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Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

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Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#201

Post by specialist »

bborud wrote: post #46

I wish they had spun it off so it wouldn't just have died within Google. It seems that any project that isn't wildly popular is just starved of talent inside Google. Outside Google with a little bit of money and a dedicated team, I don't see why this couldn't have been a success. What I would really like was a product that was developed to be affordable, fairly open so you can easily integrate it into your own system…

> I wish they had spun it off so it wouldn't just have died within Google.

Exactly. Why isn't this their norm? So dumb.

Expand scope of Google Ventures. Or create "Google Spinoffs" with a tighter focus.

I'm certain they'd have plenty of Googlers/Xooglers who'd jump at the chance.

Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#202

Post by elesiuta »

phpisthebest wrote: post #152
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…

google will never get a new service to a billion users right now They have the netflix problem (or does nexflix have the Google problem) they have killed off soo many projects that no one want to invest their time into new ones unless they reach the multi-year stage, and they can not reach the multi-year stage unless they get millions of users... It is a catch 22, and neither company seems to want to address or even…

Exactly, ironically I was finally just starting to get comfortable enough with Stadia being around long enough to buy a few games on it, literally weeks before the shutdown was announced.

Specifically I re-bought the Jackbox games which were perfect for it since I could now simply cast them when visiting friends/family. I also recently purchased a budget Chromebook for travelling and probably would have bought more games for that.

Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#203

Post by joshhart »

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 don't have a good solution for this. The reality is a lot of people can't be the quarterback to build new shiny things so promoting those who can is reasonable. But at the same time, it does incentivize this path more than needed and there are more people who CAN build shiny new things than the number of shiny new things that NEED to be built. It's easy to separate those who can do this from those who don't in promo review committees. In promotion reviews it's harder to separate those who are excellent at maintenance vs OK.

Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#204

Post by r0ze-at-hn »

toyg wrote: post #154
phpisthebest wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

google will never get a new service to a billion users right now They have the netflix problem (or does nexflix have the Google problem) they have killed off soo many projects that no one want to invest their time into new ones unless they reach the multi-year stage, and they can not reach the multi-year stage unless they get millions of users... It is a catch 22, and neither company seems to want to address or even…

I don't think Netflix has a particular problem; maintaining series for more than a couple of seasons has always been hard in broadcasting. It's easier to spot now because people have complete visibility: instead of caring about a couple of series in key time slots, they can know care about all series, so it's more noticeable that most series die a sad death. Addressing off-ramps in a nicer way would be an innovation.…

> Google plays in a field where maintenance costs are a rounding error. You can basically freeze a product and keep it running forever for pennies, and these products get embedded in our daily lives, which is why killing it looks so bad

That would be nice if it was true, but that is not how it plays out at most tech companies.

I have specifically targeted this in my career, thinking about engineering productivity and even spent a number of years working at a company that provided software for manufacturing and explicitly learning about lessons learned in that field.

What usually happens is maintenance costs are not taken into account when building a product and a team is not disbanded after building something. They continue to run the larger teams/orgs until one day some VP looks at the expenses and decides to simply kill the entire product.

So in a world of having hiring freezes, having someone come in to help reduce total costs, from AWS to headcount is a way to free up people and get "new hires" without additional cost.

Some companies and individuals seem to get this instinctively, but many are happy to not make waves and try to improve the system. For some in management, adding value without headcount doesn't mean anything for them individually so they wont.

Increasing the total value over total costs of teams and orgs is my jam. I can take over products that have high maintenance burden, but are valuable, dramatically reduce the maintenance burden, then turn around with my free headcount and go and do it again and again growing the total value produced. This is the 10X-100X game.

Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#205

Post by seanf »

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…

Taking this opporuntity to link to Charles Proteus Steinmetz[1]. Among the many, many things Steinmetz did, he invented the Metal Halide Lamp which was later refined for mass production decades later. This took the innovation of others less well-known to history[2]. So great example, bringing up the light bulb!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Proteus_Steinmetz

[2] https://americanhistory.si.edu/lighting/20thcent/invent20.ht...

Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#206

Post by ozten »

charcircuit wrote: post #194
ozten wrote: post #184

The physics behind Glasses style augmented reality are impossible (or at least 50 years away), so the industry is moving towards MR mixed reality. Bigscreen VR's recent glasses show where things are headed - Micro OLED displays and smaller form factor. Speculation: Google is consolidating talent and doubling down on an internal VR/MR headset and metaverse to compete with Apple. It will be tethered to a "Puck" that ru…

I'm sorry, but glasses style augmented reality is already possible. 50 years is even too long of a time span for when AR glasses are attractive enough to the general public enough to reach >1B users.

A line of text floating in your view is doable. Seeing 3D renderings in a dark environment with 30 minutes of battery is doable.

The original vision of augmenting human vision without a bunch of caveats and limitations is not doable today.

Spectacles by Snap is a cool accomplishment, but mostly the form factor is useful for recording video form a human's perspective and not augmenting one's vision.

Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#207

Post by meh8881 »

hotpotamus wrote: post #160
toyg wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Netflix has a particular problem; maintaining series for more than a couple of seasons has always been hard in broadcasting. It's easier to spot now because people have complete visibility: instead of caring about a couple of series in key time slots, they can know care about all series, so it's more noticeable that most series die a sad death. Addressing off-ramps in a nicer way would be an innovation.…

The joke I've heard is "six seasons and a movie" that goes back to broadcast TV series. Something about contracts running six years, so costs balloon after that, and a one-time movie is much easier to schedule a group of actors for. I've long wondered why Netflix doesn't do it more often. I'm sore about the cancellation of "Santa Clarita Diet" and I think it could easily be wrapped up in a movie.

This is a joke from Community about open ended TV shows typically having enough narrative steam to get a compelling run of six seasons and a movie at best. Not a financial thing.

Community has crawled through the trenches to get its six seasons and now finally a movie and I wish them the best.

Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#208

Post by mejutoco »

phpisthebest wrote: post #185
toyg wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Netflix has a particular problem; maintaining series for more than a couple of seasons has always been hard in broadcasting. It's easier to spot now because people have complete visibility: instead of caring about a couple of series in key time slots, they can know care about all series, so it's more noticeable that most series die a sad death. Addressing off-ramps in a nicer way would be an innovation.…

2 "Seasons" of a netflix show is not even 1 season of broadcast... Most Broadcast shows run 20-24 Episodes per Season. Netflix is 10 at the most, some 6 episodes. per "season" That is part of their problem, and why the cancellations feel even more abrupt and why people do not want to invest time in them. it is hard to tell a compelling story in 6 episodes of TV. So if a netflix series get 2 seasons, 12 Episode. it is…

IMO the problem of Netflix is not how the split the shows or their duration, but their quality.

Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#209

Post by throwaw12 »

wouldbecouldbe wrote: post #176
throwaw12 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We want company's and individuals to be innovative? But then give them shit for their failures, even if fairly handled. After failure startups leave customers & employees empty handed, Google refunds and pays all. Even though they've killed many, their successes are really impressive. This is their graveyard: https://killedbygoogle.com/ Most are small project, or large project that found continuation some other way.…

I am not arguing about Google's innovation. They innovate, but their definition of "failure" internally is hurting real users and people are losing trust.

People can't give Google a chance all the time, especially when it comes to their livelihood and businesses. I know people who built product on top of Google product, which got deprecated later and hurt their product. Do you think next time they will choose Google immediately again?

> who cares about hangout?

Remember Google Talk? it was awesome, far ahead of its time. If they kept investing to Google Talk, probably WhatsApp, Telegram and other alternatives will be struggling to get users and momentum. Now Google has how many chat apps? 8-9 or 18?

Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

#210

Post by nr2x »

This is why Google Cloud has no chance against the OpenAI and Microsoft partnership. Google kills products randomly, has no clear direction or mission, and it’s business suicide to trust them for any core functions of your product.

Whereas Microsoft will support you for decades and is a very safe bet for your business.

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