[1] - https://blog.google/inside-google/company-announcements/buil...
[2] - https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/17/google-workers-arrested-afte...
Honestly, good on them. Having a culture of honest and open discussion about work is important, but there's a very vocal minority in many companies that thinks their political opinions are both objective fact and the most important thing to discuss at any given work function.
When that kind of attitude seems to receive official support from the company it actually does make people with different political opinions feel unsafe at work. This is not okay, and it's not healthy for the company, and I'm glad to see Google finally pushing back against the idea that loud political fights are appropriate in the workplace.
How the devs felt about police for example likely affected the maps feature for reporting cops on the road. Same with Google Maps history at abortion clinics. The read on various news organizations definitely affected the choices for Google News partnerships. How you feel about government surveillance and "the deep state" likely affected how they built their messaging apps. Even down to the sign-up form where you're asked your name/sex. A conservative Google would have made very different decisions.
It's really hard to do anything non-trivial that doesn't end up brushing up against political issues de jour.
If I were "corporate" I would be asking myself why it is a group of my employees faced arrest, job loss to make a statement about company policies. I would want to know if it suggests a bigger problem down the road for the company.
I highly recommend listening to this podcast about IBM's role in Nazi Germany https://hbr.org/podcast/2019/11/lessons-from-ibm-in-nazi-ger...
TJ Watson (of IBM) had a similar "this is a business" outlook: “I’m an internationalist. I cooperate with all forms of government, regardless of whether I can subscribe to all of their principles or not.” IBM's machines were extremely important part of Nazi Germany's Holocaust efforts, and there is evidence that IBM was actively working with Nazi Germany after the invasion of Poland [1].
[1] https://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/The-business-of-makin...
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.
And yes, in the end everyone end up using GMS (besides those who are banned, ie. Huawei). But still, it's better to have a separation that is imperfect, vs not having one at all
Was there a mechanism to communicate this weirdness to decision-makers? In a company that is in control of all of its teams, what is stopping a faster reorg?
- moats
- "if we do this, XYZ is going to leave"
- weak leadership
- comfort zone
- too many managers risking being spotted as obviously redundant as a result of a reorg :)
What else?
Google sold just 10 million pixel phones last year. That’s not even 10% of Samsung.
I'd say that creates a huge conflict of interest.
That's one of the big reasons why Nokia Series60 didn't take off as a licensed OS: Whatever Samsung or LG or Lenovo wanted to build on that platform to differentiate, they had to involve Nokia during the development (who then developed the needed OS-feature in parallel to the Nokia product that will make use of it).
Google is either very secure that their grip on all these HW-vendors is strong enough forcing them to stay, or they are no longer part of Google's long-term strategy for Android.
(Sony) Ericsson used UIQ, a pen-based OS built on top of the core of Symbian foundation.
Nokia developed Series60, a key-based OS built on top of a Symbian core.
They were not compatible operating systems, and most of all Ericsson didn't license it from Nokia.
You can play chess against yourself. AlphaGo can, because it wasn't brainwashed about this notion. ChatGPT can debate against itself. You can too, if you don't see it as a conflict. Humans might find it hard, only because they were brainwashed from a child that they need to pick sides. Your neural net is capable of operating on both sides simultaneously if you let it.
The market is big enough for Google to create hardware AND other companies to create hardware.
You obviously didn't read the comment you're replying to. No one is challenging that.
Having the same TEAM in charge of the OS and in-house hardware is an entirely different story.
It's a conflict of interest because the person Samsung is talking to to have a feature implemented into the OS baseline may be the same person in charge of defining the competitive featureset for the next Google hardware.
Now this person knows that the product he and his team is designing will compete with a yet-to-be-announced Samsung-product with a new feature.
So his interest to support a licensee being successful with his product is in conflict with his interest to create a more successful competing product.
And even if he isn't, for SAMSUNG just the potential of this situation to happen can be enough to NOT cooperate with this team and scale back communications with the Android team as a whole.
That could be said for anything in the moral and judicial sphere. "There's no theft, property is a human invention", "There's no rape, animals don't have that concept", and so on.
Lucky for us, we're discussing this in the context of humans building stuff for other humans to buy in a human society with human governments and markets, not in some metaphysical 'but what does meaning means' context.
Also, it feels like this merger will lead to a similar article to Hixie's in about 5 years:
> A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle management. Take XYZ, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it.
During a Q&A, I was literally laughed at when I asked the head of Android whether developers should take Flutter seriously. His eventual answer equated to "well Google is really big so we can't say".
