4 ms·

Playing devil's advocate here (a little) but imagine they took a few dozen million of that and, say, improved their development tool chains for Android (which a

by jahnu 10y ago

Playing devil's advocate here (a little) but imagine they took a few dozen million of that and, say, improved their development tool chains for Android (which are disappointingly flaky). Or another few dozen millions and extended the security updates for Nexus phones by a couple of years. That could grow their market share of both developer mind-share and consumers. Moonshots maybe should come once you've mastered all your core products?

Normal_gaussian 10y ago
> Moonshots maybe should come once you've mastered all your core products? Then they'll never come.
- jahnu 10y ago
  They mastered search. They mastered mapping.
  - slmyers 10y ago
    Is anything truly "mastered"?
    - iopq 10y ago
      It's not "perfect", it's just "mastered"
      - ZenoArrow 10y ago
        What's the difference?
        SXX 10y ago
        Probably "mastered" mean constant quality.
        iopq 10y ago
        A grandmaster chess player has mastered chess, but he can't play perfectly because he's still a human.
    - lorenzhs 10y ago
      Just yesterday I got a blank result page for a sensible query, seems to have hit some rarely visited bucket combined with a busy machine somewhere or the like, and the background request timed out. Of course a refresh fixed it, but software is never perfect.
  - redthrowaway 10y ago
    Search has stagnated. Google has gotten scarily good at anticipating what I want to know, but conspicuously bad at answering hard questions. There's tons of room for improvement. Similarly, Google Maps has added features that make it a better map, and it's a great place to find what time a store closes and what their phone number is. But it's been essentially the same service, with iterative improvements, for years. There's a world of possible uses for that data beyond what we imagine when we think of a map.
    - _pmf_ 10y ago
      > Google has gotten scarily good at anticipating what I want to know, but conspicuously bad at answering hard questions. Well, 98 percent of the market is not asking hard questions, so by dropping support, they are actually making their search product more tailored towards their market.
    - sievebrain 10y ago
      I suspect Google Search has not actually had quality regressions, but rather that your expectations have gone up over time without you realising it.
      - matwood 10y ago
        This. It used to be the first page of results was good enough. Now if it is not in the top 3-4, I refine my query.
      - redthrowaway 10y ago
        Yes, I might have phrased that poorly. Google Search still finds relevant web pages just as well as it did 5 years ago, perhaps better. It certainly has leveraged the data it collects on me to suggest search terms in a way that's almost eerie. But it's still a tool to find relevant pages, not a tool to find answers. It's made some progress with the semantic web and knowledge graph, but that still provides basic facts about people, places, and things. At its core, it's still a portal. It's still just a much better version of Excite. Search today feels like it did in 1997: a "solved problem" ripe for disruption. Google has the talent, technology, and data to produce something an order of magnitude better.
wastedhours 10y ago
Since Other Bets are separate in Alphabet (compared to Google), these aren't technically Google's investments offset by revenues, so would actually be losses for Alphabet as an org, no?
ryporter 10y ago
Google is perfectly able to invest a few dozen million in the Android development chain, if they so desire. If they don't, and if you're right that it would be a good investment, then that's simply a bad decision made by Google proper. Alphabet is trying to learn from the mistakes of their predecessor tech giants, who continued to focus almost exclusively on their current money spinners, only to wind up completely missing the boat on the Next Big Thing (tm).
markcerqueira 10y ago
> Improved their development tool chains for Android A true moonshot! :) and :( at the same time...
yoz-y 10y ago
I think that they are already investing quite a lot into the Android development toolchain and probably more investment would not make things go faster. That being said, it does indeed need a lot of improvement.
matwood 10y ago
The Android tool chain has improved A LOT over the years. I used to want to throw my computer every time I was forced to do something in our Android product, now it is only a mild annoyance. Compared to iOS it still has a ways to go though.
kalleboo 10y ago
> improved their development tool chains for Android (which are disappointingly flaky). To compete with what, Xcode? Strategically they're almost better off inspiring others to make better third-party Android dev tools to open up the space
on_and_off 10y ago
TBH, it feels like they are already ramping up the Android team. The support lib development pace seemed to have really picked up some steam this year. Of course they could do more, for example : - a really open support lib repo where you can really easily push contributions on something like github, gitlab, etc.. - start working on a replacement for Java .. Java 10 is better than what we have right now but still way behind kotlin or swift.. - do even more in the support lib. They are dozen of points of the material specs not covered by the platform right now. - do something about android updates. It looks like a political issue though, so not sure there is a solution. I don't feel like they are not investing in Android though, all the contrary.
landryraccoon 10y ago
A lot of world class engineers would leave Google to go to their competition. The promise of maybe getting to work on self driving cars is a big recruiting carrot. Improve ad revenue by 0.01%? Will that motivate a top 1% engineer to sign or stick around?

