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Google’s newly formed 'Platforms and Devices' team is all about AI
- resource_waste 2y agoI basically forgot that Google made Android. Are they really making major contributions? Seems like Mobile OS are basically stagnant.
- Groxx 2y agoIt gets less and less stable with every major upgrade, if that counts. Achieving that takes effort.
- danpalmer 2y agoDo you have some basis for this that you can share? My perception is the opposite.
- Groxx 2y agoTreat yourself to multiple UI lockups, missing home buttons, stuck notifications in the middle of the screen, etc every single day if you disable animations. On a completely stock Pixel phone.
- shrimp_emoji 2y agoNah, that's just entropy. Making UIs progressively worse beyond levels you though imaginable, like Reddit or GNOME -- that's art.
- meindnoch 2y agoIt's going to be a tremendous success, I can feel it already.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- courseofaction 2y agoThe 'consumer data extractor' (hardware) team is teaming up with the 'consumer manipulator' (AI) team, and all free of any inconvenient 'dont be evil' policy. What a time to be alive!
- resource_waste 2y ago[flagged]
- __loam 2y agoGoogle execs found incapable of speaking two sentences without mentioning AI
- stagger87 2y agoIf this article was written 4 years ago the title would have been, "Google is combining …, and it's all about Blockchain"
- surfingdino 2y agoBlockchain is so 2023 for Google. Speaking of blockchain, what happened to the crypto accelerator Google launched in 2023?
- CatWChainsaw 2y agoIt's google, what do you think happened? :)
- karma_pharmer 2y agoQuantum Cyber Blockchain of Things, actually.
- user_7832 2y agoI'm not sure how I feel about this, as a user of google's services and as an owner of google's hardware (pixel 5, nest hub 2). I'm probably cautiously optimistic, seeing how high quality yet unique/quirky their hardware has been. However Tensor/Samsung fabs have had their issues, but maybe factors may have been out of the hands of those in charge?
- ur-whale 2y agoHow is a reorg at Google any kind of news ? Last I spoke to folks working there, these seem to happen every y-ending day.
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y agoA reorg at this scale? It doesn't even happen annually. A reorg of two teams of 10 people? Sure. Google is a ~180k person company.
- bsimpson 2y agoThere's also a buried lede: Hiroshi, who's been an Android lead since before it shipped, is no longer leading Android. When Jony Ive and Scott Forstall and the other big Apple execs left, that was news. Hiroshi may not have Jony's profile, but it's still a major change in how Android is governed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshi_Lockheimer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshi_Lockheimer
- xnx 2y agoEven small changes by a $2 trillion company with billions of daily users are a big deal.
- bogwog 2y agoI don't know anything involved in the process, but I hope this doesn't make it any harder for regulators to break them up when the day finally comes.
- dcgudeman 2y agoI hope ideas like "regulators break them up" never come true. I'll never understand why people crave the destruction of productive organizations. Android has been a stunning success. Valuable for consumers who enjoy the platform, profitable for the investors who bet on the platform and lucrative for the employees who work on the platform. The only people that seem to have a problem with Android are misguided ideologues who think that "big company == bad".
- bogwog 2y ago> destruction of productive organizations. I don't think your understanding of this is complete. A break up doesn't destroy anything; on the contrary, it creates value. Where once there was a single monopolist, there are now two (or three or twelve) organizations that can proceed independently of each other, and be much more focused on their core product. For example, maybe Google can keep the play store, but not Android. Android would become an independent entity, and can develop in ways that benefit all Android stakeholders instead of just Google. Maybe then Android will finally be able to focus on competing with iOS in ways that Google would never dare to (since Google's relationship with Apple is a bit sus) A breakup can also be good for investors, because illegal monopolies are inefficient. Android could potentially be much more profitable on its own than under Google's umbrella, and the play store could be more profitable if they're actually forced to compete. This can lead to innovations which increase revenue, and which never would've happened under Google.
- bearjaws 2y agoI believe I speak for everyone when I say: As long as the AI does something helpful I don't care how you structure the team. But the current generative craze with "AI generated backgrounds" is a dead end. Give me better AI autocomplete, AI image correction, AI noise cancellation...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dcgudeman 2y agoaren't they doing those things?
- lawlessone 2y ago>Give me better AI autocomplete, AI image correction, AI noise cancellation.. We have all those, some of it we've had a long time, we just didn't call it AI.
