7 ms·

I've speculated for a long time that basically anything interesting Google says they're doing is essentially meant to be a jobs program to keep employees from l

• oconnor663 10y ago
  Is the evidence for this view, that they cancel a lot of interesting projects? I think a simpler explanation for that would be that trying lots of new things is just a good strategy, even if you know 90% of them will fail.
  • flukus 10y ago
    Trying and failing is one thing. Trying, announcing, telling everyone it's the next big thing and then failing is quite another.
    • bcook 10y ago
      Is it? If they intentionally failed, I would agree, but I have seen no proof of that. Many ventures fail, regardless of resources and best intentions.
    • kyrra 10y ago
      Certain types of products need by-in from 3rd parties to make them work. I could see Ara being in this camp, so it's better to control the message about it, instead of some 3rd party leaking details. May also help to get those 3rd party companies to reach out to you.
    • tacoman 10y ago
      Like Project Vault that was made public at IO in 2015. It looked very promising. From an outsider's perspective, it looks like Mudge left Google a month later, then the project died. I hope there's more to the story because what kind of organization has a product's success completely reliant on one person?
      • loeg 10y ago
        > what kind of organization has a product's success completely reliant on one person? Hah. Without evidence, lots of them.
      • 1_2__3 10y ago
        This is why I haven't been able to stand the IO hype for years. When are people going to realize it's a tech demo, not product announcements? Do thy not realize most of the announced projects have gone nowhere?
        • tdkl 10y ago
          That's basically all that Google produces nowadays, tech demos.
        • pjmlp 10y ago
          Like the Android ADK, Cardboard, that funny bluethooth ball robot....
      • 1_2__3 10y ago
        This is why I haven't been able to stand the IO hype for years. When are people going to realize it's a tech demo, not product announcements? Do thy not realize most of the announced projects have gone nowhere?
    • untog 10y ago
      I'm not sure they ever said Ara was going to be the next best thing. I only read a few reports, but they always highlighted how it was a total experiment.
      • mtmail 10y ago
        "They intend to make a phone cheap enough to be accessible to 5 billion people. To do so, they need to create an ecosystem of hardware manufacturers robust enough that it could literally challenge giant incumbents like Foxconn and even Samsung. The head of Project Ara, Paul Eremenko, says he is planning "the most custom mass-market product ever created by mankind" without a trace of irony in his voice." http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/15/5615880/building-blocks-how-project-ara-is-reinventing-the-smartphone http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/15/5615880/building-blocks-ho...
        • majewsky 10y ago
          When I hear "the most custom mass-market product ever created by mankind", the first thing that comes to mind is a Subway sandwich.
    • ajharrison 10y ago
      Telling people something is the next big thing is part of trying to make it so.
      • flukus 10y ago
        Until you become the boy who cried wolf. I now consider anything from google vaporware until proved otherwise. The biggest part of making something the next big thing is actually producing a product.
        • astronautjones 10y ago
          The challenge they will always face. Once you get to this scale, there's no way to avoid it. I, for one, don't find it duplicitous - what if Google was a movie studio? The shame that they aren't is that we'll never see a technology giant's Pootie Tang (one of my favorite films, beloved by many, its name itself a piece of pop culture, though it failed on any metric a shareholder would consider)
          • flukus 10y ago
            >there's no way to avoid it Of course there is, keep it secret until they're close to release.
            • harke 10y ago
              They were calling for partners to build modules and announcing that they had multiple partners already. I think that's a valid enough reason to talk about it. There are enough leaked press stories on secret projects they are working on but not announcing until they have gone the distance.
        • deleted 10y ago
          [deleted]
    • i_feel_great 10y ago
      If it is not next-big-thing-worthy, there is no real point for a company like Google to try it in the first place.
    • madeofpalk 10y ago
      Which is just a PR strategy. It's alomost certain that other companies, like Apple and Microsoft are working of similar things but they just don't make public announcements about their internal hackathon proof-of-concepts
      • lqdc13 10y ago
        They do sometimes. With the Tay twitter bot for example. It was a ploy to get people to switch to Azure. Most things are less obvious I imagine.
        • spullara 10y ago
          No one is working on a modular phone because it is a terrible idea.
          • kasparsklavins 10y ago
            LG tried it with their G5 model. It isnt very interesting
    • richie5um 10y ago
      Completely agree. This is baffling.
    • sangnoir 10y ago
      > Trying and failing is one thing. Trying, announcing, telling everyone it's the next big thing and then failing is quite another. Isn't this the modus operandi of startups though? Most of them fail too, but they hardly ever get their feet held to the fire like Google projects.
      • ethanbond 10y ago
        Probably because people expect better from one of the most established tech companies on the face of the planet? It's as sad as Facebook's rampant feature theft from Snapchat. Sure, not illegal, not surprising, but also not impressive.
