3 ms·

Tbh, I would expect Google to have enough money to do both [develop new OS] and [maintain/improve existing products].

cmrdporcupine 5y ago
Plenty of money, but not enough discipline and focus to make that happen. After years in this industry and seeing so many things like this just fail, my perspective is that the "right" way to do it (rewrites/replatforms) is build shared components and have teams that deploy to both and so live in both worlds. This way the old gets the new, and the new has to live and breathe the reasons for the compromises that the old lived through the first time. And you don't end up with a "legacy" team and a "future" team. Example: I tried (a bit half-heartedly and I was low-status so nobody cared) to pitch that we write a new screenreader for Home Hub rather than brutally kludging in the one from ChromeOS. A new screenreader that could be shared with Fuchsia, as they were writing one from scratch. If building from scratch why not build one as a component that can be shared? That approach was seen as a total non-starter by the people I talked to. Fuchsia got to write their shiny new thing basically in isolation and barely interacted with us poor folk who had to keep maintaining the actual-existing screenreader deployed on several million devices in people's homes. Mainly fell to my friend/coworker who was a hero. BTW we both quit the same day.
- codeofdusk 5y ago
  As a totally blind Home Hub user who finds Chrome Vox completely unsuitable for the platform, I'm saddened (though not surprised) that a Fuchsia screen reader never could see the light of day.
  - surajrmal 5y ago
    I believe Fuchsia does have its own native screen reader. I have no idea if it's used on the home hub, but I would hazard a guess that it is. https://cs.opensource.google/fuchsia/fuchsia/+/main:src/ui/a11y/lib/screen_reader/screen_reader.h https://cs.opensource.google/fuchsia/fuchsia/+/main:src/ui/a...
- mwcampbell 5y ago
  If sharing this won't get you in trouble, I'm curious about why you believed that the ChromeVox screen reader wasn't a good fit for Home Hub. Was the Home Hub UI not HTML-based? Or did you see some design flaw in ChromeVox (which, if I'm not mistaken, is open-source so you should have no problem going into detail on that)? Feel free to email me privately if you prefer. Thanks.
  - codeofdusk 5y ago
    From the user perspective, Chrome Vox on Home Hub feels... bolted on. It uses the assistant TTS, probably over the network, so lag is extreme (a thing you don't want in your primary interface to a device), and random portions of the UI don't reliably read.
staticassertion 5y ago
They already do this - ChromeOS has been a thing for years.

Plenty of money, but not enough discipline and focus to make that happen. After years in this industry and seeing so many things like this just fail, my perspective is that the "right" way to do it (rewrites/replatforms) is build shared components and have teams that deploy to both and so live in both worlds. This way the old gets the new, and the new has to live and breathe the reasons for the compromises that the old lived through the first time. And you don't end up with a "legacy" team and a "future" team. Example: I tried (a bit half-heartedly and I was low-status so nobody cared) to pitch that we write a new screenreader for Home Hub rather than brutally kludging in the one from ChromeOS. A new screenreader that could be shared with Fuchsia, as they were writing one from scratch. If building from scratch why not build one as a component that can be shared? That approach was seen as a total non-starter by the people I talked to. Fuchsia got to write their shiny new thing basically in isolation and barely interacted with us poor folk who had to keep maintaining the actual-existing screenreader deployed on several million devices in people's homes. Mainly fell to my friend/coworker who was a hero. BTW we both quit the same day.

codeofdusk 5y ago
As a totally blind Home Hub user who finds Chrome Vox completely unsuitable for the platform, I'm saddened (though not surprised) that a Fuchsia screen reader never could see the light of day.
- surajrmal 5y ago
  I believe Fuchsia does have its own native screen reader. I have no idea if it's used on the home hub, but I would hazard a guess that it is. https://cs.opensource.google/fuchsia/fuchsia/+/main:src/ui/a11y/lib/screen_reader/screen_reader.h https://cs.opensource.google/fuchsia/fuchsia/+/main:src/ui/a...
mwcampbell 5y ago
If sharing this won't get you in trouble, I'm curious about why you believed that the ChromeVox screen reader wasn't a good fit for Home Hub. Was the Home Hub UI not HTML-based? Or did you see some design flaw in ChromeVox (which, if I'm not mistaken, is open-source so you should have no problem going into detail on that)? Feel free to email me privately if you prefer. Thanks.
- codeofdusk 5y ago
  From the user perspective, Chrome Vox on Home Hub feels... bolted on. It uses the assistant TTS, probably over the network, so lag is extreme (a thing you don't want in your primary interface to a device), and random portions of the UI don't reliably read.

staticassertion 5y ago

They already do this - ChromeOS has been a thing for years.