- treprinum 2y agoIt seems like Google didn't learn the lesson from Google+ and is going to do another fear-driven reorg.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- onemoresoop 2y agoGoogle cannot learn that kind of lesson, the people who were in Google+ are probably long gone from Google for greener pastures most likely. Second, google is an amorphous giant with no other goals than increase market share, no wonder their products are terrible. But still, with all this in mind, we should remember that great things go come from google, it's just that they're not capable of capitalizing on them.
- pschuegr 2y agoinsightful comment. I'd like to think that Google will integrate AI in an at least mostly useful way, but it's clear that large scale reorgs like this around chasing a competitor can and do end badly.
- afavour 2y agoYawn. Get back to me when something of actual note gets launched. Mobile OSes are now a boring, stable environment. All this noise about AI seems like an attempt to convince investors that some paradigm-shifting change is on the way. It isn't. A mildly better Google Assistant is on the way.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rickdeckard 2y agoSo the team that is in charge of the OS which is licensed to Hardware vendors in the world is the same team that's in charge to create competing Hardware? I'd say that creates a huge conflict of interest. That's one of the big reasons why Nokia Series60 didn't take off as a licensed OS: Whatever Samsung or LG or Lenovo wanted to build on that platform to differentiate, they had to involve Nokia during the development (who then developed the needed OS-feature in parallel to the Nokia product that will make use of it). Google is either very secure that their grip on all these HW-vendors is strong enough forcing them to stay, or they are no longer part of Google's long-term strategy for Android.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dheera 2y agoConflict of interest is a human invention, and not a law of the universe. There is no "conflict" unless you see it as one. You can play chess against yourself. AlphaGo can, because it wasn't brainwashed about this notion. ChatGPT can debate against itself. You can too, if you don't see it as a conflict. Humans might find it hard, only because they were brainwashed from a child that they need to pick sides. Your neural net is capable of operating on both sides simultaneously if you let it. The market is big enough for Google to create hardware AND other companies to create hardware.
- maximinus_thrax 2y ago> Conflict of interest is a human invention, and not a law of the universe. Lucky for us, we're discussing this in the context of humans building stuff for other humans to buy in a human society with human governments and markets, not in some metaphysical 'but what does meaning means' context.
- rickdeckard 2y ago> The market is big enough for Google to create hardware AND other companies to create hardware. You obviously didn't read the comment you're replying to. No one is challenging that. Having the same TEAM in charge of the OS and in-house hardware is an entirely different story. It's a conflict of interest because the person Samsung is talking to to have a feature implemented into the OS baseline may be the same person in charge of defining the competitive featureset for the next Google hardware. Now this person knows that the product he and his team is designing will compete with a yet-to-be-announced Samsung-product with a new feature. So his interest to support a licensee being successful with his product is in conflict with his interest to create a more successful competing product. And even if he isn't, for SAMSUNG just the potential of this situation to happen can be enough to NOT cooperate with this team and scale back communications with the Android team as a whole.
- Mathnerd314 2y agoI guess it makes them more like Apple, having a vertically integrated division for making phones. TFA says it might make other phone manufacturers struggle. Although I get the impression they are already struggling with the Open Handset Alliance terms from Google that they don't like. Maybe the best outcome is that AOSP gets multiple active forks supported by manufacturers, Google apps stop being distributed by default, and the phone software ecosystem gets more decentralized in general.
- lawlessone 2y agoThe other manufactures are fine I think as google still build a quality phone to house their cutting edge tech.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y agoSamsung is the dominant Android manufacturer by far.
- conradfr 2y agoWould it be realistic for app developers?
- rickdeckard 2y agoForks supported by manufacturers don't work, because they only earn money when selling hardware. So they can't each operate a huge platform maintenance team on their own. Also, the only glue that actually holds Android in place as a single platform is Google's CTS (compatibility test suite). Without it being mandated for Googles Mobile Services (GMS) and its revenue-share, Android will stop being a single platform. It will start drifting apart as soon as all vendors have to implement the next display/camera/sensor/form-factor support in the OS in parallel of each other...