    • harke 10y ago
      They didn't just talk about it. They called for partners to build the modules and had multiple partners already. If this was a lie from the start, it would've been easier to not go through the trouble.
  • IBM 10y ago
    I think there was reporting about this regarding Andy Rubin. After he was pushed out of Android, Larry Page basically gave him a robotics division to keep him around. He made some acquisitions, there was no real follow through and he left and is now a VC. I just want to know how pervasive that is across the company.
  • rajeshp1986 10y ago
    Trying, announcing, pursuing the project for 3 years and suddenly announcing that the project shows that random ideas are being chased without proper vision & leadership.
• maxerickson 10y ago
  You could argue that they pay every employee not to leave. Like any other business.
  • thaumasiotes 10y ago
    Generally, the concept is that they're paying for the work you do for them, not that they're paying for the privilege of saying you're on the payroll.
    • maxerickson 10y ago
      O I C.
• samfisher83 10y ago
  Why do they need these people if they aren't working on things that make the company money?
  • taspeotis 10y ago
    Perhaps better doing nothing for Google than working for other companies, making them money.
  • prawn 10y ago
    Deprives competitors of talent and there are also advantages in having people doing speculative/moonshot work.
    • majewsky 10y ago
      Such as prestige.
• mturmon 10y ago
  Enjoyably Machiavellian. But in the instance of this phone, a more straightforward strategy seems clear: to break down the monolithic phone market and suppress the unique market position of big competitors like Samsung. As in this quote from a wowed reporter from The Verge -- Just as importantly, though, Project Ara could have a ripple effect on the entire mobile industry. One of the goals is to "democratize the hardware ecosystem, break it wide open, basically disintermediate the OEMs," Eremenko [then the project lead] says, "so that component developers can now have privy [sic] with the consumer." Fun to read the puff piece in retrospect: http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/15/5615880/building-blocks-how-project-ara-is-reinventing-the-smartphone http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/15/5615880/building-blocks-ho...
  • Someone 10y ago
    To have that strategy work, you would need zero cost, zero volume connectors that stay together forever if desired, yet come apart easily. Otherwise, the guy building the integrated system would offer a smaller, sturdier phone at lower cost that suits 90+% of the market, leaving scraps for you, forcing your prices up, decreasing your market even further, forcing your prices up, etc. There's a reason that, except for a few early suitcase-sized ones, we never saw laptops with ISA/PCI/PCMCIA slots succeed in the market, and laptops had the advantage to start out as desktops, which had slots.
    • Nullabillity 10y ago
      > There's a reason that, except for a few early suitcase-sized ones, we never saw laptops with ISA/PCI/PCMCIA slots succeed in the market, and laptops had the advantage to start out as desktops, which had slots. Huh? PCMCIA/CardBus/ExpressCard was a standard feature in more or less all laptop until just a few years ago.
      • coldtea 10y ago
        Only if by "just a few years ago" you mean "almost a decade or more ago", and by "on more or less all laptops" you mean "some high end models".
• ChuckMcM 10y ago
  Flip it around, would anyone want to apply to Google if they weren't doing big visionary things? I've met a lot of people who want to work at Google, not because anything they want to achieve in life is only possible if they do it with Google's resources, but simply because "It's a magical place." as Phil Coulson would say. So whether or not it keeps people from leaving, if it is effective at getting people to apply to Google first, it meets its goal right? From my experience working there some of the "moonshot" type projects were rather hit or miss in terms of retention. Some, like the self driving car one, attracted a lot of great talent, some of the more interesting power related ones were only interesting to people who cared about power efficiency. But the feeling that anything is possible is intoxicating until you realize what you have to give up to make something possible. Then its sort of hit or miss.
  • AtheistOfFail 10y ago
    T.A.H.I.T.I is calling. "It's a magical place"
  • xiphias 10y ago
    Most of us at Google are not working on on moonshot projects, and still have a happy life. Still, most non-moonshot projects that people are working on are growing nicely, have a long term view, and making lots of impact. Also having free good quality, healthy food with big variety all day long makes a huge impact in life quality.
    • ethanbond 10y ago
      I don't think Google's perks are anywhere close to a differentiator in the market these days.
      • majewsky 10y ago
        s/the market/Silicon Valley/
      • eitally 10y ago
        But even the things that aren't "perks" are still way beyond what most non-valley companies offer as benefits (insurance, retirement, education, leaves, parental benefits, internal training/development, etc). None of that is uniquely special, and many non-tech companies have pieces of the puzzle, but imho Google is unique among companies it size with the breadth and quality of employee benefits it offers.
• jpm_sd 10y ago
  Sadly, these repeated failed hardware efforts are all totally sincere. There is a sort of pump-and-dump hype cycle but people are really drinking the kool-aid internally. So far they are still a software company failing to create internal hardware startups. Source: worked at Google for 2 years