I think that was the moment I understood just how deep the mismanagement at Google actually is. Just shocking.
Much of Google's value proposition was in their ability to innovate. The current leadership has proven catastrophically inept at this. Without fresh leadership, Google is on its way to becoming some mid-tier ad placement agency at best. Engineering excellence won't save them as long as the top leadership is incapable of adjusting to circumstances.
There's still time for Google to leverage its competence at managing large infrastructure to regain its position as a leading technology company. But the window of opportunity is shrinking. Alphabet's board of directors needs to fire the executive suite, that's the easy part. The harder part is finding a replacement CEO and executive suite who will make the deep cuts and rearrangements necessary to get Google back on track. The longer they put that off, the less chance for Google to be relevant in the future.
To me, this feels like Hiroshi went to Sundar and said that he wanted to step down or wanted to do something else or whatever. Sundar then had to choose whether to elevate one of Hiroshi's reports or elevate one of the other SVPs to lead two orgs together. Sundar chose Rick.
This feels more like a question of upper management politicking rather than mission change.
Also, the only glue that actually holds Android in place as a single platform is Google's CTS (compatibility test suite).
Without it being mandated for Googles Mobile Services (GMS) and its revenue-share, Android will stop being a single platform.
It will start drifting apart as soon as all vendors have to implement the next display/camera/sensor/form-factor support in the OS in parallel of each other...
"Google is combining …, and it's all about Blockchain"
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?
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.
Bingo.
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.
Android as-is does enough monitoring, and reporting back home. I fear it will make it worse for the Android users of non-Google devices, in 3-to-5 years.
In my experience not doing that is a bad idea. Hardware and software depend on each other. There should be good communication between them.
Is this more of just Google being Google, as the ads side of the house continues to print more money than God?
Probably makes a good impression on shareholders who'd prefer to see all divisions disinvested but the money counting one.
Meanwhile, Samsung products are widely available and marketed everywhere.
Pixel is great hardware, but Google has failed to generate enough demand for consumers to be going into stores and the n leaving because Pixel isn’t sold there. That’s what gets distribution in the long run.
What country is this? In the US at least you can get pixel phones through the major carriers.
No, Pixel HW fails because it's shit: weak call signal reception and 5G performance due to poor Samsung modem, low performance compared to Apple and Qualcomm, high battery drain, overheating, software bugs that get in the way of you dialing calls, dimples in OLED display, poor design with ultra thick visor, questionable warranty support, AI features only exclusive to the US market but not EU making them useless, etc. Much of the issues that do not exist on Apple and Samsung phones.
Carriers go with Apple and Samsung because those brands are a slam dunk with consumers, are well known and mostly reliable by this point with fewer lemons, and when they do fail, there's service centers for them everywhere. Pixels are mostly bought by enthusiasts who will forgive the rough edges for the chance of being Google's software beta testers.
There has been so much potential squandered with Android over the last decade it is amazing.
Maybe they see the writing on the wall and want to become Apple 2. Bad news for Samsung?
And even if they went for "all out war" I still don't think it would be that one-sided.
I don't think your understanding of this is complete. A break up doesn't destroy anything; on the contrary, it creates value. Where once there was a single monopolist, there are now two (or three or twelve) organizations that can proceed independently of each other, and be much more focused on their core product.
For example, maybe Google can keep the play store, but not Android. Android would become an independent entity, and can develop in ways that benefit all Android stakeholders instead of just Google. Maybe then Android will finally be able to focus on competing with iOS in ways that Google would never dare to (since Google's relationship with Apple is a bit sus)
A breakup can also be good for investors, because illegal monopolies are inefficient. Android could potentially be much more profitable on its own than under Google's umbrella, and the play store could be more profitable if they're actually forced to compete. This can lead to innovations which increase revenue, and which never would've happened under Google.
What a time to be alive!
Meanwhile the rest of the phone is surprisingly buggy and annoying. Basic functionality I use every day is worse than on any other recent phone.
Google has never been a great product org, but this desperate need to be seen as one of the cool kids in AI is making things worse. Granted I think of phones/computers more as a tool than a toy and put much higher value on usability and reliability versus novelty; perhaps I'm outlier in that.
