21 ms·

Google and Ambient Computing

142 points by hvass 7y ago

shadowgovt 7y ago
""" So “being helpful” is the company’s goal, not its mission statement. """ The goal derives from the mission statement; it's an implementation strategy for "universally accessible and useful."
- gowld 7y ago
  But Google isn't making iformation "universally accessible and useful" anymore. Now they are "slurping up all the information in the universe, and doling out in controlled ways to maximize user engagement metrics and advertising revenue"
ydnaclementine 7y ago
It seems like google has the unfortunate culture of just releasing a bunch of new services, not maintaining them, and allowing them to die. (Remember all of their chat apps?) I think I’ve read it’s due to google’s promotion process and needing to “release” something to move upward. I expect the majority of these service to no longer be around in 5 years.
- mey 7y ago
  https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ I am rather curious about Stradia's longevity.
  - magashna 7y ago
    I'm still very pessimistic about the network resources that they expect the average user to have. The recent hubbub was about places that have data caps. I'm still not convinced that the latency is there for an enjoyable experience. I'll be incredibly surprised if it isn't a complete flop.
    - uoaei 7y ago
      Every time something like this comes up, I imagine a bunch of giddy "world-changers" sitting behind Mac Pros with Retina displays and T3 lines, building something that works great under those conditions, and then convincing each other that they've helped people over $16 microbrews. I know this is a caricature but it's how I get my kicks. To wit, the conditions that the engineers inhabit in their lives has basically zero resemblance with the technology experience of the vast majority of people. Designing websites for 4K screens only, expecting <20ms latency over home lines when everyone else in the house is streaming video to their own personal devices, etc. One thing we can do collectively as an industry is put in place guidelines which steer development to minimalism and attention to the resources available to the median user.
      - zorked 7y ago
        Most tech-company engineers have exactly the same infrastructure at home as everybody else. Comcast and the like, also mad about data caps, latency and DNS hijacking.
        uoaei 7y ago
        Most tech-company engineers don't live in bad parts of town nor in the countryside, so I have a hard time believing that.
    - VRay 7y ago
      The latency is interesting, most people can't see it or feel it if it's under 100ms or so. There's already a button press -> screen change latency of ~100 ms in most AAA games except for twitchy shooters If you're more of a hardcore player, you may feel the extra latency as all your reflexes being off. It's harder to make jumps, perform combos, line up shots, etc. In my case, I absolutely can't stand network streaming latency. Even 50ms is completely unacceptable to me outside of turn-based games, and I go out of my way to look into the input lag for any new monitor or TV I buy. BUT you might be different, you should give it a shot.
  - whazor 7y ago
    Stadia will be a free gaming service next year. If they launch a free to play game, people will switch internet provider for it.
    - extesy 7y ago
      > people will switch internet provider for it. Ha-ha, I wish I could switch over from Comcast.
    - J5892 7y ago
      I would happily switch my internet provider for it. I would switch my internet provider for literally anything. The problem is I live in the country's main technological hub (the bay area), and I fucking can't. It's infuriating.
    - Arelius 7y ago
      I think anyone that would and more importantly can switch to better internet for a free to play game already have. In many places in the US people already have the best internet that can be provided to their home, and it's not good enough.
- icandoit 7y ago
  I like that they have a "take the flag, but dont hold the ground if it isn't worth it" approach. Learn lots and fail fast. Smaller companies can find a niche for themselves in "we are basically X that google used to do". Let someone else make the market and create your marketing, right? Maximizing profits (and innovation) over time may mean closing something profitable now, and focusing on new potential profits. Thats great.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Yeah, great. Except for the users who Google got hooked on a given service, who then have troubles finding alternatives as Google tends to suck the oxygen out from the room whenever they release something.
    - icandoit 7y ago
      They can't find someone to take their money in exchange for a useful service. That isn't a Google problem. That's our opportunity. I can't think of a single company known for riding Google's coat tails. Why aren't people responding to the enormous wealth of Google by emulating them? We don't have to be beholden to a few huge tech companies there is space for so many more players. I try to see things I can do when other people tell me a story about who is to blame for something. It's all a matter of framing.
      - yellow_postit 7y ago
        Ad companies like Google tend to be winner take most markets. Thats why you see it referred to as the duopoly of Google and FB, together they have ~60% of the digital ad market.
        joshuamorton 7y ago
        This doesn't address the question: Why didn't something pop up and eat up the success left in the wake of a market Google left, like reader or inbox or wave?