- dmitrygr 2y agoIt is unsurprising to see that RickO beat Hiroshi for the title of grand poobah of devices and platforms. Hiroshi always made the impression of a very smart guy. Rick always made the impression of a good politician. Politicians always win
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoThe world needs a third party software and hardware stack that isn’t controlled by big tech walled garden monopolists / authoritarians. Not just for phones but laptops and computers too. As far as phones go, unfortunately the best alternative I’ve heard of is Graphene and the best phone for Graphene is the Pixel series. And I assume using it as a daily driver is problematic without access to various apps or maybe if websites block them or even carriers - not sure.
- bossyTeacher 2y agoThe world is reactive, never proactive
- WillAdams 2y agoThis is why my next tech purchase will be a Raspberry Pi 5 and a Wacom One 13" touch screen --- my testing with a Raspberry Pi 4 and Wacom One (gen 1, no touch) went well, so I'm hopeful that this will work as well.
- karma_pharmer 2y ago^ totally oblivious that he is trapped in the Broadcom Pi walled garden.
- WillAdams 2y agoIt would be nice to use some totally open firmware, but that's a big swing in terms of finance relative to the inexpensiveness of the rPi. That said, I believe I can live with: https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/561/is-the-bcm2835-broadcom-soc-proprietary-to-the-raspberry-pi-organization https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/561/is-the-b... https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=340024 https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=340024 If someone would make a decent tablet with opensource underpinnings and Wacom EMR, I'd be glad to consider it.
- karma_pharmer 2y ago
- rurp 2y agoI recently got a new Pixel phone and Google's much hyped new AI features just seem so... gimmicky. One of the setup examples shows how you can circle a tent on the left side of a picture and move it more to the center. Neat, I guess? It's kind of a fun toy but I'm not sure what problem this is actually solving. I'm sure there are some usecases for this out there, but it's not a capability I have ever found myself wishing for. Meanwhile the rest of the phone is surprisingly buggy and annoying. Basic functionality I use every day is worse than on any other recent phone. Google has never been a great product org, but this desperate need to be seen as one of the cool kids in AI is making things worse. Granted I think of phones/computers more as a tool than a toy and put much higher value on usability and reliability versus novelty; perhaps I'm outlier in that.
- Rinzler89 2y ago>I recently got a new Pixel phone and Google's much hyped new AI features just seem so... gimmicky Not just that, but their biggest crime is that almost none of those fancy AI features Google paraded at the Pixel launch even actually run on-device but need to be sent to their cloud for processing, despite all the gloating about their new Tensor 3 chip's AI capabilities being the most important (since that chip sucks at CPU and GPU benchmarks compared to Apple and Qualcomm). Also, their Tensor 3 can't even run Google's smallest LLM. Absolutely embarrassing. They REALLY need to unify the HW and SW development efforts to create a coherent and functional product, instead of designing them separately bazaar style then jerry rigging them together like some underfunded start-up making products for Kickstarter.
- moralestapia 2y ago>Absolutely embarrassing. So sad but this continues to be the case for Google's incursion into AI. Why do they still keep Pichar around?
- mupuff1234 2y agoAs a customer running on device is fairly low on my priorities, and I assume that's the case for at least 90% of users. Would it be nice? Sure, but I much prefer useful features now that could run on device later on if it adds value.
- Mindwipe 2y agoWhile I think Google needs a better clear vision in many cases, god help us that the people who have screwed up every hardware launch for a decade now get to run the OS too.
- exabrial 2y ago[flagged]
- ok123456 2y agoBuy a Shenzhen Android phone, then. For $300, you get a stock Android phone that has all of those things.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- coldtea 2y ago"Google is paninicking and chasing the latest buzzword" would be a more descriptive title
- beezlebroxxxxxx 2y agoAlso seems like some employees/exec has figured out the latest promotion mill.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- aerotwelve 2y ago> Under Rick Osterloh, a new platforms and devices team will be dedicated to bringing AI to your phone, your TV, and everything else that runs Android. Who is asking for this? Why can't they just make their search engine work again?
- ceejayoz 2y ago> Who is asking for this? Anyone who regularly uses Siri or "Hey, Google".
- Groxx 2y agoYou mean the thing that requires an internet connection or it doesn't work? And probably will continue needing internet for the foreseeable future, regardless of how many mobile Tensor-chips they develop, because cloud data and compute power will always be orders of magnitude better than your phone? That's the thing they need specialized mobile-hardware teams involved for?
- ceejayoz 2y ago> You mean the thing that requires an internet connection or it doesn't work? The AI? Or the phone?