by jahnu 10y ago

Normal_gaussian 10y ago

> Moonshots maybe should come once you've mastered all your core products? Then they'll never come.

jahnu 10y ago
They mastered search. They mastered mapping.
- slmyers 10y ago
  Is anything truly "mastered"?
  - iopq 10y ago
    It's not "perfect", it's just "mastered"
    - ZenoArrow 10y ago
      What's the difference?
      - SXX 10y ago
        Probably "mastered" mean constant quality.
      - iopq 10y ago
        A grandmaster chess player has mastered chess, but he can't play perfectly because he's still a human.
  - lorenzhs 10y ago
    Just yesterday I got a blank result page for a sensible query, seems to have hit some rarely visited bucket combined with a busy machine somewhere or the like, and the background request timed out. Of course a refresh fixed it, but software is never perfect.
- redthrowaway 10y ago
  Search has stagnated. Google has gotten scarily good at anticipating what I want to know, but conspicuously bad at answering hard questions. There's tons of room for improvement. Similarly, Google Maps has added features that make it a better map, and it's a great place to find what time a store closes and what their phone number is. But it's been essentially the same service, with iterative improvements, for years. There's a world of possible uses for that data beyond what we imagine when we think of a map.
  - _pmf_ 10y ago
    > Google has gotten scarily good at anticipating what I want to know, but conspicuously bad at answering hard questions. Well, 98 percent of the market is not asking hard questions, so by dropping support, they are actually making their search product more tailored towards their market.
  - sievebrain 10y ago
    I suspect Google Search has not actually had quality regressions, but rather that your expectations have gone up over time without you realising it.
    - matwood 10y ago
      This. It used to be the first page of results was good enough. Now if it is not in the top 3-4, I refine my query.
    - redthrowaway 10y ago
      Yes, I might have phrased that poorly. Google Search still finds relevant web pages just as well as it did 5 years ago, perhaps better. It certainly has leveraged the data it collects on me to suggest search terms in a way that's almost eerie. But it's still a tool to find relevant pages, not a tool to find answers. It's made some progress with the semantic web and knowledge graph, but that still provides basic facts about people, places, and things. At its core, it's still a portal. It's still just a much better version of Excite. Search today feels like it did in 1997: a "solved problem" ripe for disruption. Google has the talent, technology, and data to produce something an order of magnitude better.

wastedhours 10y ago

Since Other Bets are separate in Alphabet (compared to Google), these aren't technically Google's investments offset by revenues, so would actually be losses for Alphabet as an org, no?

ryporter 10y ago

Google is perfectly able to invest a few dozen million in the Android development chain, if they so desire. If they don't, and if you're right that it would be a good investment, then that's simply a bad decision made by Google proper. Alphabet is trying to learn from the mistakes of their predecessor tech giants, who continued to focus almost exclusively on their current money spinners, only to wind up completely missing the boat on the Next Big Thing (tm).

markcerqueira 10y ago

> Improved their development tool chains for Android A true moonshot! :) and :( at the same time...

yoz-y 10y ago

I think that they are already investing quite a lot into the Android development toolchain and probably more investment would not make things go faster. That being said, it does indeed need a lot of improvement.

matwood 10y ago

The Android tool chain has improved A LOT over the years. I used to want to throw my computer every time I was forced to do something in our Android product, now it is only a mild annoyance. Compared to iOS it still has a ways to go though.

kalleboo 10y ago

> improved their development tool chains for Android (which are disappointingly flaky). To compete with what, Xcode? Strategically they're almost better off inspiring others to make better third-party Android dev tools to open up the space

on_and_off 10y ago

TBH, it feels like they are already ramping up the Android team. The support lib development pace seemed to have really picked up some steam this year. Of course they could do more, for example : - a really open support lib repo where you can really easily push contributions on something like github, gitlab, etc.. - start working on a replacement for Java .. Java 10 is better than what we have right now but still way behind kotlin or swift.. - do even more in the support lib. They are dozen of points of the material specs not covered by the platform right now. - do something about android updates. It looks like a political issue though, so not sure there is a solution. I don't feel like they are not investing in Android though, all the contrary.

landryraccoon 10y ago

A lot of world class engineers would leave Google to go to their competition. The promise of maybe getting to work on self driving cars is a big recruiting carrot. Improve ad revenue by 0.01%? Will that motivate a top 1% engineer to sign or stick around?