- codingslave 7y ago
  They can't innovate, despite all of their "talent"
  - dmix 7y ago
    Innovation usually takes a much longer timeline than just launching something and killing it with a year or two when it’s not sufficiently Google scale. The world would have a lot less great products if this is how it was always done. This is why startups continue to be the primary innovation source. They are willing to go through the hard grind to find product/market fit over multiple years. Most of the products purchased by the big guys are at least 5-7yrs old (WhatsApp, YouTube, Waze, Looker, etc). There are some rare exceptions like Instagram and Android which were both 2yrs old at acquisition.
    - v7p1Qbt1im 7y ago
      Isn‘t that exactly what X is doing though? Waymo started as a project in 2009 I believe. It wasn‘t anything commercial until recently.
  - username90 7y ago
    Google is good at innovating in computer science and computer engineering. Google is not particularly good at innovating product ideas. This makes sense given how they find and hire talent.
    - icandoit 7y ago
      But they are innovating. New products all the time. They just aren't staying around to collect the (relative to Google) meager profits. I wish more companies knew when to call it quits.
      - username90 7y ago
        They create products but lack the leadership needed to follow through when the initial exciting moments are over. I'd say that if you can't follow through on your innovations then you aren't good at innovating. They can do it on the tech side, lots of successful projects there.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
phkahler 7y ago
Google is failing to organize the world's information in a way that is useful to me. I wanted to look up how to split a NURBS surface in half. You know, the math behind computing the new point and weights. All I got was a bunch of stuff from CAD vendors talking about how to manipulate NURBS in their own tools. Since then, I've seen more of this trend. It's hard to find information about how anything works now because most the results are commercial - SEOed to be high in the rankings. I'd like an option to screen out commercial results in favor of more informational ones. They're supposed to be helping me find information right? But in reality they've shifted to feeding me marketing information.
- magashna 7y ago
  May be better to select by org type (site:.edu) or remove what might be obvious commercial results (-buy -"free download")
- jacquesm 7y ago
  Yesterday I wrote a blog post about an interesting company, I couldn't find the URL even though I knew exactly what they did and where they were located. It took forver - and DuckDuckGo - to finally find the website. I'd forgotten their name and had put of writing that blog post for long enough that it had slipped my mind. That isn't the first time this happens either. It's extremely frustrating to not be able to locate a page that you know is out there.
  - shantly 7y ago
    I used to be able to find specific pages on the Web by googling for unusual words I expected would be used to link to them, not on the page itself, to pick an extreme example of the sort of triangulation one used to be able to use to track down lost pages or sites. That kind of thing hasn't worked in... god, at least a decade, at this point. Not just because the Web is larger, but because search doesn't seem to work like that anymore and also everything got way spammier. "Clever" searching is a skill I was once (judging by people's reactions) notably good at but that is entirely obsolete, but not because the function it served was replaced by something better—it's just gone now.
ronilan 7y ago
Ambivalent Computing is the new auto completed mission statement. It replaced Don’t be Drivel.
gambler 7y ago
A handful of oligopolies coercing me to use overcomplicated always-connected gadgets that are orchestrated by "AI" that I don't control, can't train, and whose main objective is to manipulate my behavior and siphon as much of my private info to its corporate master as possible. All of this to solve "problems" that I never had, while a choir of corporate shills drones on and on that problems I actually have are not real or not important. I'll take 80s dystopian cyberpunk over this crap any time of the day.
- icandoit 7y ago
  I don't like the always-on surveillance either. But if people choose these products because the convenience is worth it in their estimation, revealed preferences and all that. Maybe this suggests a counter-product? An offline, all data is local, product opportunity. Who will build it?
  - mfer 7y ago
    > But if people choose these products because the convenience is worth it in their estimation, revealed preferences and all that. "is worth it" requires people to be fully aware of what's going on. I've described what some of these devices are doing based on product announcements, patents, investigative news stories, and that sort of thing. I've had numerous people tell me that I'm wrong. That they don't believe companies are doing this. This has caused me to come to the conclusion that people aren't aware of the trade-offs or what is going on. That lack of understanding concerns me.
    - orteam 7y ago
      Seems a bit patronizing. People can actually make a conscious decision to prefer convenience over surrender of some privacy. Some people don't put shades or curtains on their windows.
      - jjoonathan 7y ago
