4 ms·

It's odd to me that they wanted to make a whole new "app" for this, rather than building in some sort of timeline into slides. Powerpoint supports automatically

It's odd to me that they wanted to make a whole new "app" for this, rather than building in some sort of timeline into slides. Powerpoint supports automatically transitioning slides and auto playing video, so with some fancy magic in the export where they slice the video for each slide, you could even do everything in a "compatible" way. Slides would of course be able to keep the video on top of the slides + transitions, playing at all times. Though to be fair, this could just be slides' codebase, with some extra UI changes on top of it. Just feels like an odd way to brand it though, especially with the market penetration + built up institutional knowledge of slides' UI.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Seb-C 3y ago
Someone probably wanted a promotion, or to use the latest shiny framework rather than an existing codebase.
- vkou 3y ago
  You'd absolutely get a promotion for building a significant new feature into an existing application. It can also a lot harder to do than greenfield development.
  - surge 3y ago
    Not at Google, they skew towards new projects for performance reviews. Not improving or maintaining existing projects. Which is why they have 3 different versions of hangouts/Meet, play music being replaced by YT Music which does the same thing and is slowly building back in the same functionality, and a lot of abandonware and stagnated core products like search/gmail/slides, etc. There was a great blog on here where an (ex maybe) Google engineer first pointed out this problem and a good reason why he left since he realized this too late and all his time making huge performance improvements in existing products meant nothing come review time and all his colleagues got promoted. Since then it's been documented several times: https://www.warp.dev/blog/problems-with-promotion-oriented-cultures https://www.warp.dev/blog/problems-with-promotion-oriented-c... https://twitter.com/petergyang/status/1576985038511448064 https://twitter.com/petergyang/status/1576985038511448064 "Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcome" Maintaining and improving existing projects is a footgun at Google because of the way their promotion structure works. Unless they've changed something fundamental about their review process, of which I've not heard, it's still the same. This launch of a new product rather than naturally being integrated into an existing one that already fills this space and has adoption seems to prove its still the case.
- bigbossman 3y ago
  This seems like the most obvious, Googley reason why this exists
blackeyeblitzar 3y ago
I think there are a few benefits to doing creating a whole new app. First, a video editing application can become very sophisticated, especially if you want to both offer easy fast creation/editing features but also provide a spectrum where users can opt into more customization or sophistication. Cramming that user interface alongside other UI for slides or whatever will quickly become too crowded and unmanageable, for users but also the teams trying to add more functionality. The second benefit is that a new product lets you have independent flexibility on pricing or usage models. Third, you have the opportunity to perform impactful marketing around something new, as we’re seeing here. Finally, you get to define how users should use the product and incorporate it into their world. If these same features were just in Slides, people may automatically view video creation as a tool to generate content for live slide-driven presentations. But as a separate app, you have a chance to train users to view this as a daily tool that they use for all sorts of communication - both casual everyday chat-like messages and highly-polished presentations. I have no idea which of these benefits Google is intentional about, by the way - I am just speculating.
- calirepublik 3y ago
  It's a whole new project they can cancel in the future once it has enough users.
topicseed 3y ago
Probably like what happened with Google Inbox... It's a greenfield canvas to try a lot of innovations, see which ones people use, then shut down the product and add these popular features to Gmail, or in this instance, Slides.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Seb-C 3y ago

Someone probably wanted a promotion, or to use the latest shiny framework rather than an existing codebase.

vkou 3y ago
You'd absolutely get a promotion for building a significant new feature into an existing application. It can also a lot harder to do than greenfield development.
- surge 3y ago
  Not at Google, they skew towards new projects for performance reviews. Not improving or maintaining existing projects. Which is why they have 3 different versions of hangouts/Meet, play music being replaced by YT Music which does the same thing and is slowly building back in the same functionality, and a lot of abandonware and stagnated core products like search/gmail/slides, etc. There was a great blog on here where an (ex maybe) Google engineer first pointed out this problem and a good reason why he left since he realized this too late and all his time making huge performance improvements in existing products meant nothing come review time and all his colleagues got promoted. Since then it's been documented several times: https://www.warp.dev/blog/problems-with-promotion-oriented-cultures https://www.warp.dev/blog/problems-with-promotion-oriented-c... https://twitter.com/petergyang/status/1576985038511448064 https://twitter.com/petergyang/status/1576985038511448064 "Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcome" Maintaining and improving existing projects is a footgun at Google because of the way their promotion structure works. Unless they've changed something fundamental about their review process, of which I've not heard, it's still the same. This launch of a new product rather than naturally being integrated into an existing one that already fills this space and has adoption seems to prove its still the case.
bigbossman 3y ago
This seems like the most obvious, Googley reason why this exists

blackeyeblitzar 3y ago

I think there are a few benefits to doing creating a whole new app. First, a video editing application can become very sophisticated, especially if you want to both offer easy fast creation/editing features but also provide a spectrum where users can opt into more customization or sophistication. Cramming that user interface alongside other UI for slides or whatever will quickly become too crowded and unmanageable, for users but also the teams trying to add more functionality. The second benefit is that a new product lets you have independent flexibility on pricing or usage models. Third, you have the opportunity to perform impactful marketing around something new, as we’re seeing here. Finally, you get to define how users should use the product and incorporate it into their world. If these same features were just in Slides, people may automatically view video creation as a tool to generate content for live slide-driven presentations. But as a separate app, you have a chance to train users to view this as a daily tool that they use for all sorts of communication - both casual everyday chat-like messages and highly-polished presentations. I have no idea which of these benefits Google is intentional about, by the way - I am just speculating.

calirepublik 3y ago
It's a whole new project they can cancel in the future once it has enough users.

topicseed 3y ago

Probably like what happened with Google Inbox... It's a greenfield canvas to try a lot of innovations, see which ones people use, then shut down the product and add these popular features to Gmail, or in this instance, Slides.