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Another big difference is Apple starts with how the product should feel and works backwards. This is tough to reconcile with AI because AI sometimes fails. Wh

by peyton 10y ago

Another big difference is Apple starts with how the product should feel and works backwards. This is tough to reconcile with AI because AI sometimes fails. When your device doesn't do what you want, it feels bad. When you read an article about your HooliPhone handing over data to government agencies, it feels bad. When you go to the Hooli Store to demo a HooliPhone, ask it to show you photos of your dog before her last haircut, and get no results, you feel less enthusiastic about owning a HooliPhone. The solution Apple uses is to add constraints. Apple doesn't need AI to guess where you want to save a file on iOS because there isn't an exposed file system. There are some areas where simplification isn't possible, like mapping and voice assistants. These happen to be two of the most widely panned Apple features. The strategically tricky thing about Google's pivot to AI is that there's a confirmation bias against adding constraints. This may result in impressive demos that just don't feel right in the real world.

askafriend 10y ago
This is an incredibly insightful comment and I thank you for sharing your thoughts. You've put into words something I've been feeling and trying to express for a while. "How does it make you feel?" is an incredibly important question and unfortunately for Google, something you can't really quantify (see: Circles and Google+). Actually Circles and Google+ is a great example that we can look at to see how the feel of a product can help lead to it's eventual downfall. When someone "friend requested" you on Facebook, you had a simple decision to make: "Is this person a friend of mine?". While everyone has their own definition of "friend", it's pretty easy to make a decision and sometimes you're gonna have to say "no" but that's fine; it feels bad for a short amount of time. With Circles and Google+, you had to ask yourself: "Do I know this person?", "Is this person a friend of mine?", "But how close am I to them really?", "Should I add them to the family circle? but they're not really family...", and so on. The worst part is, you had to do this all upfront. When you have to reflect about that many things about a human being, it starts to become far more negative than it has to be. And if you're going thru this experience all the time, then good luck. Now Facebook has it's issues too, but see how such a subtly negative "feel" to a product can be real friction. I recently heard someone make the argument that while a lot of the Google AI tech is impressive, they haven't really been able to build something that feels that useful as a product in the real world. It's an impressive tech demo for sure at Google's conferences, but once the tech makes it to Android, they don't really become used all that much. Take Now-On-Tap, for example. It was a highly touted feature on Android: an incredible ability to rip context from whatever you were looking at on your phone. Now you hardly see it mentioned and people don't really seem to use it that much. Google Now stuff is cool too, but besides airplane reminders and calendar integration, is it really that useful day to day? I suspect most people would say no. Look...all of the stuff Google does is very cool and very impressive...but it just lack a certain human feel to it. A certain simplicity in how something is useful. These AI experiences are not predictably useful. They aren't experiences you can rely on. Now I'm certainly generalizing a bit, and I know someone will come up with some counterexamples (please do! I'm curious), but I think you understand the sentiment I'm trying to convey: that Apple just understands the user from a different vantage point than Google simply by asking how something make them feel (and Jony Ive has emphasized this question time and time again, though he sometimes gets made fun of for his overzealousness).
- peyton 10y ago
  Back in school I was part of a small group of students chosen to meet Eric Schmidt. He walked into the room and asked, "Who here is making something really impressive?" I thought a long time about what that says about Google. Maybe it's about Google's competing on talent--they already have a $70 BN revenue machine and simply need a way to attract people who can keep the lights on. Maybe it's just the personalities of those at the top. Recently a friend showed me Google's Project Soli, a gesture interface that uses radio waves to sense hand position. You click by touching your fingers together and scroll by rubbing your fingers. The project looks fantastic and is clearly produced by some smart people. But the product video is a big call-to-action to developers: "We're excited to see the gestures you come up with." I feel bad for the talented people working on this. Because the first time somebody uses the product, they'll try a new gesture and it just won't work. Creativity and curiosity yields frustration and a feeling of stupidity. If you make something really cool, make it easy to love at first sight. There are ways to use Project Soli's precise depth sensing so that there's nothing to learn and no way to fail. There are applications that will make people rethink what our devices can do and reward natural curiosity. Unfortunately I can't go into details. Instead, people will be waving at their Google watches and wondering why it keeps taking selfies instead of scrolling through their notifications.
- yomly 10y ago
  >I recently heard someone make the argument that while a lot of the Google AI tech is impressive, they haven't really been able to build something that feels that useful as a product in the real world. It's an impressive tech demo for sure at Google's conferences, but once the tech makes it to Android, they don't really become used all that much. As you mention above when talking about Google+ etc. Google have not really been great at doing products in the past (though they've definitely gotten better). But the key is that they are getting themselves onto a virtuous cycle for their AI development - they're attracting brilliant minds, which leads to bigger better breakthroughs (like Alpha Go and driverless cars) which leads to great PR and attracts more talent and customers/consumers of their AI. So what if Google doesn't build AI products, what if AI is the product or platform. What if AI is the future to most things (e.g. automation of routine labour or optimisation for business operations through machine learning). If Google can position themselves to be at the heart of all of this, they can let other developers and companies build on top of that to deliver the useful products. Just like they've done with Android. How will they monetize that? No idea, in my mind I imagine using consultants or licensing fees but that doesn't feel very "Googley"....
tsunamifury 10y ago
This is basic tooling vs intelligence. One company sells an appliance/tool with a specific application. The human does the thinking and the tool does what he/she says. The the other sells an intelligence that picks the tool for you. This integrates the tool and decision making upstream into the brain. It also scales as problems get more complex and the user wants to make decisions through abstraction. One of those is a bet on optimising for the future, the other for the present. On another note using implied insults is not really in the spirit of hackernews. It significantly reduces the quality of your comment. Many of us here do work for both of these companies and have a strong respect for each other's work.