        Sure, but people generally understand how window shades work, whereas people generally don't understand how the surveillance economy works. That would be a patronizing assumption inside HN, but outside HN it's a reality that I regularly observe.
mindgam3 7y ago
> So the devices aren’t the center of the system, you are. That’s our vision for ambient computing. The vision is correct but the naming is off. Something like “embodied computing” would convey the key difference better than “ambient”, namely that the user is at the center. And yes this is a fancypants way of saying wearables. But this is a nice attempt from google to paint the future as an extension of something it is good at (managing lots of ambient cloud-like things) while downplaying that what we’re really talking about is wearables (not really a strong suit for Big G).
- v7p1Qbt1im 7y ago
  I wouldn‘t say wearables. More like device-agnostic. You are giving commands to a system. That system might literally be your surroundings in the future. Wearables, like contact lenses, might be a part of it. But so could sensors in a road or a smart window you walk past.
Santosh83 7y ago
> Our users tell us they find the Google Assistant to be smart, user-friendly, and reliable, and that’s so important for ambient technology. Interactions need to feel natural and intuitive. Here’s an example: if you want to listen to music, the experience should be the same whether you are in the kitchen, you are driving in your car, or hanging out with friends. No matter what you are doing, you should be able to just say the name of the song and the music just plays without you having to pull out a phone and tap on screens or push buttons. This may be an unpopular sentiment, but at least for me, I find a certain indefinable pleasure in manual tasks, to a certain extent. Slipping a CD into a player or a cassette into a deck or having to browse through a shelf to find the book I want. I don't think people will realise the "ambience" of these minor things we do hundreds of times a day almost unconsciously until practically everything becomes voice/thought activated and almost anything you want is delivered right to where you are. I believe that there is a certain happy medium between entirely manual and being too automated. Obviously this will be different for different tasks but we must keep in mind that the aim of corporations will always be to make them fully automated because that way they and their services become indispensable for the world. Our aim should be to try to tread the happy medium where automation makes significant difference but does not turn us into instantly-gratified, grown-up children.
- blackflame 7y ago
  There will always be a market for one man to foster another man's laziness. Edit: Not sure how this is even debatable down-voters?
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  You raise a valid concern, but I think there's a stable equilibrium here. It seems to me that the current goals of ambient computing pretty much match the canonical utopian scifi vision; you can order the computer to look up information or play/display whatever media you want, but there are no little robots bringing coffee to your armchair. I don't think we risk automating so much that people (or, well, wealthy people at least) never have to stand up.
- jwhitlark 7y ago
  I wonder if this feeling plays into the comfort of noun-verb over verb-noun that is being discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21271212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21271212
tdonia 7y ago
as someone who switched to an iphone yesterday after having using google flagship models since the nexus one, i agree that this is an important direction for google's product strategy, but i think they're playing catch up from far behind. i remarked to my wife last night that the biggest difference in the ux between the two was that my android was always a phone, and this iphone has become a platform/ux that's larger than a single device, a whole set of humanistic little devices -- airpods and the home ipad in my case. i'd always thought i couldn't switch because i use google services, but those are largely commodities now -- i've got a wide range of good enough options for photos/music/email/cal/etc. -- the google android apps are a little better, but not enough so to make a difference. even siri has been good enough so far, though my queries aren't especially complicated.
- mav3rick 7y ago
  Assistant is so far ahead.
  - Lio 7y ago
    That might very well be true that Google Assistant is better but there’s a certain class of user, like me, that finds voice interfaces obnoxious. The first thing I do with a new phone is turn Siri off because I don’t want to use my phone that way. So it doesn’t matter to me which is better or which is worse. However privacy is important to me so I use that as a driver of purchases.
  - dawg- 7y ago
    If Assistant is that far ahead, then it's really funny because assistant is very disappointing. These companies are pushing voice onto the general public before it is ready to be actually useful. I got a free google home with something and half the time I try to use it I end up closing the conversation with something like "hey google you are completely useless". When it comes to voice recognition and language modeling we are still rubbing sticks together to make fire. But Google and Amazon are marketing their voice products like it's a zippo lighter. They really have a chicken and the egg problem. They need more data input to train their AI and make the service better, but they need the service to be better before more people will adopt it and feed data to train the AI.