Not just that, but their biggest crime is that almost none of those fancy AI features Google paraded at the Pixel launch even actually run on-device but need to be sent to their cloud for processing, despite all the gloating about their new Tensor 3 chip's AI capabilities being the most important (since that chip sucks at CPU and GPU benchmarks compared to Apple and Qualcomm). Also, their Tensor 3 can't even run Google's smallest LLM. Absolutely embarrassing.
They REALLY need to unify the HW and SW development efforts to create a coherent and functional product, instead of designing them separately bazaar style then jerry rigging them together like some underfunded start-up making products for Kickstarter.
So sad but this continues to be the case for Google's incursion into AI. Why do they still keep Pichar around?
Would it be nice? Sure, but I much prefer useful features now that could run on device later on if it adds value.
Another one: I can't tell my phone to change it's name to what I want. Basic "AI" fail.
Maybe these devices have become so complicated they're simply too challenging to work out all of the edge cases out of. New features are easier.
With the amount of telemetry and data Google is collecting I doubt they can't catch edge cases, let alone recurrent bugs that impact multiple users.
I wanted to buy a Pixel on sale last week but I watched a 6 month long term review of the Pixel and the reviewer complained that every new update fixed some bugs but added it's own new bugs.
It's why I'm still gonna keep using a phone that stopped getting updates over a year ago: it's finally stable and no more new bugs are being introduced by updates, as my mind and muscle memory has already adapted to the old bugs.
Maybe I'm getting old but while 10 years ago I couldn't wait for new major updates to arrive on my phone, I feel like phone SW has peaked a few years ago and has been on a constant decline ever since, with new updates just adding useless crap that bugs you and changing things for the sake of change without improving them, and I would much rather have a phone that only updates security but nothing else. Basically I don't want my phone to be a Googler's playground and me being the beta-tester.
Jesus christ, I've had to dismiss at least 20 different popup things just in the Messages app since I reset my phone a few days ago. Just fuck off already!
And guess what. After resetting the phone, I still can only make a successful outgoing phone call 1 out of every 3 tries, and it will only work after a reboot. It worked fine after the reset for about a day. Now, again, it barely works as a phone.
Rodney Dangerfield was right. There is no fucking respect for the people using the phones. There is only respect for the stocks going up. Fuck you and give us money, that's what smartphones are all about.
Yesterday I ordered a Nokia flip phone. I'm done with iOS and Android. It has added nothing to my life except distractions and maintenance. I spent 3 days trying to get this piece of trash to work as a phone. Just a total waste of my life.
Who is asking for this? Why can't they just make their search engine work again?
Anyone who regularly uses Siri or "Hey, Google".
For example, when I'm driving and a timed phone alarm goes off for the Android phone in my pocket, I ask it to silence the alarm, yet instead rebukes me by falsely claiming no alarms are active right now.
It's fixed now that I checked, but for a while it would also secretly ignore the date that I already specified for a scheduled event while it was prompting me to clarify the time of day.
And probably will continue needing internet for the foreseeable future, regardless of how many mobile Tensor-chips they develop, because cloud data and compute power will always be orders of magnitude better than your phone?
That's the thing they need specialized mobile-hardware teams involved for?
Share and enjoy!
Mobile OSes are now a boring, stable environment. All this noise about AI seems like an attempt to convince investors that some paradigm-shifting change is on the way. It isn't. A mildly better Google Assistant is on the way.
But the current generative craze with "AI generated backgrounds" is a dead end.
Give me better AI autocomplete, AI image correction, AI noise cancellation...
We have all those, some of it we've had a long time, we just didn't call it AI.
I can see AI in enterprise/business being extremely useful in different industries, but at the same time, is the current 'AI' actually good/useful for the end-user consumer?
Last I spoke to folks working there, these seem to happen every y-ending day.
It doesn't even happen annually.
A reorg of two teams of 10 people? Sure. Google is a ~180k person company.
Hiroshi, who's been an Android lead since before it shipped, is no longer leading Android.
When Jony Ive and Scott Forstall and the other big Apple execs left, that was news. Hiroshi may not have Jony's profile, but it's still a major change in how Android is governed.
Are they really making major contributions? Seems like Mobile OS are basically stagnant.
Making UIs progressively worse beyond levels you though imaginable, like Reddit or GNOME -- that's art.
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 love (e.g Google Domains, RSS, etc.) but not shutdown a project that puts the company at risk and that some of their own workers actively protest against.
The Android Virtualization Framework, for one, is something I'm really excited to see in the next few years
You think Numbus puts Google at risk, as opposed to strengthening its corporate standing with the US government?
I mean at risk of being complicit in genocide.
