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Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

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Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#141

Post by throwaw12 »

xorcist wrote: post #43
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…

> 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…

> It's much easier to build a brand new highway

In software world, new highway is not a new thing, it is just a copy/paste. In software new thing is mostly relates to inventing a solution for specific use case, solution itself could be invented long ago, but using in your area could be novel.

Even in construction industry, building new highway is not 100% new thing, processes, structures, materials, rules are already defined. You spend time for different type of thinking (where to build, which road to buy,...)

Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#142

Post by avsteele »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #118
bborud wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, configura…

They are not interested in selling to anything other than drug/life sciences. See my comment above.

Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#143

Post by azatom »

jpm_sd wrote: post #93

Glass just wasn't very good. Tiny low resolution display, poor quality camera, uncomfortable to wear, terrible battery life. Pivoting to "for Enterprise" was just a half-assed attempt to make back some of the $$$ wasted on development without putting much more effort into R&D. Not a surprise that adoption was limited. (I worked at X 2013-2015.)

I don't understand: it is not a fashion thing but a work equipment. Battery life: why isn't there an option for a battery pack on your belt and a wire under the cloth? If it is uncomfortable, than with a (different hardware design) that battery pack could carry most of the hardware too.

This let me think that google never intended this as a real product, just for the media attention.

Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#144

Post by throwaw12 »

culturestate wrote: post #62
rightbyte wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Support shiny thing -> it's not difficult, everyone can do it This is not a truism, even though many managers see it like that. Dealing with someone else's mess is way harder than to deal with your own.

> This is not a truism, even though many managers see it like that. Which is, I think, exactly the point that OP is trying to make. Incentives are defined by managers, after all.

Yes, exactly.

Managers are too much focused on new thing, because it is much easier to see impact on new thing.

Quantifying impact on support is much difficult and it seems big tech mostly gave up on trying to quantify it, hence people get praise when they are incident commanders, but when you go above and beyond to avoid it from happening at all, you are just doing labor work

Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#145

Post by eitally »

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 honestly has nothing to do with SWE/PM incentives. The problem here, as noted, isn't going from 0->1. The problem is business strategy and leadership, and the ability for multiple stakeholders to rally around a xfn initiative to ensure it receives dedicated care & feeding to take it from 1->100.

When you step outside the eng bubble, the incentives problems absolutely apply when discussing issues Google has creating mature products.

Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#146

Post by throwaw12 »

bla3 wrote: post #79
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…

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…

> I think this is both obsolete and subtly wrong

Maybe you are right, not sure. But this is my impression from working at Big tech. New thing is easy to measure, compare these: "launched X in region Y" vs "prevented possible incident X from happening" (your manager would ask, how do you know if that incident will happen? maybe you spent too much time for over optimizing the solution?)

Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#147

Post by pjmlp »

wslh wrote: post #91
bla3 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We can analyze another course of action from companies such as Microsoft. Not saying that is better or worse but showing an alternative in big corporations. Microsoft launched similar initiatives every time for decades even failing at prior tries. In the UI front they "play" with Silverlight, WFP, Windows Forms, MFC and a lot more. Try and retry. I also think that these issues are worse when you are dealing with hard…

Microsoft is suffering form the reality that Azure is the OS that matters, WinDev seems to be getting new devs without much background on how Windows used to be, and wiht constrained resources versus anything Azure.

Also note that DevTools is no longer .NET only, rather any language that has tier 1 support on Azure.

Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#148

Post by mrbungie »

bla3 wrote: post #79
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…

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…

Focusing on individual product growth is just one strategy an organization may follow. And it's a strategy that if followed blindly will eventually make said organization be seen as unreliable to customers.

I wouldn't pay Google for any services right now. I prefer products and services that last more than mere single digit years (looking at you Stadia).

Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#149

Post by throwaw12 »

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…

Let's say 3B unique people use 100 Google products. Their biggest apps get largest amount of users, but there are disjoint number of users using other products, e.g. 100M using Google Reader, 10M using Stadia and so on.

For Google, independently it might feel like "only 10M users" will be impacted by deprecation, but in total 500M people might get impacted by deprecating 50 smaller products. Google might think, it is less than 1% of our user base, but in reality they impacted 16% of their user base.

1 out 6 people will know that new google product will be killed in 3-4 years. They tell about it to others, eventually it becomes a meme.

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