magwa101 7y ago
Overly self important self promoter...
Kiro 7y ago
People really hate Google here. Look at this thread and the other about Soli. Not a single positive comment about Google. No wonder Google engineers have stopped posting on HN. Maybe Google truly is evil but I fail to see it personally.
- mav3rick 7y ago
  This is so true. Half of these are people openly claiming they hate it because they couldn't get in.
- m463 7y ago
  It's a symptom of an underlying problem. - companies used to respect us. - computers used to belong to us. The equation changed when companies found a way to charge advertisers big money by inverting these equations. Google is just the poster child for all this, but there are lots of other players that have cashed in.
  - mav3rick 7y ago
    You are free to not use their services. People acting offended for using free services. Before you say "free" is not free, well no one pays for most web services. So this is an inherent human problem not one these companies created.
    - LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
      Well. How does Wikipedia survive? Or Archive.org? Or Open Streetmap? Maybe the people/haters don't even care so much about advertisements in general, but the sheer mass of them, which degrades the usability, and maybe some of the services aren't that good anymore in general, while having been better before? I remember the days i happily used Altavista Search instead of the Yahoo. Because Yahoo was spammed to death, while Altavista at the time wasn't. It feels the same with Duck Duck Go vs. Google since at least 5 years now? I don't really care how it is financed in the background, i care about how much hassle it is to find something, or even being able to find it at all. Google fails there massively for me, and i wonder why that is? Maybe because it is Anglocentric? Or even US-centric? But then the same should apply to Duck Duck Go, which isn't the case, because it works fine for me. I know it's using inferior indices, but it doesn't matter when the better ones are so overblown that i fail to find the needle in the impossibly large haystack. I'm even using other search engines before i fall back to Google, in case of not finding something. Google has gone from something good to last ditch only for me. That was for general search. Now to the maps. With the exception of satellite/air-imagery it leaves much to be desired, and that is the labeling of places. Which fails worldwide. That algorithm is just crap on higer zoom levels. At first i thought it would be because of my location, some country far away over the Atlantic in old Europe, but it's not. I recognized that while reading something about the history of building railroads trough the Rocky Mountains, and the Googlemaps made no sense at all, because it either omits small places altogether, or puts the labels where they absolutely don't belong. Bingmaps meanwhile were a joy to use, everything was there, at the right places, and it ran even faster! LOL? Then there is this thing with business listings and reviews in the map which is useless in my locations. I don't read them anymore, because any i have read were wrong, or did otherwise not meaningfully apply. I don't know why that is, is it just vandalism from random people, coercion of services like Yelp, or whatver? I don't care anymore, because USELESS! Then general accuracy about what is where, and how to get there in my favored modes of transport. In my locations Open Streetmaps wins. EVERY TIME! (I know that is not applicable in general, because coverage/accuracy thereof varies regionally) What else? Hm. Youtube. What can i say? Expect to get dirty if walking into a market for stupid pigs. Though it has not only some rare, but many pearls. Just difficult to find them in all that stinking shit. Apart from that, what are they thinking if i'm listening to some ambient psychill/progressive psytrance mix which goes about 1 to 2 hours and they are interupting that with at least 4 adverts per hour for stuff which is totally unrelated and i have no interest in? Who thinks of something like that? Are they on crack? Is there anything i like about Google? Yeah, i like EARTH. Glorious! My digital globe. Great. But i don't need that, it's more of a toy for me. So, emperors new clothes for all the gaslighted androids, anyone? :-)
empath75 7y ago
They used to call this "Ubiquitous Computing" https://www.wired.com/1994/02/parc/ https://www.wired.com/1994/02/parc/
dheelus 7y ago
Google hired away Oracle's President, not VP.
jeiro0 7y ago
Stratechery is a rag. What’s striking about the list of 7 announced shipments, they write, is 2 of them won’t ship until next year! Oh man terrible numbers. Further complaining about boredom with Google. Shock and awe we’re a bit meh at splashy tech events, that’s been the sentiment going around for a while. Above all, the article lauds their vision even though they’re annoyed at 2 releases being off in the future and how meh the actual outcomes are. So which is it, Stratechery? Are they nailing it with vision and failing with execution? Confused by this entire write up except as blog spam.
scarejunba 7y ago
> The first thing that is striking about this list is how many of the announcements won’t ship for quite some time. Literally everything there ships in a month, dude.
ToFab123 7y ago
They are not really being helpful to me, when organizing the worlds information means, that all search results on page 1 are paid advertising.

