5 ms·

I wonder if Google needs a new CEO and a serious shakeup. Other than Cloud, though Google innovates, we just haven't seen any huge things come from Google since

I wonder if Google needs a new CEO and a serious shakeup. Other than Cloud, though Google innovates, we just haven't seen any huge things come from Google since around 2010. Stadia - If they're serious about this they should pay 10B for Valve and make it so anyone can play any computer game available on Steam via Stadia. Daydream - Bring it back and make it work Android - Feels like it's stagnating. They need to think of some groundbreaking features at this point WearOS - Feels dead already

silisili 5y ago
> If they're serious about this they should pay 10B for Valve and make it so anyone can play any computer game available on Steam via Stadia. Won't work. Geforce Now essentially tried this, and many publishers/gamedevs threw a big fit and threatened legal action. Unfortunately, GFN caved and removed the games.
saltminer 5y ago
> we just haven't seen any huge things come from Google since around 2010 Google Photos has been a runaway success. https://www.fastcompany.com/90380618/how-google-photos-joined-the-billion-user-club https://www.fastcompany.com/90380618/how-google-photos-joine...
ivanmontillam 5y ago
Whilst I can agree everyone has a price, Valve is bootstrapped for a reason. Not necessarily you can buy out anyone by the sheer power of money. Buy out Valve and you'll destroy its creative freedom that got them there in the first place.
- eropple 5y ago
  > Buy out Valve and you'll destroy its creative freedom that got them there in the first place. I don't think an acquisition by Google would have anything to do with Valve's "creative freedom"--the evidence of which has been pretty scant for the last decade or so. ;) More for the storefront and the platform. (I absolutely do not want this to happen, obviously.)
  - andrewl-hn 5y ago
    No one wants that to happen, and I think Valve's asking price would be in hundreds of millions of dollars - given the recent Activision price tag.
    - neon_electro 5y ago
      It's amazing to say it - you meant "billions", not "millions". :D Prices are astronomical!
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - jwin742 5y ago
      Valve is certainly a multi-billion dollar acquisition simply from owning steam the largest marketplace for PC(and mac and linux) gaming.
mdoms 5y ago
> Stadia - If they're serious about this they should pay 10B for Valve and make it so anyone can play any computer game available on Steam via Stadia. Valve does not own the rights to every video game on Steam.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  A hypothetical Google-Valve doesn't need to necessarily own all of the rights to every game in order to allow people to play the game via Stadia.
  - spiderice 5y ago
    How do you figure? Netflix can't show movies they don't have the right to. Why would streaming Video Games be any different?
    - endisneigh 5y ago
      There’s precedent either way: Publishers abandoned GeForce now for reasons around licensing, but Apple made digital asset usage mainstream with the original iPod. More recently Google allows you to upload and read your own books on play books and your own music to YouTube music. Game publishers would bicker for sure, but there’s no reason Google couldn’t argue that you’re purchasing a cloud hard drive and it’s mounted to the closest compute aka stadia It really could go either way.
    - packetlost 5y ago
      Because the user has to own rights to use the content. Stadia is selling hardware, not the games itself in this hypothetical scenario. Also, see GeForce Now.
jeffbee 5y ago
Be serious. Everything ML/AI at Google post-dates 2010, including 4 generations of TPUs. You have made the common mistake of believing that Google's products are the things in the hamburger menu, but Google's actual product is dirt-cheap computing.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  Even by this definition Google isn't the cheapest nor the most available in that time period. Even you're claiming Google's actual product is dirt cheap computing then they're failing by price, market capture percentage and breadth of offerings.
- dekhn 5y ago
  No. Early google had several machine learning systems including Phil, RePhil, SERI, SmartAss (which made google many billions before 2010), and Sibyl all of which predate 2010. Rephil: https://www.quora.com/How-does-Googles-topic-model-Rephil-work https://www.quora.com/How-does-Googles-topic-model-Rephil-wo... and 26.5.4 Case study: Google’s Rephil 928 from Kevin Murphy's ML book. Rephil was critical for google when they needed to cluster topics and it was used for a wide range of other things. Smartass: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/pubs/archive/41159.pdf http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co... Smartass is really weird if you come from the "batch training of deep networks" world, because it's online, and visits the dataset once, in temporal order. But. it's as ML as it gets; it was just turning joined clicks (between search queries and ad impressions) into weights for pCTR. Sibyl was Google's secret sauce before tensorflow started in 2007, it implemented parallel boosting using mapreduce as a worker engine to do linear and logistic regression and was used to train the models for youtube watch next and play store (both of which produced enormous revenue at a time when people had no idea that youtube and android were gold mines) but predated those uses by at least 5 years. It was one of the oddest systems I've ever worked on and you can see some of the ideas it innovated in TFX today. There's also SETI which IIRC even predated Sibyl, and you still can see vestiges of its functionality when doing archeological work on the google codebase. I worked on systems related to smartass, worked on sibyl, and later tensorflow/TPU hardware/software. I met a number of long-time engineers and asked them deep questions about ML use at Google predating tensorflow and gained a deep understanding (and even then, I've left out many details about systems I'm not aware of). Before tensorflow there wasn't much use of GPUs or TPUs, for several reasons but once Vincent Vanhouke stuffed a few GPUs in his workstation and showed fast training to Jeff Dean, that changed quickly.
andrewl-hn 5y ago
At this point even their Cloud Platform is very hard to recommend for projects. Sure it seems to be doing really well, but who knows: what if the "launch the product - kill the product" disease spreads into Google's Cloud division?

