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Wow, this is a lot of FUD, even for Gruber. Google does demo plenty of stuff at I/O that isn't available Today. In fact that might be almost everything shown
by jlebar 8y ago
Wow, this is a lot of FUD, even for Gruber.
Google does demo plenty of stuff at I/O that isn't available Today. In fact that might be almost everything shown at I/O.
But utter fraud [0], as he suggests here? Is there any precedent for Google doing such a thing on this scale? That seems absurd and, in a company of this size and openness, likely to backfire.
Maybe Gruber doesn't believe anything he wrote and is actually trying to get Googlers to email him in defense of the tech and reveal confidential details of how it works. I don't have any reason to believe this, just asking the question...
[0] I mean, the article is written such that the author could backtrack are any point and say "that's not what I meant, I was just asking the question". But hopefully we can get beyond that facade.
- Marazan 8y agoIt's classic Gruber. He wants you to definitely come away with the impression that this is a total fraud but he also wants complete deniability that he called it a fraud.
- eksemplar 8y agoI don’t know if this is classic Gruber. I’ve read a lot of his stuff and it’s always been interesting. Now I haven’t followed him closely either, so maybe I’ve only seen the good stuff, but this is the first time I’ve come away from it thinking he was an idiot.
- Marazan 8y agoGruber's stock in trade is ambiguous 1 line response to an extract from an article he's linked to which he can then criticise people for mis interpreting. Once you've noticed this pattern it's much harder to take his (often very good) long form pieces seriously.
- Marazan 8y agoAlso his total and complete inability to admit he was 100% wrong about large screened phones being successful is painful. Gruber/Apple is never wrong - but sometimes reality realigns.
- neya 8y agoIf you've been following the Markdown debacle closely[1], this is classic Gruber. [1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-common-markdown/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-commo...
- tpush 8y agoI mean, Gruber is literally accusing Sundar Pichai of lying on stage: https://twitter.com/gruber/status/995538518016487425 https://twitter.com/gruber/status/995538518016487425 I usually like what Gruber has to say about Apple, but this fanboyism is off the charts even for him.
- RodoBobJon 8y agoGruber didn't call it a fraud. He said the demo was not "distinguishable from a fraud," which is true. His actual recommendation is the title of the post, which is that we should have "a little Duplex skepticism." And yes, Google certainly wouldn't demo a completely non-existent technology, and I'm sure Gruber knows that. But they might very well demo a technology that only works 60% of the time at present. Let's be honest, this wouldn't be the first time we've seen a large tech company demo incredible-seeming too-good-to-be-true tech that turned out to actually be too good to be true and never made it into real world use for one reason or another. It is kind of weird that the broad tech punditry has just accepted Google's demo at face value with respect to what the tech is actually capable of at present. For example, Google demoed object removal in Google Photos (https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/17/15654476/google-photos-object-removal-feature-demo https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/17/15654476/google-photos-ob...) last year at IO, and as far as I can tell it never shipped. If a company in any other industry announced an insane-seeming new technology with a completely non-verifiable demo like this, no credible journalist who covers that beat would report it as credulously as tech journalists have covered the Duplex demo. Gruber is absolutely right that the lack of skepticism around Duplex is baffling and journalistically suspect.