7 ms·

Ah, Fuchsia... another of Google's solutions looking for a problem. I remember hearing about it and immediately asking "what is the market for this?" and not b

by cletus 6y ago

Ah, Fuchsia... another of Google's solutions looking for a problem. I remember hearing about it and immediately asking "what is the market for this?" and not being satisfied with the answer. On the one side you have Samsung, who are unhappy enough with their dependence on Google that they'll not likely eat the cost of moving from Android to something else that has no strategic benefit to them (as far as I could tell, anyway). So what does that leave? Google making its own devices. I don't know this to be the case but I strongly suspect the intent was for the Pixel line was (and may still be?) intended to be the spark for Google being a vertically integrated first-party seller of mobile devices. What I mean is these aren't just proof-of-concept or developer devices. The problem there is by doing that they'll hurt their relationships with Android OEMs and it'd take a long time to fill that void, if that's even possible. So where else? The obvious answer is... Chromecast. This is a hardware product Google has had a good amount of success with. It's already first-party. A recently leaked report [1] seems to indicate that the next Chromecast will be Android TV. That is (IMHO) bad news for Fuchsia. You have to also take into account that during the time Fuchsia has been around (which must be 4+ years by now?) there's been a change at the top with Sundar replacing Larry. That's always a dangerous time for high-profile and high-cost (literally $billions) projects with no customers. Sundar came from Chrome. Fuchsia didn't. You have to ask questions about who was the original (SVP+) cheerleader who got it off the ground and funded it? Was larry on board? Is Sundar/ Does that sponsor enjoy the same support under Sundar that they did under Larry? I don't know the answer to these questions, just that they matter. marissa Mayer's departure from Google was largely a product of a change at the top as she enjoyed Eric's favour but all signs pointed to Larry not being as big as a fan. Fuchsia probably should've been called Graphene. Graphene can do everything but leave the lab, after all. [1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/googles-leaked-tv-dongle-looks-like-a-merger-of-android-tv-and-chromecast/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/googles-leaked-tv-do...

