projects...

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#95

Post by adra »

fidgewidge wrote: post #87
adra wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft didn't miss mobile, they supported many or all verticals of mobile probably 10 years before it ever really took off. They absolutely bungled it and pulled 3-4 various strategies that all seemed to fall flat by miss-judging the market or self defeating strategies to protect their other products/partners. I do see some similarities with the companies though. It's hard to say or blame this on CEOs, but rather…

Did they misjudge the market? Windows CE was quite popular in the smartphone segment before iOS and Android steamrollered every existing incumbent. The idea that having a computer in your pocket was important, that was classic 90s era Gatesism and they were right on target. Microsoft lost (not missed) mobile because the Windows team had been losing the ability to execute competently. iOS was essentially macOS for mob…

Nah, Blackberry, ohsa, Nokia dominance, etc. were way more relevant to the markets than Windows Mobile (not really CE as CE is more relevant for embedded and tablet like verticals).

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#96

Post by sylware »

spinningslate wrote: post #23

I've no inside knowledge on Google, so can't comment on the rationale for selecting those being let go. From the outside though, Google under Pichai increasingly looks like Microsoft under Ballmer in the late 2000s/early 2010s. Balmer was lauded for delivering good numbers from a dominant market position. That was fine - until it wasn't. Under his watch, Microsoft completely misjudged the internet and totally missed…

"Google under Pichai increasingly looks like Microsoft under Ballmer"

alphabet(google) and msft are own and steered by the same network of ppl from blackrock/vanguard.

No magic here.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#97

Post by fidgewidge »

milesward wrote: post #12
AlbertCory wrote: post #10

I knew Chris DiBona quite well. While I don't know the whole community as well so this is a rash statement, it's hard to imagine anyone knowing more about open source than Chris does. And Chris, if you're reading this: you rock, man.

This is 100% truth. Chris does rock! Unfathomable.

Alternative take: when I was there he was tyrannical and constantly blocking employees from open sourcing code developed on their own weekends and evenings, purely on a personal whim. People had to fight internal battles to get like little video games and stuff put up on github. You'd think head of OSPO would do whatever it took to get code open sourced but no far from it. Loads of grumbling about how he was just an ex-Slashdot editor who couldn't even code, on a power trip abusing contract ip clauses.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#98

Post by andsoitis »

cute_boi wrote: post #25
ipaddr wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? The open source teams have the best of the best in terms of reputation and quality output often delivering more value and goodwill compared to the traditional marketing department. They should move some of those folks into search..

The problem is corporation are blinded by short term revenue over long term investments.

What long term revenue stems from open source? I’m not talking about a million her or there. I’m talking about billions of dollars.

IBM-style “consulting”?

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#99

Post by wallflower »

adra wrote: post #83
spinningslate wrote: post #23

I've no inside knowledge on Google, so can't comment on the rationale for selecting those being let go. From the outside though, Google under Pichai increasingly looks like Microsoft under Ballmer in the late 2000s/early 2010s. Balmer was lauded for delivering good numbers from a dominant market position. That was fine - until it wasn't. Under his watch, Microsoft completely misjudged the internet and totally missed…

Microsoft didn't miss mobile, they supported many or all verticals of mobile probably 10 years before it ever really took off. They absolutely bungled it and pulled 3-4 various strategies that all seemed to fall flat by miss-judging the market or self defeating strategies to protect their other products/partners. I do see some similarities with the companies though. It's hard to say or blame this on CEOs, but rather…

> Microsoft didn't miss mobile

They missed mobile. Apple (and later Android) delivered what average consumers wanted. Average consumers do not want to have to be a personal IT department to upgrade their software and manage backups of their settings/apps.

As someone who had a Windows CE iPaq and wanted to love it, the user experience was so frustrating. It was nicknamed Wince for a reason.

For example, since Windows CE was burned into the iPaq's ROM, you had to upgrade he ROM. To upgrade the ROM...

> This ROM update will Clean Reset the HP iPAQ Handheld device to factory settings. Performing a Clean Reset will return the device to its default settings, and clear all user applications and data. Before performing this ROM update, back up all your data.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#100

Post by sombragris »

dgacmu wrote: post #81
CHY872 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, this is a bit of a false one. (A)GPL's pretty great for things that look like applications (or alternatively, pretty much anything GNU's ever made), but for anything looking like a library that is designed to be both free as in speech and free as in beer (Qt is the former but not the latter - want commercial usage? Pay us for a differently licensed edition!) it's a complete non-starter because it says that any us…

This is entirely correct. Open sourcing tensorflow was about getting the world to use Google's stuff so that that stuff became more valuable / remained valuable / was possible to hire people with experience in it, not about getting people to work on it for free. The ratio of external to internal contributions is extremely small. Google saw what happened with other of their technologies like map reduce (not open sourc…

And what about Fuchsia? The primary value I see for it is that it looks like the un-Linux, especially in the license space.

Google really hates copyleft and the GPL.

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