- Terr_ 2y agoNah, I want them to first fix the basic shit I actually (would) use. For example, when I'm driving and a timed phone alarm goes off for the Android phone in my pocket, I ask it to silence the alarm, yet instead rebukes me by falsely claiming no alarms are active right now. It's fixed now that I checked, but for a while it would also secretly ignore the date that I already specified for a scheduled event while it was prompting me to clarify the time of day.
- badgersnake 2y agoSo nobody.
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- ConanRus 2y ago[dead]
- dpflan 2y agoThe comments here are trending towards "stop cramming 'AI' into everything". I am curious how the end-user consumer (versus 'AI' for enterprise/business) differ in experience and use. We are in the beginning of this AI-fication, and it seems deep learning models are doing really well and that DL can predictably scale [1.]; therefore, do we have to wait a bit for really life-changing AI for the end-user consumer? I can see AI in enterprise/business being extremely useful in different industries, but at the same time, is the current 'AI' actually good/useful for the end-user consumer? [1.] https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.00409 https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.00409
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ykonstant 2y agoI'll wait for Advanced Platforms and Devices second edition.
- ein0p 2y agoWhat for? The market share of Google’s hardware is minuscule, and other Android OEMs are unable to take advantage of Google stuff since they use their own chips.
- ulfw 2y agoGoogle is a one trick pony. I've seen the same panic behaviour with Social / Google Plus. Now they're doing nothing but AI.
- danpalmer 2y agoStepping past all the AI hype, as an engineer in what was Play/Android/Chrome, I'm excited about being closer to hardware. The fact that Pixel was in another division was always weird and felt like it was an artifact of legacy decisions rather than the right way for things to work today.
- azangru 2y ago> The fact that Pixel was in another division was always weird Was there a mechanism to communicate this weirdness to decision-makers? In a company that is in control of all of its teams, what is stopping a faster reorg?
- hashtag-til 2y ago- Politics - moats - "if we do this, XYZ is going to leave" - weak leadership - comfort zone - too many managers risking being spotted as obviously redundant as a result of a reorg :) What else?
- danpalmer 2y agoYes this was a well understood phenomenon. These sorts of things grow slowly over time though, and the orgs are large, so understandable why it took a while.
- Xeamek 2y agoYou assume this is 'just weirdness', but in the thread You have multiple examples that there were upsides to this separation as well
- Zigurd 2y agoIt was probably kept apart while Google was deciding if Pixel was going to survive and to not antagonize 3rd party Android phone OEMs. But all that is more locked-in now.
- Rinzler89 2y ago>The fact that Pixel was in another division was always weird Why? Having a separate division also has upsides, like keeping it away from terrible exec interference. A lot of products we take for granted today succeeded because they were a sort of skunkworks project away form the reach of the mothership that's full of execs who would have tried to push their own agenda in the product or shut it down due to their lack of vision. The original PlayStation, first Xbox, DirectX, Gameboy, etc.
- tempodox 2y agoI'm curious to see how the new HardChromeDroid division will fare. I cannot imagine that lumping hardware and software together in one division is a particularly good idea, but I'm open to surprises.
- cmrdporcupine 2y agoThey already did, in DSPA. The (dysfunctional) PA that brought out the Nest products, etc. Now they're swallowing Android and Chrome. In theory, this could lead to executing in a consistent way. E.g. not having 5+ distributions of Linux and competing platforms fighting over who will rule on some new product. In practice, it's not going to go well.
- candiddevmike 2y agoIs Fuchsia still a thing?
- IshKebab 2y agoYes. https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/+log https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/+log
- IshKebab 2y ago> I cannot imagine that lumping hardware and software together in one division is a particularly good idea In my experience not doing that is a bad idea. Hardware and software depend on each other. There should be good communication between them.
- brookst 2y agoExactly. This vertical integration is often pointed to as a reason Apple has been so successful.
- HenryBemis 2y agoMy thoughts on this, is how will the Hardware convenience, with the Chrome-track-every-breath will dictate the Android/Operating System. Android as-is does enough monitoring, and reporting back home. I fear it will make it worse for the Android users of non-Google devices, in 3-to-5 years.