deathgrips 6y ago
The market is enforcing DRM at the operating system level. Look it up in the documentation, search "DRM".
- m4rtink 6y ago
  Yeah, all those banking apps, streaming clients and even games that require locked boot loader and a singned image are basically another wave of thrusted computing. Totally disgusting.
lima 6y ago
> Sundar came from Chrome. Fuchsia didn't. Fuchsia appears to be really close to Chrome/Chrome OS - they even share the build system and many components.
- esprehn 6y ago
  More than close, it's directly derived from it and shares many of the same engineers and leaders. Early versions were literally forked chrome code.
adrianmonk 6y ago
I don't know if this is Google's intention, but I could certainly see Fuchsia being used for IoT devices. IoT devices have a big problem with software updates. The people who make them are primarily interested in selling hardware, not supporting it for the many years it will probably be in your home. (You might replace a smartphone every two years, but how often do you replace a light switch or thermostat?) Google says Fuchsia is built to be easy to update. Different components are able to be upgraded independently. There is a stable binary API for drivers. Imagine a world where IoT devices are built to some Fuchsia-based standard which allows them to continue to be updated even when the manufacturer inevitably abandons the devices and their users. You could get more out of the devices, and you could worry less about security. It wouldn't solve 100% of the problem, though, because there would always be some device-specific code, including device drivers and any software that enables unique capabilities of the device.
- beckler 6y ago
  I don't see that... yet. It sounds like Fuschia doesn't support ARM at the moment, and that would be a crucial first step.
  - monocasa 6y ago
    Not publicly, but there's a suspicious amount of arm support up and down the stack. Like aarch64-fuchsia target in upstreamed stable Rust.
  - tbodt 6y ago
    *Fuchsia
- atombender 6y ago
  Apparently Google is already running Fuchsia (or at least Zircon) internally on several smart home devices, such as the Home Hub. Here [1] is an article from last year, still relevant. [1] https://9to5google.com/2019/02/08/fuchsia-friday-home-hub-max/ https://9to5google.com/2019/02/08/fuchsia-friday-home-hub-ma...
apozem 6y ago
Bloomberg, 2018: > One person who has spoken to Fuchsia staff described the effort simply: "It’s a senior-engineer retention project." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-19/google-team-is-said-to-plot-android-successor-draw-skepticism https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-19/google-te... Fuchsia’s greatest value is letting senior devs solve fun puzzles without the burden of shipping anything customers want.
- earthboundkid 6y ago
  Traditionally, large money-making companies liked having big, obvious loss areas, so that when the hard times come, they can just cut that and restore the illusion of growth on Wall Street. It only buys you a couple of quarters of fake growth, but for Wall Street, that's often enough.
  - tomjakubowski 6y ago
    Ah, the corporate Speed-Up Loop. https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop
  - nv-vn 6y ago
    People like to claim these things anecdotally but if you sit down for a few minutes and think about it then it doesn't really make sense. By doing something like that you'd sacrifice current growth, and since money today is worth more than money in the future cutting dead weight now would be more valuable to the shareholders (not to mention the fact that the losses accumulate each year as cash being drained from your accounts). The reality is probably that companies are making a bet on some far fetched technology, so for example Fuschia or the developers behind it could lead to something insanely profitable, but there's only a 20% chance. If you're in a good year then the investment is worthwhile because the expected value is still positive. If you're in a bad year you can't afford to wait for the investment to pan out (not to mention your risk model goes totally out of whack; if the market is doing poorly consumers won't shell out cash for this new tech) so you have to cut costs in that area.
geodel 6y ago
> On the one side you have Samsung, who are unhappy enough with their dependence on Google that they'll not likely eat the cost of moving from Android to something else... Strange argument. Maybe they will move all their devices to their own superior OS Tizen. Or maybe they tried and it did not turn out very well. So whichever side Samsung is it does not affect Google. There are many phone makers not that many phone OS makes. And with chinese manufacturers already pounding them they have no leverage on Google.
- close04 6y ago
  > Maybe they will move all their devices to their own superior OS Tizen. Or maybe they tried and it did not turn out very well. Google (via the Open Handset Alliance) managed to enforce the current status quo. Manufacturers can't simultaneously ship their own OS like forked versions of Android, or presumably Tizen, and still be allowed to use Google Play Services. It's all-Google or nothing. I don't know whether Tizen is superior or not but one could assume it isn't simply due to the lacking ecosystem. Windows Phone was a good OS. It was shot in the foot by a weak app ecosystem. > So whichever side Samsung is it does not affect Google. Samsung has 20% of the market and a lot more of the high end market. Going with "not Google" means a lot of users no longer using Google Play Store and services. It most certainly would "affect" Google.
  - CountSessine 6y ago
    Samsung has 20% of the market and a lot more of the high end market. Going with "not Google" means a lot of users no longer using Google Play Store and services. It most certainly would "affect" Google. It’s a game of chicken and one Samsung can’t win, but Google probably doesn’t want to inflict on them. Look at how well Huawei is doing outside China without google services (they’re dead in the water). Samsung doesn’t want that and can’t build an app ecosystem on their own. If Google pulls them and android and more importantly the android SDKs and dev tools toward Fuschia, I guarantee you that Samsung will follow. At the same time I think Google would be foolish to intentionally antagonize one of their most successful partners. If Samsung’s bungled reaction was to try to go it alone with Tizen or hold out upgrading their phones to a new android, it only helps Apple and iOS, and that’s the last thing google wants.
rakoo 6y ago
What was the market for Linux when it came out ? The thing was a copy of an existing OS, made by a guy in his spare time. What was the market for php when it came out ? It was just a few helpers to write web pages, simpler to use than perl that already existed at the time What was the market for go when it came out ? Yes, it did have a few modern things built-in, but there were already tons of widely deployed languages. And yet here we are. I don't need to tell you how successful each of those is today. I don't mean to say that Fuchsia will definitely be useful or deployed in any large fashion; just that "there is no market" is not a valid counterpoint to the development of a new project.
- khazhoux 6y ago
  > What was the market for Linux when it came out ? The thing was a copy of an existing OS, made by a guy in his spare time. > What was the market for php when it came out ? It was just a few helpers to write web pages, simpler to use than perl that already existed at the time The markets were clearly there (and huge!) for a free Unix-like OS and for a better replacement for CGI scripts. The fact that some people didn't see the potential for Linux or PHP, is wholly separate from their market opportunities. The question here remains: where is the market today for a new micro-kernel OS? The likely answer would have to be device-makers... but which ones can actually benefit from Fushcia?
nemothekid 6y ago
Everything out of PARC in the 70s were solutions looking for a problem. Fuchsia, in my mind, has always been a research project. I find it weird all your counter examples were all consumer facing, when Google is trying to grow an enterprise cloud business and we are seeing a push for ARM in the cloud. Fuchsia could have datacenter impacts for Google internally.
nmfisher 6y ago
I've always seen Fuchsia as the backup plan if Google loses the Oracle-Android lawsuit.