142 points by hvass 7y ago

""" So “being helpful” is the company’s goal, not its mission statement. """ The goal derives from the mission statement; it's an implementation strategy for "universally accessible and useful."

gowld 7y ago
But Google isn't making iformation "universally accessible and useful" anymore. Now they are "slurping up all the information in the universe, and doling out in controlled ways to maximize user engagement metrics and advertising revenue"

ydnaclementine 7y ago

It seems like google has the unfortunate culture of just releasing a bunch of new services, not maintaining them, and allowing them to die. (Remember all of their chat apps?) I think I’ve read it’s due to google’s promotion process and needing to “release” something to move upward. I expect the majority of these service to no longer be around in 5 years.

mey 7y ago
https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ I am rather curious about Stradia's longevity.
- magashna 7y ago
  I'm still very pessimistic about the network resources that they expect the average user to have. The recent hubbub was about places that have data caps. I'm still not convinced that the latency is there for an enjoyable experience. I'll be incredibly surprised if it isn't a complete flop.
  - uoaei 7y ago
    Every time something like this comes up, I imagine a bunch of giddy "world-changers" sitting behind Mac Pros with Retina displays and T3 lines, building something that works great under those conditions, and then convincing each other that they've helped people over $16 microbrews. I know this is a caricature but it's how I get my kicks. To wit, the conditions that the engineers inhabit in their lives has basically zero resemblance with the technology experience of the vast majority of people. Designing websites for 4K screens only, expecting <20ms latency over home lines when everyone else in the house is streaming video to their own personal devices, etc. One thing we can do collectively as an industry is put in place guidelines which steer development to minimalism and attention to the resources available to the median user.
    - zorked 7y ago
      Most tech-company engineers have exactly the same infrastructure at home as everybody else. Comcast and the like, also mad about data caps, latency and DNS hijacking.
      - uoaei 7y ago
        Most tech-company engineers don't live in bad parts of town nor in the countryside, so I have a hard time believing that.
  - VRay 7y ago
    The latency is interesting, most people can't see it or feel it if it's under 100ms or so. There's already a button press -> screen change latency of ~100 ms in most AAA games except for twitchy shooters If you're more of a hardcore player, you may feel the extra latency as all your reflexes being off. It's harder to make jumps, perform combos, line up shots, etc. In my case, I absolutely can't stand network streaming latency. Even 50ms is completely unacceptable to me outside of turn-based games, and I go out of my way to look into the input lag for any new monitor or TV I buy. BUT you might be different, you should give it a shot.
- whazor 7y ago
  Stadia will be a free gaming service next year. If they launch a free to play game, people will switch internet provider for it.
  - extesy 7y ago
    > people will switch internet provider for it. Ha-ha, I wish I could switch over from Comcast.
  - J5892 7y ago
    I would happily switch my internet provider for it. I would switch my internet provider for literally anything. The problem is I live in the country's main technological hub (the bay area), and I fucking can't. It's infuriating.
  - Arelius 7y ago
    I think anyone that would and more importantly can switch to better internet for a free to play game already have. In many places in the US people already have the best internet that can be provided to their home, and it's not good enough.
icandoit 7y ago
I like that they have a "take the flag, but dont hold the ground if it isn't worth it" approach. Learn lots and fail fast. Smaller companies can find a niche for themselves in "we are basically X that google used to do". Let someone else make the market and create your marketing, right? Maximizing profits (and innovation) over time may mean closing something profitable now, and focusing on new potential profits. Thats great.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Yeah, great. Except for the users who Google got hooked on a given service, who then have troubles finding alternatives as Google tends to suck the oxygen out from the room whenever they release something.
  - icandoit 7y ago
    They can't find someone to take their money in exchange for a useful service. That isn't a Google problem. That's our opportunity. I can't think of a single company known for riding Google's coat tails. Why aren't people responding to the enormous wealth of Google by emulating them? We don't have to be beholden to a few huge tech companies there is space for so many more players. I try to see things I can do when other people tell me a story about who is to blame for something. It's all a matter of framing.
    - yellow_postit 7y ago
      Ad companies like Google tend to be winner take most markets. Thats why you see it referred to as the duopoly of Google and FB, together they have ~60% of the digital ad market.
      - joshuamorton 7y ago
        This doesn't address the question: Why didn't something pop up and eat up the success left in the wake of a market Google left, like reader or inbox or wave?
codingslave 7y ago
They can't innovate, despite all of their "talent"
- dmix 7y ago
  Innovation usually takes a much longer timeline than just launching something and killing it with a year or two when it’s not sufficiently Google scale. The world would have a lot less great products if this is how it was always done. This is why startups continue to be the primary innovation source. They are willing to go through the hard grind to find product/market fit over multiple years. Most of the products purchased by the big guys are at least 5-7yrs old (WhatsApp, YouTube, Waze, Looker, etc). There are some rare exceptions like Instagram and Android which were both 2yrs old at acquisition.
  - v7p1Qbt1im 7y ago
    Isn‘t that exactly what X is doing though? Waymo started as a project in 2009 I believe. It wasn‘t anything commercial until recently.
- username90 7y ago
  Google is good at innovating in computer science and computer engineering. Google is not particularly good at innovating product ideas. This makes sense given how they find and hire talent.
  - icandoit 7y ago
    But they are innovating. New products all the time. They just aren't staying around to collect the (relative to Google) meager profits. I wish more companies knew when to call it quits.
    - username90 7y ago
      They create products but lack the leadership needed to follow through when the initial exciting moments are over. I'd say that if you can't follow through on your innovations then you aren't good at innovating. They can do it on the tech side, lots of successful projects there.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

