[Jetrel]

Yeah, I'm pretty concerned about them (and several others like Apple, but we'll focus on google in this comment).

I'm baffled at how google fell into this trap, because it really seems like Larry/Sergey "got it" but the thing that basically crowned google king was that unlike almost all other major tech companies, they were willing to do R&D as a massive loss-leader.

And when I say R&D, most people think of just boffins in the lab, cooking up some crazy new thing - and they don't realize that the beefiest part of R&D happens in the market. You build a giant new thing, and only when it's actually in the hands of tons of people do you really figure out what the hell it's "for". When the web first came out it was useless. Things like webmail, wikipedia, online video - these made the web useful. But these took another 20-30 years to build! MULTIPLE DECADES! People don't realize how insanely slow technology develops - everyone thinks tech is moving really fast, but it's actually a very slow industry.

What's scared me about Google - and the first really "black mark" was Wave, was them starting to pull the life support on these fundamentally viable products years, even decades, before the world had a chance to figure out what the hell they were for. Google was uniquely suited to try these things, in a way almost no other companies can, because they, uniquely, had an almost evergreen fountainhead of revenue. Ads are not going away, and if Google ever lost its hegemony over them, no amount of cost-control would save the company. So cost-control is completely useless for them - it cannot help them if they're in trouble, and it's only a negative if they're not in trouble. The only sensible behavior is to fanatically defend that revenue stream, but then to also be completely, ludicrously promiscuous with the cash they've got. To spend money in ways that would give business management schools heartattacks. Because that is something they, alone, can do.

There's a similar tragedy with Glass - and that one, at least, I can clearly see what it was for, but google axed it because decision-makers in the company thought it was another useless toy. Glass would have been a godsend for a ton of working, specialist professions, to essentially have a pilot-like HUD giving them critical information. Imagine a surgeon using glass to get live vitals on the patient - hell - imagine a surgeon using glass with an adaptive machine-learning program that matches prior CAT scans to the living tissues the surgeon is operating on, and helps guide them to the site of i.e. a cancerous tumor, or a foreign object in a wound.

Or imagine a construction worker using Glass to place pieces of the wooden framework of a house they're building - guiding themselves with an AR projection of the blueprint.

The possibilities are absolutely wild.

But then, before the proverbial plane was even allowed to do its first flight, they cut the funding and just chopped everything. Glass was just, gone.

---

That's the thing that scares me about Google right now - as long as they're tight-fisted (or really: not promiscuous) about money like this, they've lost their ability to meaningfully innovate. At the rate things are going, nothing weird enough to be game-changing is gonna get a chance. That aspect of having a "useless toy" phase isn't an accident - it pretty much is absolutely mandatory for every product that's been a civilization changer.

We don't know what they're for, because we haven't "changed our culture" yet. For example - people had no analogous behavior to "making a quick phone call" before it existed. Phones had to be out there - and be in the hands of enough people you'd want to call, before the average person reflexively thought "oh, gosh, I could just call that person!". Before teenagers could kill half-hours sitting by the window with a phone to their ear; the time-cost of walking, beforehand, just made casual conversations like that impossible (unless the person was literally in your neighborhood). It changed our culture; just like cars did. Or TV. This, by the way, is why all those old-timey predictions of the future are always comedically inaccurate - it's because they're blind to a change in future culture.

The other thing is we haven't "built the infrastructure" - if you build something like Glass, if it's gonna be worth a damn you have to wait the full decade or two that it takes to build out all those pipe-dream apps like Surgery AR. They just take a long time to build. (Analogy: cars were useless until you could reasonably expect to be able to buy gasoline at, and have flat roads leading to, your destination).

And furthermore - you've gotta build the "economic ecosystem" so that all the people making those apps believe that your platform - your google glass - is going to be a firm "bedrock" to build what's basically going to be their entire career, on. If they're building a serious, professional tool like that hypothetical Surgeon's AR, it's as deep of a rabbit-hole dive as something like ProTools or Photoshop. It's like getting married. If you start an app like that you're gonna be building that for the rest of your life, if it's going to be any good. So the platform vendor has to convince you and everybody that this platform is going to be around "forever".

---

And that trust - that trust of "support something forever" is something Google's torpedoed. If they come up with something genuinely cool, you'll get some kooky startups messing around with it but you're going to scare away all the lifers. And as a result, you're never going to get the god-tier professional tools that create a new industry. You'll never get the equivalent of ProTools, or Photoshop, or Blender.

Which means they're doomed to stay toys, fizzle out after a few years, and quietly get put out to pasture.

It's very similar to what happened to Xerox. Crazy stuff getting built in the labs, but a company struggling to understand it needs that product to be artificially spoon-fed to the public for multiple years before humanity understands what the hell they're supposed to do with it.

It bugs me partly because I don't want them to have the same sort of business troubles Xerox had, but it also bugs me because this sort of behavior stagnates the human race's tech development. Because if google isn't doing these sorts of "grand experiments" - nobody else can. Nobody else can operate on that scale.

[howlgarnish]

Google Glass has not been axed. The consumer version flopped and was yanked from the market, but the "Enterprise Edition" targeted at precisely the market you describe is still live and kicking, and v2 rolled out late last year:

https://www.blog.google/products/hardware/glass-enterprise-e...

That said, companies like Xybernaut (who?) have been trying to pitch AR devices to various fields since the 1990s, without much success.

