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Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

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Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#111
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Support shiny thing -> it's not difficult, everyone can do it Sometimes people say those things, but I can't understand for whom it rings true. What's especially hard about new things? Maintenance on the other hand, can be much more tricky. Especially when taking backwards compatibility in mind you really have to think about every step going forward. It's much easier to build a brand new highway than repairing an e…

You're right, support is difficult. But there's no "glory" in support. there's glory in making something new, everyone being amazed, world-is-changed-forever. Of course that is pretty much 1% of the journey. Turning that light-bulb moment into an actual product, getting mass market adoption, finding the killer app, that's hard. And anonymous. Keeping customers happy is hard. But again, anonymous. Are you more impress…

Mass adaptation is not even that hard, profitable mass adaptation is.

Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because, especially now, we can see lack of it drastically impacting new Google products like Stadia. No one can trust Google to maintain their products at all.

Stadia failed as a business, not as a product or technical solution. I work on Google Play, we've been going for a decade, no sign of stopping now. Much of what I and the many people around me do is maintenance – making things go faster, making things error less, etc. Some of that is done with new features, some is transparent to users (or app developers). I don't see this culture that HN seems so convinced about. I…

>> Stadia failed as a business, not as a product or technical solution.

Stadia failed as a business because it failed to get adoption by developers and gamers / users.

It failed to get adoption by developers and gamers because Google has a reputation for killing things.

Google has a reputation for killing things because it's leadership does not have a vision outside of advertising and its internal culture does not reward long-term maintenance of products.

>> I don't see this culture that HN seems so convinced about.

It started with Google Reader and has become ever more obvious since then.

When Google launches a new product, observers in tech make bets about how long the product will be around before Google kills it.

It has become a meme: https://killedbygoogle.com/

Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#113

At this point, I think issue is not about products Google build, it is about how Google put their incentives in place. - Build new shiny thing -> promoted - Support shiny thing -> it's not difficult, everyone can do it This type of culture is influencing future direction of Google products, they put together awesome team, solve problem and get from 0 to 1, then team moves on, others don't have incentive to make 1 to…

Are we being too hard on Google, or did the company change?

When it comes to launching new products, whether innovative or not, they seem to have launched some of the most used products out there: Gmail, Google Calender, Analytics Google Play, Chrome etc.

They also did their fair share of copying: Galaxy, Cloud etc.

Software wise they've launched Go, Angular, Kubernetes, probably some more.

They've succesfully launched more products than any other corp out there. Even though nothing rivals their search revenue.

Although of lately they've been getting a bad rep with killing projects. Startups we often push to move fast and break things, but from Google we seem to expect more.

Regarding Stadia they handled it nicely, got a full refund after using it for almost a year (except for the subscription which is fair)

Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#114
The Google apologists here usually say "they only kill consumer proudcts, they wouldn't do that for enterprise products", but here we are. I hope that doesn't look equally dismissive, but it's time that everyone realize Google is willing to kill almost any product that's not making enough profit.

Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because, especially now, we can see lack of it drastically impacting new Google products like Stadia. No one can trust Google to maintain their products at all.

Stadia failed as a business, not as a product or technical solution. I work on Google Play, we've been going for a decade, no sign of stopping now. Much of what I and the many people around me do is maintenance – making things go faster, making things error less, etc. Some of that is done with new features, some is transparent to users (or app developers). I don't see this culture that HN seems so convinced about. I…

Not evaluating whether the meme is true or not (or it’s spectrum truthiness), it isn’t just HN where you will see this meme, it’s also common on memegen as well.

Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#116
post #79

At this point, I think issue is not about products Google build, it is about how Google put their incentives in place. - Build new shiny thing -> promoted - Support shiny thing -> it's not difficult, everyone can do it This type of culture is influencing future direction of Google products, they put together awesome team, solve problem and get from 0 to 1, then team moves on, others don't have incentive to make 1 to…

I think this is both obsolete and subtly wrong. Big corps want products with global impact. When a product is new, it's evaluated for its potential. When it's been around for a while, it's evaluated on how well its growth is matching the estimated impact. Eventually, growth has stopped. If the product lands at an active base of a billion users or so, it's a success and people definitely can make a career out of maint…

Problem with promoting on potential is that it’s rife for nepotism and poor judgement.

People want to get promoted, managers want their people promoted. Inflating impact can quickly become the name of the game.

Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#117
post #8

I really hope Apple can do something interesting with AR. I've tried all the major AR things (HoloLens, HoloLens 2, MagicLeap) and tons of the "smart glasses" and there's so much room for improvement.

Any you would recommend or is it still too early?

Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#118
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out apprentice.io The founder initially fell in love with Google Glass and went on to build an AR/VR startup around it. They are life sciences focused, but I see no reason it couldn't fit your use case.

Interesting, but I think the device is a bit too bulky and sticks too far out to work in my use case. The environment where we'd use this is essentially a giant machine shop where you have to wear a hard-hat, it is noisy and dirty and you often have to get into tight spaces with cabling and piping everywhere. Besides it doesn't look like they are primarily focused on selling the device itself. For a device to work fo…

Reach out to the team. They are not a device company but a software company that focuses on integrating with AR devices.

Angelo, the founder, has a deep passion for VR/AR so I'm sure he'd love to hear your use case.

As a bonus: their focus has been on adding evidence capture (documentation, really) in the flow of the process. The primary use case is pharma manufacturing execution systems (e.g. installation, configuration, and validation of a new production line).

Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stadia failed as a business, not as a product or technical solution. I work on Google Play, we've been going for a decade, no sign of stopping now. Much of what I and the many people around me do is maintenance – making things go faster, making things error less, etc. Some of that is done with new features, some is transparent to users (or app developers). I don't see this culture that HN seems so convinced about. I…

>> Stadia failed as a business, not as a product or technical solution. Stadia failed as a business because it failed to get adoption by developers and gamers / users. It failed to get adoption by developers and gamers because Google has a reputation for killing things. Google has a reputation for killing things because it's leadership does not have a vision outside of advertising and its internal culture does not re…

I completely understand the "google kills products" meme.

I just think that "google doesn't reward maintenance" doesn't lead to "google kills products" except in very general examples. For the most part Google is maintaining products, that's most of what most people do.

The reasons for the killing of products are I think much more nuanced and numerous.

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