phkahler 7y ago

Google is failing to organize the world's information in a way that is useful to me. I wanted to look up how to split a NURBS surface in half. You know, the math behind computing the new point and weights. All I got was a bunch of stuff from CAD vendors talking about how to manipulate NURBS in their own tools. Since then, I've seen more of this trend. It's hard to find information about how anything works now because most the results are commercial - SEOed to be high in the rankings. I'd like an option to screen out commercial results in favor of more informational ones. They're supposed to be helping me find information right? But in reality they've shifted to feeding me marketing information.

magashna 7y ago
May be better to select by org type (site:.edu) or remove what might be obvious commercial results (-buy -"free download")
jacquesm 7y ago
Yesterday I wrote a blog post about an interesting company, I couldn't find the URL even though I knew exactly what they did and where they were located. It took forver - and DuckDuckGo - to finally find the website. I'd forgotten their name and had put of writing that blog post for long enough that it had slipped my mind. That isn't the first time this happens either. It's extremely frustrating to not be able to locate a page that you know is out there.
- shantly 7y ago
  I used to be able to find specific pages on the Web by googling for unusual words I expected would be used to link to them, not on the page itself, to pick an extreme example of the sort of triangulation one used to be able to use to track down lost pages or sites. That kind of thing hasn't worked in... god, at least a decade, at this point. Not just because the Web is larger, but because search doesn't seem to work like that anymore and also everything got way spammier. "Clever" searching is a skill I was once (judging by people's reactions) notably good at but that is entirely obsolete, but not because the function it served was replaced by something better—it's just gone now.

ronilan 7y ago

Ambivalent Computing is the new auto completed mission statement. It replaced Don’t be Drivel.

gambler 7y ago

A handful of oligopolies coercing me to use overcomplicated always-connected gadgets that are orchestrated by "AI" that I don't control, can't train, and whose main objective is to manipulate my behavior and siphon as much of my private info to its corporate master as possible. All of this to solve "problems" that I never had, while a choir of corporate shills drones on and on that problems I actually have are not real or not important. I'll take 80s dystopian cyberpunk over this crap any time of the day.

icandoit 7y ago
I don't like the always-on surveillance either. But if people choose these products because the convenience is worth it in their estimation, revealed preferences and all that. Maybe this suggests a counter-product? An offline, all data is local, product opportunity. Who will build it?
- mfer 7y ago
  > But if people choose these products because the convenience is worth it in their estimation, revealed preferences and all that. "is worth it" requires people to be fully aware of what's going on. I've described what some of these devices are doing based on product announcements, patents, investigative news stories, and that sort of thing. I've had numerous people tell me that I'm wrong. That they don't believe companies are doing this. This has caused me to come to the conclusion that people aren't aware of the trade-offs or what is going on. That lack of understanding concerns me.
  - orteam 7y ago
    Seems a bit patronizing. People can actually make a conscious decision to prefer convenience over surrender of some privacy. Some people don't put shades or curtains on their windows.
    - jjoonathan 7y ago
      Sure, but people generally understand how window shades work, whereas people generally don't understand how the surveillance economy works. That would be a patronizing assumption inside HN, but outside HN it's a reality that I regularly observe.