silisili 5y ago

> If they're serious about this they should pay 10B for Valve and make it so anyone can play any computer game available on Steam via Stadia. Won't work. Geforce Now essentially tried this, and many publishers/gamedevs threw a big fit and threatened legal action. Unfortunately, GFN caved and removed the games.

saltminer 5y ago

> we just haven't seen any huge things come from Google since around 2010 Google Photos has been a runaway success. https://www.fastcompany.com/90380618/how-google-photos-joined-the-billion-user-club https://www.fastcompany.com/90380618/how-google-photos-joine...

ivanmontillam 5y ago

Whilst I can agree everyone has a price, Valve is bootstrapped for a reason. Not necessarily you can buy out anyone by the sheer power of money. Buy out Valve and you'll destroy its creative freedom that got them there in the first place.

eropple 5y ago
> Buy out Valve and you'll destroy its creative freedom that got them there in the first place. I don't think an acquisition by Google would have anything to do with Valve's "creative freedom"--the evidence of which has been pretty scant for the last decade or so. ;) More for the storefront and the platform. (I absolutely do not want this to happen, obviously.)
- andrewl-hn 5y ago
  No one wants that to happen, and I think Valve's asking price would be in hundreds of millions of dollars - given the recent Activision price tag.
  - neon_electro 5y ago
    It's amazing to say it - you meant "billions", not "millions". :D Prices are astronomical!
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - jwin742 5y ago
    Valve is certainly a multi-billion dollar acquisition simply from owning steam the largest marketplace for PC(and mac and linux) gaming.

mdoms 5y ago

> Stadia - If they're serious about this they should pay 10B for Valve and make it so anyone can play any computer game available on Steam via Stadia. Valve does not own the rights to every video game on Steam.

endisneigh 5y ago
A hypothetical Google-Valve doesn't need to necessarily own all of the rights to every game in order to allow people to play the game via Stadia.
- spiderice 5y ago
  How do you figure? Netflix can't show movies they don't have the right to. Why would streaming Video Games be any different?
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    There’s precedent either way: Publishers abandoned GeForce now for reasons around licensing, but Apple made digital asset usage mainstream with the original iPod. More recently Google allows you to upload and read your own books on play books and your own music to YouTube music. Game publishers would bicker for sure, but there’s no reason Google couldn’t argue that you’re purchasing a cloud hard drive and it’s mounted to the closest compute aka stadia It really could go either way.
  - packetlost 5y ago
    Because the user has to own rights to use the content. Stadia is selling hardware, not the games itself in this hypothetical scenario. Also, see GeForce Now.

jeffbee 5y ago

Be serious. Everything ML/AI at Google post-dates 2010, including 4 generations of TPUs. You have made the common mistake of believing that Google's products are the things in the hamburger menu, but Google's actual product is dirt-cheap computing.

endisneigh 5y ago
Even by this definition Google isn't the cheapest nor the most available in that time period. Even you're claiming Google's actual product is dirt cheap computing then they're failing by price, market capture percentage and breadth of offerings.
dekhn 5y ago
No. Early google had several machine learning systems including Phil, RePhil, SERI, SmartAss (which made google many billions before 2010), and Sibyl all of which predate 2010. Rephil: https://www.quora.com/How-does-Googles-topic-model-Rephil-work https://www.quora.com/How-does-Googles-topic-model-Rephil-wo... and 26.5.4 Case study: Google’s Rephil 928 from Kevin Murphy's ML book. Rephil was critical for google when they needed to cluster topics and it was used for a wide range of other things. Smartass: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/pubs/archive/41159.pdf http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co... Smartass is really weird if you come from the "batch training of deep networks" world, because it's online, and visits the dataset once, in temporal order. But. it's as ML as it gets; it was just turning joined clicks (between search queries and ad impressions) into weights for pCTR. Sibyl was Google's secret sauce before tensorflow started in 2007, it implemented parallel boosting using mapreduce as a worker engine to do linear and logistic regression and was used to train the models for youtube watch next and play store (both of which produced enormous revenue at a time when people had no idea that youtube and android were gold mines) but predated those uses by at least 5 years. It was one of the oddest systems I've ever worked on and you can see some of the ideas it innovated in TFX today. There's also SETI which IIRC even predated Sibyl, and you still can see vestiges of its functionality when doing archeological work on the google codebase. I worked on systems related to smartass, worked on sibyl, and later tensorflow/TPU hardware/software. I met a number of long-time engineers and asked them deep questions about ML use at Google predating tensorflow and gained a deep understanding (and even then, I've left out many details about systems I'm not aware of). Before tensorflow there wasn't much use of GPUs or TPUs, for several reasons but once Vincent Vanhouke stuffed a few GPUs in his workstation and showed fast training to Jeff Dean, that changed quickly.

andrewl-hn 5y ago

At this point even their Cloud Platform is very hard to recommend for projects. Sure it seems to be doing really well, but who knows: what if the "launch the product - kill the product" disease spreads into Google's Cloud division?