by cletus 6y ago

deathgrips 6y ago

The market is enforcing DRM at the operating system level. Look it up in the documentation, search "DRM".

m4rtink 6y ago
Yeah, all those banking apps, streaming clients and even games that require locked boot loader and a singned image are basically another wave of thrusted computing. Totally disgusting.

lima 6y ago

> Sundar came from Chrome. Fuchsia didn't. Fuchsia appears to be really close to Chrome/Chrome OS - they even share the build system and many components.

esprehn 6y ago
More than close, it's directly derived from it and shares many of the same engineers and leaders. Early versions were literally forked chrome code.

adrianmonk 6y ago

I don't know if this is Google's intention, but I could certainly see Fuchsia being used for IoT devices. IoT devices have a big problem with software updates. The people who make them are primarily interested in selling hardware, not supporting it for the many years it will probably be in your home. (You might replace a smartphone every two years, but how often do you replace a light switch or thermostat?) Google says Fuchsia is built to be easy to update. Different components are able to be upgraded independently. There is a stable binary API for drivers. Imagine a world where IoT devices are built to some Fuchsia-based standard which allows them to continue to be updated even when the manufacturer inevitably abandons the devices and their users. You could get more out of the devices, and you could worry less about security. It wouldn't solve 100% of the problem, though, because there would always be some device-specific code, including device drivers and any software that enables unique capabilities of the device.

beckler 6y ago
I don't see that... yet. It sounds like Fuschia doesn't support ARM at the moment, and that would be a crucial first step.
- monocasa 6y ago
  Not publicly, but there's a suspicious amount of arm support up and down the stack. Like aarch64-fuchsia target in upstreamed stable Rust.
- tbodt 6y ago
  *Fuchsia
atombender 6y ago
Apparently Google is already running Fuchsia (or at least Zircon) internally on several smart home devices, such as the Home Hub. Here [1] is an article from last year, still relevant. [1] https://9to5google.com/2019/02/08/fuchsia-friday-home-hub-max/ https://9to5google.com/2019/02/08/fuchsia-friday-home-hub-ma...

apozem 6y ago

Bloomberg, 2018: > One person who has spoken to Fuchsia staff described the effort simply: "It’s a senior-engineer retention project." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-19/google-team-is-said-to-plot-android-successor-draw-skepticism https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-19/google-te... Fuchsia’s greatest value is letting senior devs solve fun puzzles without the burden of shipping anything customers want.

earthboundkid 6y ago
Traditionally, large money-making companies liked having big, obvious loss areas, so that when the hard times come, they can just cut that and restore the illusion of growth on Wall Street. It only buys you a couple of quarters of fake growth, but for Wall Street, that's often enough.
- tomjakubowski 6y ago
  Ah, the corporate Speed-Up Loop. https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop
- nv-vn 6y ago
  People like to claim these things anecdotally but if you sit down for a few minutes and think about it then it doesn't really make sense. By doing something like that you'd sacrifice current growth, and since money today is worth more than money in the future cutting dead weight now would be more valuable to the shareholders (not to mention the fact that the losses accumulate each year as cash being drained from your accounts). The reality is probably that companies are making a bet on some far fetched technology, so for example Fuschia or the developers behind it could lead to something insanely profitable, but there's only a 20% chance. If you're in a good year then the investment is worthwhile because the expected value is still positive. If you're in a bad year you can't afford to wait for the investment to pan out (not to mention your risk model goes totally out of whack; if the market is doing poorly consumers won't shell out cash for this new tech) so you have to cut costs in that area.