mindgam3 7y ago

> So the devices aren’t the center of the system, you are. That’s our vision for ambient computing. The vision is correct but the naming is off. Something like “embodied computing” would convey the key difference better than “ambient”, namely that the user is at the center. And yes this is a fancypants way of saying wearables. But this is a nice attempt from google to paint the future as an extension of something it is good at (managing lots of ambient cloud-like things) while downplaying that what we’re really talking about is wearables (not really a strong suit for Big G).

v7p1Qbt1im 7y ago
I wouldn‘t say wearables. More like device-agnostic. You are giving commands to a system. That system might literally be your surroundings in the future. Wearables, like contact lenses, might be a part of it. But so could sensors in a road or a smart window you walk past.

Santosh83 7y ago

> Our users tell us they find the Google Assistant to be smart, user-friendly, and reliable, and that’s so important for ambient technology. Interactions need to feel natural and intuitive. Here’s an example: if you want to listen to music, the experience should be the same whether you are in the kitchen, you are driving in your car, or hanging out with friends. No matter what you are doing, you should be able to just say the name of the song and the music just plays without you having to pull out a phone and tap on screens or push buttons. This may be an unpopular sentiment, but at least for me, I find a certain indefinable pleasure in manual tasks, to a certain extent. Slipping a CD into a player or a cassette into a deck or having to browse through a shelf to find the book I want. I don't think people will realise the "ambience" of these minor things we do hundreds of times a day almost unconsciously until practically everything becomes voice/thought activated and almost anything you want is delivered right to where you are. I believe that there is a certain happy medium between entirely manual and being too automated. Obviously this will be different for different tasks but we must keep in mind that the aim of corporations will always be to make them fully automated because that way they and their services become indispensable for the world. Our aim should be to try to tread the happy medium where automation makes significant difference but does not turn us into instantly-gratified, grown-up children.

blackflame 7y ago
There will always be a market for one man to foster another man's laziness. Edit: Not sure how this is even debatable down-voters?
SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
You raise a valid concern, but I think there's a stable equilibrium here. It seems to me that the current goals of ambient computing pretty much match the canonical utopian scifi vision; you can order the computer to look up information or play/display whatever media you want, but there are no little robots bringing coffee to your armchair. I don't think we risk automating so much that people (or, well, wealthy people at least) never have to stand up.
jwhitlark 7y ago
I wonder if this feeling plays into the comfort of noun-verb over verb-noun that is being discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21271212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21271212

tdonia 7y ago

as someone who switched to an iphone yesterday after having using google flagship models since the nexus one, i agree that this is an important direction for google's product strategy, but i think they're playing catch up from far behind. i remarked to my wife last night that the biggest difference in the ux between the two was that my android was always a phone, and this iphone has become a platform/ux that's larger than a single device, a whole set of humanistic little devices -- airpods and the home ipad in my case. i'd always thought i couldn't switch because i use google services, but those are largely commodities now -- i've got a wide range of good enough options for photos/music/email/cal/etc. -- the google android apps are a little better, but not enough so to make a difference. even siri has been good enough so far, though my queries aren't especially complicated.

mav3rick 7y ago
Assistant is so far ahead.
- Lio 7y ago
  That might very well be true that Google Assistant is better but there’s a certain class of user, like me, that finds voice interfaces obnoxious. The first thing I do with a new phone is turn Siri off because I don’t want to use my phone that way. So it doesn’t matter to me which is better or which is worse. However privacy is important to me so I use that as a driver of purchases.
- dawg- 7y ago
  If Assistant is that far ahead, then it's really funny because assistant is very disappointing. These companies are pushing voice onto the general public before it is ready to be actually useful. I got a free google home with something and half the time I try to use it I end up closing the conversation with something like "hey google you are completely useless". When it comes to voice recognition and language modeling we are still rubbing sticks together to make fire. But Google and Amazon are marketing their voice products like it's a zippo lighter. They really have a chicken and the egg problem. They need more data input to train their AI and make the service better, but they need the service to be better before more people will adopt it and feed data to train the AI.

magwa101 7y ago

Overly self important self promoter...