[jcrites]

One of the sections that stood out to me about Jeff Bezos' letter to investors in 2018 was pointing out that, at the size Amazon currently is, in order to keep growing, they must make bets on scale of billions of dollars. Rather than paraphrase, let me link to and quote the original:

https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/2018-letter-to-sha...

> Failure needs to scale too

> As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle. Amazon will be experimenting at the right scale for a company of our size if we occasionally have multibillion-dollar failures. Of course, we won’t undertake such experiments cavalierly. We will work hard to make them good bets, but not all good bets will ultimately pay out. This kind of large-scale risk taking is part of the service we as a large company can provide to our customers and to society. The good news for shareowners is that a single big winning bet can more than cover the cost of many losers.

> Development of the Fire phone and Echo was started around the same time. While the Fire phone was a failure, we were able to take our learnings (as well as the developers) and accelerate our efforts building Echo and Alexa. The vision for Echo and Alexa was inspired by the Star Trek computer. The idea also had origins in two other arenas where we’d been building and wandering for years: machine learning and the cloud. From Amazon’s early days, machine learning was an essential part of our product recommendations, and AWS gave us a front row seat to the capabilities of the cloud. After many years of development, Echo debuted in 2014, powered by Alexa, who lives in the AWS cloud.

> No customer was asking for Echo. This was definitely us wandering. Market research doesn’t help. If you had gone to a customer in 2013 and said “Would you like a black, always-on cylinder in your kitchen about the size of a Pringles can that you can talk to and ask questions, that also turns on your lights and plays music?” I guarantee you they’d have looked at you strangely and said “No, thank you.”

> Since that first-generation Echo, customers have purchased more than 100 million Alexa-enabled devices.

One of the things I like and value about Amazon is its focus on long-term thinking, willingness to make big bets (Echo, Just-Walk-Out retail stores aka Amazon Go stores), and generally a willingness to be misunderstood for long periods of time (i.e., you have you believe in your own vision and ignore what competitors are doing and haters are saying).

On a personal basis, my guiding light is designing products that I'd want to use myself, with the premise that there are enough other people out there like me; this has served me well several times in guiding my own individual innovation or research.

That being said, I agree with you about the specific products you mentioned, like Wave. It feels like products like Wave were killed prematurely, before the industry had the chance to wrap its collective brain around the ideas it embodied. With a better UI and product documentation, Google could have built a product that took on the role of Slack or was even better, and years earlier. I think what actually killed Wave was an insufficient focus on making the UI really slick. It may have been too early for its time, needing some of the Internet technologies that were invented later.

[andyjpb]

> I think what actually killed Wave was an insufficient focus on making the UI really slick. It may have been too early for its time, needing some of the Internet technologies that were invented later.

I think this is what Jetrel means when they mention that the good engineers were/will leave. For GMail they pioneered the technology needed to implement the UX and UI they wanted.

Why couldn't they do it again? Because they're not the same kind of company with the same kind of mindshare?

If you look at where webmail was when GMail came out and compare it to where corporate chat is now, Google just don't seem to be (successfully) taking the same advantages. I know plenty of companies who use G-Suite plus Slack.

[Jetrel]

That's actually an excellent point; I was really talking about "external" engineers, rather than internal ones, but yeah, the attrition (or even loss of agency) amongst internal engineers is another huge problem. A closely related problem google's created is that there's been a big loss of self-determination - google likely has the engineers capable of tackling something like that, but they've sunk into more of a standard corporate leadership model where these engineers really aren't allowed to work on something like this - instead of having a free-floating surplus pool of them, freely able to attach themselves to different projects, they're mostly hired on a need-based rationale.

If you're doing a standard corporate model (in the interest of cost control), where you've got exactly the number of engineers you need to maintain/develop certain products, then you've got no flex/slack in the system - everyone you've got is necessary for the projects they're on, and can't be pulled off without hurting those projects.

I remember reading about one of Google's last big bets - which was the major, AI-driven upgrade to google translate, and what was terrifying to me about reading the article was the artificial darwinian survival model applied to it. Firstly - the folks who wanted to work on it had to beg management for buy-in to get anyone the clearance to work on it, and then second of all, they were given a deadline where they had to produce meaningful results within 1-2 year's time, or the whole thing would have the plug pulled.

If we weren't right at the cusp of that technology wave cresting, and ML-driven translation being viable, it'd have gotten axed and set us back by quite a few years. What we need is a company willing to genuinely "no strings attached" commit resources to things like this - because maybe something simply can't be ready for another 5 years. But if it is on a 5 year timeline, we really want them to just put in the 5 years of work so we can have it - instead of cutting all funding and turning it into a 15 year delay.

Because again - if someone like google isn't doing it - nobody else will. The whole cost-cutting rationale on R&D stuff is really a bet that someone else can do the hard work in the meantime, and then once it's close to being ready, you, the company, can hop onboard and cash in. But if you're the only one with the means (be it cash, or in google's case: data sets) to do that hard work, and you're not doing it, then we're all screwed - it means nobody's doing it.

[Jetrel]

Yeah, Echo's probably a perfect example of doing this right, and honestly, the more I'm thinking about this, the more I'm realizing Amazon's doing this stuff surprisingly well.

And it's probably down to that: Commitment. Amazon is doing a few different things like AWS, but anything they're doing that's an honest-to-goodness "platform" other people build their stuff on, gets kept alive long enough to either let people build things that matter, or they give people plenty of heads-up that a business is going to get wound down.

[hoseja]

Would be nice if they could also stop abstracting warehouse workers as well optimizable non-human automatons.