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I mean, I thought the media was right and I work at Google. I knew the Verily site existed (a member of my team helped with a production readiness review last w
by KirinDave 7y ago
I mean, I thought the media was right and I work at Google. I knew the Verily site existed (a member of my team helped with a production readiness review last week).
So if they went and looked for Googlers who knew about the national effort and came up bank, and then didn't get immediate confirmation from Google, then they ran with a story.
Obviously I am but a small part of this massive machine and even though I am in a lot of the COVID-19 chats and have been engaged with various technical readiness efforts since we'll before US took it seriously, so maybe I missed it. But also, I wouldn't be surprised if the Executive has just recently enlisted Google to do this.
The "1700 engineers" number is super weird. That's much too high to be any one reasonably sized team, but it's definitely smaller than the impact footprint I infer at Google.
So my prediction is Trump said nonsense but the Executive decided to try and make it reality afterwards. Google as a company would definitely jump on doing this sort of thing for free.
- paulie_a 7y agoThe 1700 number is just replies then mistated in the speech. That wouldn't be the actual size of the team I bet.
- zaroth 7y agoI wouldn’t totally put it past Trump to announce it therefore forcing Google’s hand. But it also seems reasonable that someone in the Admin has a conversation with someone high up at Google and most of Google wasn’t aware of it immediately. It clearly wasn’t straight up invented out of thin air, because the 1,700 number correlates. Someone gave him that number after talking with Google. Either way... IMO, booting it into Google’s court (whether they truly volunteered or not, maybe we’ll never know) is a way more effective way to get the site done quickly than trying to get it done inside the government. I guess we’ll see what they stand up in the next week. Personally I really like the idea of “Corporate America” pulling out all the stops in every way that they can to provide COVID support. Whether it’s credit cards waiving payments and interest, tech companies donating software/services, retail stores volunteering space and workers to support outreach and testing efforts. I’d love to see a massive mobilization of the commercial sector truly bringing everything they have to bear on this challenge.