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

Google’s newly formed 'Platforms and Devices' team is all about AI

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 195 posts

Re: Google’s newly formed 'Platforms and Devices' team is all about AI

#131

Post by itsoktocry »

smashah wrote: post #118

"Google's previous head of software platforms like Android and ChromeOS, will be headed to "some new projects" at Google" Ok so they're more than willing and able to shut down divisions and relocate human resources to "new projects". Why not just do that with Nimbus? At least ChromeOS didn't put Google in the position of being complicit in a plausible ........ Strange decision making, shutdown and kill things people…

>puts the company at risk

You think Numbus puts Google at risk, as opposed to strengthening its corporate standing with the US government?

Re: Google’s newly formed 'Platforms and Devices' team is all about AI

#132

Post by nkozyra »

cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #129
xxmarkuski wrote: post #128

"Merging teams" is such a Google thing. Merging DeepMind and Google AI, Waze and Maps, Fitbit & Nest and Pixel come to mind. I don't remeber reading such stories from other companies. Is my perception off or is "merging teams" something that Google likes to announce loudly and other companies don't or do other companies "merge teams" less often? I would like to have some input to this.

Not many other companies have the unique blend of being out of touch enough to think that anyone knows what this means and reality, and self-important enough to think that people care.

I don't necessarily disagree, but structurally these moves can be very impactful, particularly in a huge company as sprawling and with as much overlap as Google.

If there's a lot of redundant work being done, maybe the teams will benefit from working together on the same problems.

You're right that most of us don't care, necessarily, but I think it sends some signals that the company is attempting to focus a bunch of less focused lasers at the same point.

It's less common in tech companies than in massive multinationals like GE or Sony that span a lot of different industries.

Re: Google’s newly formed 'Platforms and Devices' team is all about AI

#133

Post by hifromwork »

cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #129
xxmarkuski wrote: post #128

"Merging teams" is such a Google thing. Merging DeepMind and Google AI, Waze and Maps, Fitbit & Nest and Pixel come to mind. I don't remeber reading such stories from other companies. Is my perception off or is "merging teams" something that Google likes to announce loudly and other companies don't or do other companies "merge teams" less often? I would like to have some input to this.

Not many other companies have the unique blend of being out of touch enough to think that anyone knows what this means and reality, and self-important enough to think that people care.

Are you anthropomorphising companies now? Google the company can't be "out of touch" or "self-important". The engineers maybe, but they don't make PR decisions like this.

In this case the original source is an announcement on a "inside-google" blog, and starts with "Hi Googlers", so the target are clearly mostly Google engineers. It ended up on HN because it was repeated by arstechnica, a respected and well-known portal. And here we are discussing it. So maybe people in fact do care about this?

Re: Google’s newly formed 'Platforms and Devices' team is all about AI

#134

Post by Zigurd »

danpalmer wrote: post #116

Stepping past all the AI hype, as an engineer in what was Play/Android/Chrome, I'm excited about being closer to hardware. The fact that Pixel was in another division was always weird and felt like it was an artifact of legacy decisions rather than the right way for things to work today.

It was probably kept apart while Google was deciding if Pixel was going to survive and to not antagonize 3rd party Android phone OEMs. But all that is more locked-in now.

Re: Google’s newly formed 'Platforms and Devices' team is all about AI

#135

Post by PurpleRamen »

xxmarkuski wrote: post #128

"Merging teams" is such a Google thing. Merging DeepMind and Google AI, Waze and Maps, Fitbit & Nest and Pixel come to mind. I don't remeber reading such stories from other companies. Is my perception off or is "merging teams" something that Google likes to announce loudly and other companies don't or do other companies "merge teams" less often? I would like to have some input to this.

I think most other companies have not such a high amount of redundant teams to merge them all the time. So while merging happens occasionally in other companies, we usually only hear about them in context of one company buying out another one.

Re: Google’s newly formed 'Platforms and Devices' team is all about AI

#136

Post by Zigurd »

smashah wrote: post #118

"Google's previous head of software platforms like Android and ChromeOS, will be headed to "some new projects" at Google" Ok so they're more than willing and able to shut down divisions and relocate human resources to "new projects". Why not just do that with Nimbus? At least ChromeOS didn't put Google in the position of being complicit in a plausible ........ Strange decision making, shutdown and kill things people…

It's not nearly as momentous as removing Andy Rubin. Android has evolved a lot. From an OS technology PoV it's less distinctive and more about competitive parity with iOS. Kind of boring.

Re: Google’s newly formed 'Platforms and Devices' team is all about AI

#137

Post by seba_dos1 »

hifromwork wrote: post #133
cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not many other companies have the unique blend of being out of touch enough to think that anyone knows what this means and reality, and self-important enough to think that people care.

Are you anthropomorphising companies now? Google the company can't be "out of touch" or "self-important". The engineers maybe, but they don't make PR decisions like this. In this case the original source is an announcement on a "inside-google" blog, and starts with "Hi Googlers", so the target are clearly mostly Google engineers. It ended up on HN because it was repeated by arstechnica, a respected and well-known por…

> Are you anthropomorphising companies now?

Companies are groups of people, they're maintained by people, all their decisions are made by people and they only ever do things through their people's hands. They are as anthropomorphic as it gets.

Re: Google’s newly formed 'Platforms and Devices' team is all about AI

#138

Post by candiddevmike »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #121
tempodox wrote: post #117

I'm curious to see how the new HardChromeDroid division will fare. I cannot imagine that lumping hardware and software together in one division is a particularly good idea, but I'm open to surprises.

They already did, in DSPA. The (dysfunctional) PA that brought out the Nest products, etc. Now they're swallowing Android and Chrome. In theory, this could lead to executing in a consistent way. E.g. not having 5+ distributions of Linux and competing platforms fighting over who will rule on some new product. In practice, it's not going to go well.

Is Fuchsia still a thing?

Re: Google’s newly formed 'Platforms and Devices' team is all about AI

#139

Post by sevagh »

cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #129
xxmarkuski wrote: post #128

"Merging teams" is such a Google thing. Merging DeepMind and Google AI, Waze and Maps, Fitbit & Nest and Pixel come to mind. I don't remeber reading such stories from other companies. Is my perception off or is "merging teams" something that Google likes to announce loudly and other companies don't or do other companies "merge teams" less often? I would like to have some input to this.

Not many other companies have the unique blend of being out of touch enough to think that anyone knows what this means and reality, and self-important enough to think that people care.

>self-important enough to think that people care.

Bingo.

Re: Google’s newly formed 'Platforms and Devices' team is all about AI

#140

Post by Rinzler89 »

danpalmer wrote: post #116

Stepping past all the AI hype, as an engineer in what was Play/Android/Chrome, I'm excited about being closer to hardware. The fact that Pixel was in another division was always weird and felt like it was an artifact of legacy decisions rather than the right way for things to work today.

>The fact that Pixel was in another division was always weird

Why? Having a separate division also has upsides, like keeping it away from terrible exec interference.

A lot of products we take for granted today succeeded because they were a sort of skunkworks project away form the reach of the mothership that's full of execs who would have tried to push their own agenda in the product or shut it down due to their lack of vision.

The original PlayStation, first Xbox, DirectX, Gameboy, etc.

Post reply on HN