geodel 6y ago

> On the one side you have Samsung, who are unhappy enough with their dependence on Google that they'll not likely eat the cost of moving from Android to something else... Strange argument. Maybe they will move all their devices to their own superior OS Tizen. Or maybe they tried and it did not turn out very well. So whichever side Samsung is it does not affect Google. There are many phone makers not that many phone OS makes. And with chinese manufacturers already pounding them they have no leverage on Google.

close04 6y ago
> Maybe they will move all their devices to their own superior OS Tizen. Or maybe they tried and it did not turn out very well. Google (via the Open Handset Alliance) managed to enforce the current status quo. Manufacturers can't simultaneously ship their own OS like forked versions of Android, or presumably Tizen, and still be allowed to use Google Play Services. It's all-Google or nothing. I don't know whether Tizen is superior or not but one could assume it isn't simply due to the lacking ecosystem. Windows Phone was a good OS. It was shot in the foot by a weak app ecosystem. > So whichever side Samsung is it does not affect Google. Samsung has 20% of the market and a lot more of the high end market. Going with "not Google" means a lot of users no longer using Google Play Store and services. It most certainly would "affect" Google.
- CountSessine 6y ago
  Samsung has 20% of the market and a lot more of the high end market. Going with "not Google" means a lot of users no longer using Google Play Store and services. It most certainly would "affect" Google. It’s a game of chicken and one Samsung can’t win, but Google probably doesn’t want to inflict on them. Look at how well Huawei is doing outside China without google services (they’re dead in the water). Samsung doesn’t want that and can’t build an app ecosystem on their own. If Google pulls them and android and more importantly the android SDKs and dev tools toward Fuschia, I guarantee you that Samsung will follow. At the same time I think Google would be foolish to intentionally antagonize one of their most successful partners. If Samsung’s bungled reaction was to try to go it alone with Tizen or hold out upgrading their phones to a new android, it only helps Apple and iOS, and that’s the last thing google wants.

rakoo 6y ago

What was the market for Linux when it came out ? The thing was a copy of an existing OS, made by a guy in his spare time. What was the market for php when it came out ? It was just a few helpers to write web pages, simpler to use than perl that already existed at the time What was the market for go when it came out ? Yes, it did have a few modern things built-in, but there were already tons of widely deployed languages. And yet here we are. I don't need to tell you how successful each of those is today. I don't mean to say that Fuchsia will definitely be useful or deployed in any large fashion; just that "there is no market" is not a valid counterpoint to the development of a new project.

khazhoux 6y ago
> What was the market for Linux when it came out ? The thing was a copy of an existing OS, made by a guy in his spare time. > What was the market for php when it came out ? It was just a few helpers to write web pages, simpler to use than perl that already existed at the time The markets were clearly there (and huge!) for a free Unix-like OS and for a better replacement for CGI scripts. The fact that some people didn't see the potential for Linux or PHP, is wholly separate from their market opportunities. The question here remains: where is the market today for a new micro-kernel OS? The likely answer would have to be device-makers... but which ones can actually benefit from Fushcia?

nemothekid 6y ago

Everything out of PARC in the 70s were solutions looking for a problem. Fuchsia, in my mind, has always been a research project. I find it weird all your counter examples were all consumer facing, when Google is trying to grow an enterprise cloud business and we are seeing a push for ARM in the cloud. Fuchsia could have datacenter impacts for Google internally.

nmfisher 6y ago

I've always seen Fuchsia as the backup plan if Google loses the Oracle-Android lawsuit.