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When the in house engineers come out with products like Wave and Glass while things like Maps and Android are purchased you have to wonder.

jpatokal 10y ago
Psst: the Rasmussen brothers were behind both Maps and Wave. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Rasmussen_(software_developer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Rasmussen_(software_devel...
fphhotchips 10y ago
Not sure what you're saying here. Wave was great technically; the market fit just wasn't there.
jrockway 10y ago
I think you're neglecting the continuous improvement of successful projects, which take quite a bit of engineering effort. Was it software quality that killed Wave and Glass, or was it more of the market not wanting either of those things? (To digress, it seems like both of those products came too early. Do you think that wearable computers will _never_ exist? And Slack seems to be the Wave-like thing that the market wanted.)
- esturk 10y ago
  Slack is in no way like Wave. Now you're just over reaching with your comparisons. Wave's flaw was showing you what the other person was typing as they were typing it. You try to separate quality from functionality and stick that to market's fault because it doesn't want Wave's functionality. That is not mutually exclusive. Wave's quality was egregious.
- crdoconnor 10y ago
  Funny you should mention that. I was just using maps and thinking "this is worse than it used to be". From what I've heard from insiders, the adwords code base is an enormous mess. Not surprising for a product that old perhaps, but this points to their engineering practises being about as mediocre as the industry average. I don't honestly know why people want slack. It seems to just be in vogue - one of those weird network effect things. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with their feature-set or engineering quality because it's not noticeably better than, say, hipchat. >To digress, it seems like both of those products came too early. Do you think that wearable computers will _never_ exist? They already exist.

jpatokal 10y ago

Psst: the Rasmussen brothers were behind both Maps and Wave. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Rasmussen_(software_developer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Rasmussen_(software_devel...

fphhotchips 10y ago

Not sure what you're saying here. Wave was great technically; the market fit just wasn't there.

jrockway 10y ago

I think you're neglecting the continuous improvement of successful projects, which take quite a bit of engineering effort. Was it software quality that killed Wave and Glass, or was it more of the market not wanting either of those things? (To digress, it seems like both of those products came too early. Do you think that wearable computers will _never_ exist? And Slack seems to be the Wave-like thing that the market wanted.)

esturk 10y ago
Slack is in no way like Wave. Now you're just over reaching with your comparisons. Wave's flaw was showing you what the other person was typing as they were typing it. You try to separate quality from functionality and stick that to market's fault because it doesn't want Wave's functionality. That is not mutually exclusive. Wave's quality was egregious.
crdoconnor 10y ago
Funny you should mention that. I was just using maps and thinking "this is worse than it used to be". From what I've heard from insiders, the adwords code base is an enormous mess. Not surprising for a product that old perhaps, but this points to their engineering practises being about as mediocre as the industry average. I don't honestly know why people want slack. It seems to just be in vogue - one of those weird network effect things. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with their feature-set or engineering quality because it's not noticeably better than, say, hipchat. >To digress, it seems like both of those products came too early. Do you think that wearable computers will _never_ exist? They already exist.