by peyton 10y ago

askafriend 10y ago

This is an incredibly insightful comment and I thank you for sharing your thoughts. You've put into words something I've been feeling and trying to express for a while. "How does it make you feel?" is an incredibly important question and unfortunately for Google, something you can't really quantify (see: Circles and Google+). Actually Circles and Google+ is a great example that we can look at to see how the feel of a product can help lead to it's eventual downfall. When someone "friend requested" you on Facebook, you had a simple decision to make: "Is this person a friend of mine?". While everyone has their own definition of "friend", it's pretty easy to make a decision and sometimes you're gonna have to say "no" but that's fine; it feels bad for a short amount of time. With Circles and Google+, you had to ask yourself: "Do I know this person?", "Is this person a friend of mine?", "But how close am I to them really?", "Should I add them to the family circle? but they're not really family...", and so on. The worst part is, you had to do this all upfront. When you have to reflect about that many things about a human being, it starts to become far more negative than it has to be. And if you're going thru this experience all the time, then good luck. Now Facebook has it's issues too, but see how such a subtly negative "feel" to a product can be real friction. I recently heard someone make the argument that while a lot of the Google AI tech is impressive, they haven't really been able to build something that feels that useful as a product in the real world. It's an impressive tech demo for sure at Google's conferences, but once the tech makes it to Android, they don't really become used all that much. Take Now-On-Tap, for example. It was a highly touted feature on Android: an incredible ability to rip context from whatever you were looking at on your phone. Now you hardly see it mentioned and people don't really seem to use it that much. Google Now stuff is cool too, but besides airplane reminders and calendar integration, is it really that useful day to day? I suspect most people would say no. Look...all of the stuff Google does is very cool and very impressive...but it just lack a certain human feel to it. A certain simplicity in how something is useful. These AI experiences are not predictably useful. They aren't experiences you can rely on. Now I'm certainly generalizing a bit, and I know someone will come up with some counterexamples (please do! I'm curious), but I think you understand the sentiment I'm trying to convey: that Apple just understands the user from a different vantage point than Google simply by asking how something make them feel (and Jony Ive has emphasized this question time and time again, though he sometimes gets made fun of for his overzealousness).

peyton 10y ago
Back in school I was part of a small group of students chosen to meet Eric Schmidt. He walked into the room and asked, "Who here is making something really impressive?" I thought a long time about what that says about Google. Maybe it's about Google's competing on talent--they already have a $70 BN revenue machine and simply need a way to attract people who can keep the lights on. Maybe it's just the personalities of those at the top. Recently a friend showed me Google's Project Soli, a gesture interface that uses radio waves to sense hand position. You click by touching your fingers together and scroll by rubbing your fingers. The project looks fantastic and is clearly produced by some smart people. But the product video is a big call-to-action to developers: "We're excited to see the gestures you come up with." I feel bad for the talented people working on this. Because the first time somebody uses the product, they'll try a new gesture and it just won't work. Creativity and curiosity yields frustration and a feeling of stupidity. If you make something really cool, make it easy to love at first sight. There are ways to use Project Soli's precise depth sensing so that there's nothing to learn and no way to fail. There are applications that will make people rethink what our devices can do and reward natural curiosity. Unfortunately I can't go into details. Instead, people will be waving at their Google watches and wondering why it keeps taking selfies instead of scrolling through their notifications.
yomly 10y ago
>I recently heard someone make the argument that while a lot of the Google AI tech is impressive, they haven't really been able to build something that feels that useful as a product in the real world. It's an impressive tech demo for sure at Google's conferences, but once the tech makes it to Android, they don't really become used all that much. As you mention above when talking about Google+ etc. Google have not really been great at doing products in the past (though they've definitely gotten better). But the key is that they are getting themselves onto a virtuous cycle for their AI development - they're attracting brilliant minds, which leads to bigger better breakthroughs (like Alpha Go and driverless cars) which leads to great PR and attracts more talent and customers/consumers of their AI. So what if Google doesn't build AI products, what if AI is the product or platform. What if AI is the future to most things (e.g. automation of routine labour or optimisation for business operations through machine learning). If Google can position themselves to be at the heart of all of this, they can let other developers and companies build on top of that to deliver the useful products. Just like they've done with Android. How will they monetize that? No idea, in my mind I imagine using consultants or licensing fees but that doesn't feel very "Googley"....

tsunamifury 10y ago

This is basic tooling vs intelligence. One company sells an appliance/tool with a specific application. The human does the thinking and the tool does what he/she says. The the other sells an intelligence that picks the tool for you. This integrates the tool and decision making upstream into the brain. It also scales as problems get more complex and the user wants to make decisions through abstraction. One of those is a bet on optimising for the future, the other for the present. On another note using implied insults is not really in the spirit of hackernews. It significantly reduces the quality of your comment. Many of us here do work for both of these companies and have a strong respect for each other's work.