- smashah 2y ago"Google's previous head of software platforms like Android and ChromeOS, will be headed to "some new projects" at Google" Ok so they're more than willing and able to shut down divisions and relocate human resources to "new projects". Why not just do that with Nimbus? At least ChromeOS didn't put Google in the position of being complicit in a plausible ........ Strange decision making, shutdown and kill things people love (e.g Google Domains, RSS, etc.) but not shutdown a project that puts the company at risk and that some of their own workers actively protest against.
- immibis 2y agoBecause Nimbus makes lots of money.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- smashah 2y agoTesch and Stabenow probably made a lot of money with their government contracts also back in the day. Doesn't negate the fact that the way they made that money was wrong.
- itsoktocry 2y ago>puts the company at risk You think Numbus puts Google at risk, as opposed to strengthening its corporate standing with the US government?
- smashah 2y agoIs that the dichotomy here? Strange worldview. I mean at risk of being complicit in genocide.
- Zigurd 2y agoIt's not nearly as momentous as removing Andy Rubin. Android has evolved a lot. From an OS technology PoV it's less distinctive and more about competitive parity with iOS. Kind of boring.
- chiefalchemist 2y agoIn terms of revenue relative to their search / ads biz, how big of a deal is this? I understand there's name recognition for Chrome and Android, but the Pixel product line is nothing when compared to the iPhone or even Samsung. Is this more of just Google being Google, as the ads side of the house continues to print more money than God?
- londons_explore 2y agoPixel hardware fails because they don't have good distribution channels. No mobile contracts include a pixel phone. Many mobile contracts have iphones or samsungs attached.
- rchaud 2y agoBecause those are phones people want. Their ads are splashed everywhere. Pixel phones are not enough to get people to sign up with a carrier.
- vetinari 2y agoThey are failing in being present in markets; Google won't sell in more than half of EU countries at all; never mind the countries outside EU, Google sells only in a handful. Meanwhile, Samsung products are widely available and marketed everywhere.
- Rinzler89 2y ago>Pixel hardware fails because they don't have good distribution channels. No, Pixel HW fails because it's shit: weak call signal reception and 5G performance due to poor Samsung modem, low performance compared to Apple and Qualcomm, high battery drain, overheating, software bugs that get in the way of you dialing calls, dimples in OLED display, poor design with ultra thick visor, questionable warranty support, AI features only exclusive to the US market but not EU making them useless, etc. Much of the issues that do not exist on Apple and Samsung phones. Carriers go with Apple and Samsung because those brands are a slam dunk with consumers, are well known and mostly reliable by this point with fewer lemons, and when they do fail, there's service centers for them everywhere. Pixels are mostly bought by enthusiasts who will forgive the rough edges for the chance of being Google's software beta testers.
- seydor 2y agoPretty much every LLM is a google competitor now. I guess Meta's unleashing of AI is a huge thread to google's moneymaker. Maybe they see the writing on the wall and want to become Apple 2. Bad news for Samsung?
- Xeamek 2y agoI don't see how Google could threaten Samsung while at the same time not antagonizing every other OEM out there. And even if they went for "all out war" I still don't think it would be that one-sided.
- xxmarkuski 2y ago"Merging teams" is such a Google thing. Merging DeepMind and Google AI, Waze and Maps, Fitbit & Nest and Pixel come to mind. I don't remeber reading such stories from other companies. Is my perception off or is "merging teams" something that Google likes to announce loudly and other companies don't or do other companies "merge teams" less often? I would like to have some input to this.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 2y agoNot many other companies have the unique blend of being out of touch enough to think that anyone knows what this means and reality, and self-important enough to think that people care.
- nkozyra 2y agoI don't necessarily disagree, but structurally these moves can be very impactful, particularly in a huge company as sprawling and with as much overlap as Google. If there's a lot of redundant work being done, maybe the teams will benefit from working together on the same problems. You're right that most of us don't care, necessarily, but I think it sends some signals that the company is attempting to focus a bunch of less focused lasers at the same point. It's less common in tech companies than in massive multinationals like GE or Sony that span a lot of different industries.
- hifromwork 2y agoAre you anthropomorphising companies now? Google the company can't be "out of touch" or "self-important". The engineers maybe, but they don't make PR decisions like this. In this case the original source is an announcement on a "inside-google" blog, and starts with "Hi Googlers", so the target are clearly mostly Google engineers. It ended up on HN because it was repeated by arstechnica, a respected and well-known portal. And here we are discussing it. So maybe people in fact do care about this?