Kiro 7y ago

People really hate Google here. Look at this thread and the other about Soli. Not a single positive comment about Google. No wonder Google engineers have stopped posting on HN. Maybe Google truly is evil but I fail to see it personally.

mav3rick 7y ago
This is so true. Half of these are people openly claiming they hate it because they couldn't get in.
m463 7y ago
It's a symptom of an underlying problem. - companies used to respect us. - computers used to belong to us. The equation changed when companies found a way to charge advertisers big money by inverting these equations. Google is just the poster child for all this, but there are lots of other players that have cashed in.
- mav3rick 7y ago
  You are free to not use their services. People acting offended for using free services. Before you say "free" is not free, well no one pays for most web services. So this is an inherent human problem not one these companies created.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
    Well. How does Wikipedia survive? Or Archive.org? Or Open Streetmap? Maybe the people/haters don't even care so much about advertisements in general, but the sheer mass of them, which degrades the usability, and maybe some of the services aren't that good anymore in general, while having been better before? I remember the days i happily used Altavista Search instead of the Yahoo. Because Yahoo was spammed to death, while Altavista at the time wasn't. It feels the same with Duck Duck Go vs. Google since at least 5 years now? I don't really care how it is financed in the background, i care about how much hassle it is to find something, or even being able to find it at all. Google fails there massively for me, and i wonder why that is? Maybe because it is Anglocentric? Or even US-centric? But then the same should apply to Duck Duck Go, which isn't the case, because it works fine for me. I know it's using inferior indices, but it doesn't matter when the better ones are so overblown that i fail to find the needle in the impossibly large haystack. I'm even using other search engines before i fall back to Google, in case of not finding something. Google has gone from something good to last ditch only for me. That was for general search. Now to the maps. With the exception of satellite/air-imagery it leaves much to be desired, and that is the labeling of places. Which fails worldwide. That algorithm is just crap on higer zoom levels. At first i thought it would be because of my location, some country far away over the Atlantic in old Europe, but it's not. I recognized that while reading something about the history of building railroads trough the Rocky Mountains, and the Googlemaps made no sense at all, because it either omits small places altogether, or puts the labels where they absolutely don't belong. Bingmaps meanwhile were a joy to use, everything was there, at the right places, and it ran even faster! LOL? Then there is this thing with business listings and reviews in the map which is useless in my locations. I don't read them anymore, because any i have read were wrong, or did otherwise not meaningfully apply. I don't know why that is, is it just vandalism from random people, coercion of services like Yelp, or whatver? I don't care anymore, because USELESS! Then general accuracy about what is where, and how to get there in my favored modes of transport. In my locations Open Streetmaps wins. EVERY TIME! (I know that is not applicable in general, because coverage/accuracy thereof varies regionally) What else? Hm. Youtube. What can i say? Expect to get dirty if walking into a market for stupid pigs. Though it has not only some rare, but many pearls. Just difficult to find them in all that stinking shit. Apart from that, what are they thinking if i'm listening to some ambient psychill/progressive psytrance mix which goes about 1 to 2 hours and they are interupting that with at least 4 adverts per hour for stuff which is totally unrelated and i have no interest in? Who thinks of something like that? Are they on crack? Is there anything i like about Google? Yeah, i like EARTH. Glorious! My digital globe. Great. But i don't need that, it's more of a toy for me. So, emperors new clothes for all the gaslighted androids, anyone? :-)

empath75 7y ago

They used to call this "Ubiquitous Computing" https://www.wired.com/1994/02/parc/ https://www.wired.com/1994/02/parc/

dheelus 7y ago

Google hired away Oracle's President, not VP.

jeiro0 7y ago

Stratechery is a rag. What’s striking about the list of 7 announced shipments, they write, is 2 of them won’t ship until next year! Oh man terrible numbers. Further complaining about boredom with Google. Shock and awe we’re a bit meh at splashy tech events, that’s been the sentiment going around for a while. Above all, the article lauds their vision even though they’re annoyed at 2 releases being off in the future and how meh the actual outcomes are. So which is it, Stratechery? Are they nailing it with vision and failing with execution? Confused by this entire write up except as blog spam.

scarejunba 7y ago

> The first thing that is striking about this list is how many of the announcements won’t ship for quite some time. Literally everything there ships in a month, dude.

ToFab123 7y ago

They are not really being helpful to me, when organizing the worlds information means, that all search results on page 1 are paid advertising.