Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 259 posts

Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#121

Post by tmoertel »

danpalmer wrote: post #63
throwaw12 wrote: post #25

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…

This is a meme that people love and there's some truth to it, but also a number of ways in which it's inaccurate. Sure you can get promoted for launching a new thing, but you can also get promoted for fixing a first pass implementation, for scaling something from a small user base to a large user base, and so on, as long as you can show the "impact" of the change – whether that's revenue, savings, productivity, impro…

The problem is that "impact" is easy to establish for shiny new things, whereas for preventing problems – you know, maintaining things – the impact is how much better you have made the universe compared to what the universe would have been without your work. Of course, you have done your work, so we never get to observe that other, "counterfactual" universe that establishes your actual impact.

To estimate the impact, we need to run controlled experiments. And we have lots of A/B testing infrastructure to help us run those experiments when it comes to launching shiny new things. But when it comes to maintaining things, not so much.

So if there are two possible projects of equal difficulty and impact that you could take on, and one is to launch a shiny new thing and the other is to maintain an existing thing, you're always better off launching the shiny new thing because the cost of quantifying your impact will be low, whereas had you chosen the maintenance project, quantifying your impact would be prohibitively expensive.

And that's why building shiny new things dominates maintaining existing things: you get full credit for your work, not a small fraction.

Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#122

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #112
danpalmer wrote: post #105

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…

Holy Cow. I don’t even know about most of those products!

Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#123

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

danpalmer wrote: post #105
KptMarchewa wrote: post #97

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…

How much do you know about the rest of the business though? Even with only 10 to 20 teams, it’s easy to not know specifics about what’s happening in the rest of the business.

Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#125

Post by Nebasuke »

danpalmer wrote: post #105
KptMarchewa wrote: post #97

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 also failed as a technical solution on various of the boring bits. Stadia did not even support the new Chromecast for at least half a year, so you were expected to get the older Chromecast Ultra until then.

I was employed at Google at the time, and within Google this was treated as a matter of fact problem that was not that important. The planning was to support this most likely in the first or second half of the next year. I found this shocking, and to me it made it clear that Stadia was unlikely to succeed if it couldn't even support its main hardware components close to launch.

Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#126

Post by Retric »

danpalmer wrote: post #92
largepeepee wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly why google sucks at it. You get promoted for launching hot new products, quickly scaling it or fixing obviously broken ones. The boring grind in-between them is much harder to show value so few teams are motivated to work on it.

I think you've missed my point. As you break down "the grind", it breaks down into projects like "fix this bug" or "speed up that API", and those are impactful and can lead to promotion. Sure, no director is going to be promoted to VP for fixing a bug, but it's useful stuff for a new grad to have completed and would feed into their promotion. If there is "grind" that is truly not impactful, then why is it being done?…

The problem exists at the managerial level. If no VP is going to be promoted for Google glass improvements then they sure as fuck don’t want to be involved. When managers are better off shifting budget to projects that can help them progress, these projects stagnate and ultimately get cancelled.

Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#127

Post by tbyehl »

wouldbecouldbe wrote: post #113
throwaw12 wrote: post #25

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 launch…

Google Analytics was an acquisition (Urchin)

Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#128

Post by PurpleRamen »

bruce511 wrote: post #53
xorcist wrote: 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…

> But there's no "glory" in support. there's glory in making something new, everyone being amazed, world-is-changed-forever.

Glory is where you place it. And Google, like most of those Companies nowadays, are putting glory on the simple path of new creations, not the hard path of everything else.

> Are you more impressed with a CV that says "invented iphone" or one that says "worked on iphone 2 to make it better than iphone 1"?

Neither. If you have a speck of competence, you will evaluate actual skill, not the outcome of a whole team's work, of which you were just one screw.

But if you know history, or care for your companies future, I would be more interested in the second, because the first iPhone wasn't really that impressive or groundbreaking. The later iterations had more substance for the company.

Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#129

Post by luckylion »

danpalmer wrote: post #107
luckylion wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If there is "grind" that is truly not impactful, then why is it being done? Because it's hard to measure and even harder to predict. E.g. Something that fixes Youtube's scam comment problem where scammers impersonate creators and lure viewers into telegram and whatsapp to scam them. It won't be working immediately, so someone will have to work on it for a while and iterate against the scammers' countermeasures unti…

I think you might underestimate the number of people working on this stuff. There are rarely trade-offs between, as you suggested, working on ad engagement and YouTube scam comments. Both will have teams working on them. At a very high level you could argue that the number of people being allocated to each may not be right, but it's not that one or the other doesn't have any resources. From what I've seen, people at…

Thank you for your perspective. It's frustrating from the outside with the lack of progress (or even acknowledgement, really), and it feels like nobody is working on it (or cares). I'm sure they're hard problems, but on the other hand I'm sure Google has lots of smart people, and they have sheer endless resources and own pretty much every part of the user journey and the stack, and the attacks aren't even sophisticated.

Amazon had a similar issue a while back where well-rated seller accounts got hacked (or sold?) and started offering vastly underpriced premium items with text added somewhere to get in contact with the seller, trying to get people off of the platform. But to their credit, they dealt with it pretty swiftly, and I'd consider it a solved problem, I haven't seen it since.

Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#130

Post by pmontra »

danpalmer wrote: post #105
KptMarchewa wrote: post #97

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…

If you discontinue Google Play you discontinue Android so it won't happen. OK, you could extract the app store and discontinue all the other parts that I know exist and I never used, or split them in two, apps vs media. The app store is going to stay until Google will support Android.
Post reply on HN