- seba_dos1 2y ago> Are you anthropomorphising companies now? Companies are groups of people, they're maintained by people, all their decisions are made by people and they only ever do things through their people's hands. They are as anthropomorphic as it gets.
- serial_dev 2y agoIt feels like a large bundle to me, so they probably want to go for selling phones and computers much more heavily? Sounds interesting if you are okay with going all in with Google stuff, I'm not sure it's good news if you are using Android or Chrome otherwise. Also, it feels like this merger will lead to a similar article to Hixie's in about 5 years: > A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle management. Take XYZ, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1 https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1
- caleb-allen 2y agoI attended the Android Dev summit a few years back, shortly after Flutter had made some public noise. During a Q&A, I was literally laughed at when I asked the head of Android whether developers should take Flutter seriously. His eventual answer equated to "well Google is really big so we can't say". I think that was the moment I understood just how deep the mismanagement at Google actually is. Just shocking.
- loudmax 2y agoNone of this reorganization matters as long as the executive suite remains the same. Google's problem is top-down. This rearranging the deck chairs isn't going to cut it. Much of Google's value proposition was in their ability to innovate. The current leadership has proven catastrophically inept at this. Without fresh leadership, Google is on its way to becoming some mid-tier ad placement agency at best. Engineering excellence won't save them as long as the top leadership is incapable of adjusting to circumstances. There's still time for Google to leverage its competence at managing large infrastructure to regain its position as a leading technology company. But the window of opportunity is shrinking. Alphabet's board of directors needs to fire the executive suite, that's the easy part. The harder part is finding a replacement CEO and executive suite who will make the deep cuts and rearrangements necessary to get Google back on track. The longer they put that off, the less chance for Google to be relevant in the future.
- keepamovin 2y agoDoes this mean we’re going to see a new secure OS?
- lawgimenez 2y agoDoes this mean Android/Google will scale down with all the cringe YouTube tutorials.
- momofuku 2y agoI'd recommend folks read the last section of the announcement where these changes were announced [1]. The section is titled "Mission First", and I'm pretty sure the recent altercations at Google Cloud's offices over the past week [2] motivated much of the writing in this section. This seems like a stark change in how things happened at Google, and to put it explicitly in a blog was something I couldn't imagined to have happened in ~2017-2022. [1] - https://blog.google/inside-google/company-announcements/building-ai-future-april-2024/ https://blog.google/inside-google/company-announcements/buil... [2] - https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/17/google-workers-arrested-after-nine-hour-protest-in-google-cloud-ceos-office.html https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/17/google-workers-arrested-afte...
- lolinder 2y ago> We have a culture of vibrant, open discussion that enables us to create amazing products and turn great ideas into action. That's important to preserve. But ultimately we are a workplace and our policies and expectations are clear: this is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics. This is too important a moment as a company for us to be distracted. Honestly, good on them. Having a culture of honest and open discussion about work is important, but there's a very vocal minority in many companies that thinks their political opinions are both objective fact and the most important thing to discuss at any given work function. When that kind of attitude seems to receive official support from the company it actually does make people with different political opinions feel unsafe at work. This is not okay, and it's not healthy for the company, and I'm glad to see Google finally pushing back against the idea that loud political fights are appropriate in the workplace.
- JKCalhoun 2y agoI'm not so sure. You point to a vocal minority, I see something amiss for the company. If I were "corporate" I would be asking myself why it is a group of my employees faced arrest, job loss to make a statement about company policies. I would want to know if it suggests a bigger problem down the road for the company.
- fidotron 2y agoGoogle needs to properly absorb Android into Chrome before any antitrust measure forces it (along with the Play Store) to be spun out, as would be most healthy for absolutely everyone except the Google ads business. There has been so much potential squandered with Android over the last decade it is amazing.
- haolez 2y agoI hope ChromeOS gets some love. We need some competition to Windows. They've even experimented with ads in Explorer. They have no limits anymore :)
- nolist_policy 2y agoI wonder if Google is anticipating that they will be broken up.
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- mandalander 2y agoI think that this unification simply took place because Google Android in the future will only be the top layer and Fuchsia OS will manage phones, etc., so such a merger is needed to prepare for new changes.
- mandalander90 2y agoI think that this unification simply took place because Google Android in the future will only be the top layer and Fuchsia OS will manage phones, etc., so such a merger is needed to prepare for new changes.