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I find that writing which speaks of Google as a single "it" misses the mark. I say this because the Googlers who write here show many disparate views and pressu

by ggm 2y ago

I find that writing which speaks of Google as a single "it" misses the mark. I say this because the Googlers who write here show many disparate views and pressures to deliverable. Sure, we think "there is one vision" but I suspect, there will be people inside the tent who still think this is a good idea, or a variation of it, and so (not) is mostly conjectural, because nobody who CAN say with authority what is or is not being done, is going to want to commit until they understand how it affects their KPIs. Considering why Google acquired Android in the first place, Some of this is a bit bizarre. You would think by now, there was a roadmap which made sense across the generations. We're at Android 15. Thats an awful lot of time in that model of the world and Fuschia is on what release trajectory?

onion2k 2y ago
I find that writing which speaks of Google as a single "it" misses the mark. I say this because the Googlers who write here show many disparate views and pressures to deliverable. That doesn't matter if you're talking about a boolean outcome or the actions of the company as a whole. There could be 50%+1 person on one side of the internal debate and 50%-1 person on the other, and everyone outside of the company would still say "Google" to refer to the collective outcomes and actions of everyone there. The subtleties of what happens behind closed doors doesn't matter. Individually Googlers are a disparate bunch. Collectively, they are "Google".
- Sakos 2y ago
  This is the case for every company, not just Google. I've been the one internally trying to stop us from making a bad decision which ended up being made anyway. I can't distance myself from that. For everybody outside, there's only the company. My dissent as an individual doesn't exist out there.
- asplake 2y ago
  Right. And Google isn't a democracy either (nor should it be). The numbers on the winning side might be small. But as you say, “it” is what it does.
- lucianbr 2y ago
  It might explain an apparently erratic behaviour. Continuously alternating priorities, indecision, that sort of thing. Multiple actions, some aligned with "still promoting Fuchsia", others with "we're abandoning it". The "Stadia isn't going anywhere" announcement weeks before killing it comes to mind.
jillesvangurp 2y ago
There's a pattern here of not invented here and Google forever obsessing about injecting their own versions of things. Android brought in a lot of technology not controlled by Google. Java, mobile Linux, stuff like that. It rejected Java for systems programming and came up with Go. And of course with Go they built their own compiler instead of building on the llvm ecosystem as well (unlike what Apple did with Swift). It also rejected Java for frontend programming on the web, and Dart became a thing. Which eventually got repurposed for Flutter so they could get rid of Java on Android too. Early on, it started funding Firefox. But then it partnered with Apple on Webkit only to fork that into Chrome. And of course they then came up with Chrome OS (a linux based OS running their own browser. With Fuchsia the goal was to replace Linux and have a whole Google only stack and replace both Chrome OS and Android. One thing that keeps on happening to Google is outside innovation making their internal efforts redundant. And because Google is so big, it usually doesn't take long for external stuff to start getting used internally and become more or less strategic. Dart/flutter solved a problem. But they never really got rid of Java. And then Kotlin came along and largely replaced Java on Android largely removing the need for Flutter. Flutter is not dead. But at this point it's also clearly not replacing Kotlin. And Google's own Jetpack Compose was built on top of Kotlin in parallel to Flutter. Jetbrain's multiplatform version of that, which is now targeting everything that Flutter was targeting (IOS, Web, Desktop, Android), is starting to look pretty solid. Google just endorsed kotlin multiplatform at Google IO as well. And you'd be wrong to dismiss Kotlin as a frontend only thing because at this point Amazon, Facebook, Google and most other big Java server side users are also deploying Kotlin for that at scale. These companies have many millions of lines of code of Java of course and that's not disappearing overnight. But they are increasingly treating that as legacy code and transitioning to Kotlin for new projects. On the system programming side, Go has worked really well and it's pretty popular. But it did not really displace Java/Kotlin even inside Google. And now we have Rust popping up everywhere as a better C++. Including places like the Linux kernel. Rust is popular especially for things that need to be fast and secure. So, Go is kind of sandwiched between those ecosystems now. The pattern here is Google having the right analysis about what needs doing, work on some internal solution, only to then have external solutions popping up that that remove the need for Google's in house thing. This latest effort to reinvent sandboxing and salvaging some bits of Fuchsia needs to be looked at in the broader trend of people using WASM for that; especially server side. But of course WASM runs great in Chrome too. And thus on Android/Linux.

by ggm 2y ago

onion2k 2y ago

I find that writing which speaks of Google as a single "it" misses the mark. I say this because the Googlers who write here show many disparate views and pressures to deliverable. That doesn't matter if you're talking about a boolean outcome or the actions of the company as a whole. There could be 50%+1 person on one side of the internal debate and 50%-1 person on the other, and everyone outside of the company would still say "Google" to refer to the collective outcomes and actions of everyone there. The subtleties of what happens behind closed doors doesn't matter. Individually Googlers are a disparate bunch. Collectively, they are "Google".

Sakos 2y ago
This is the case for every company, not just Google. I've been the one internally trying to stop us from making a bad decision which ended up being made anyway. I can't distance myself from that. For everybody outside, there's only the company. My dissent as an individual doesn't exist out there.
asplake 2y ago
Right. And Google isn't a democracy either (nor should it be). The numbers on the winning side might be small. But as you say, “it” is what it does.
lucianbr 2y ago
It might explain an apparently erratic behaviour. Continuously alternating priorities, indecision, that sort of thing. Multiple actions, some aligned with "still promoting Fuchsia", others with "we're abandoning it". The "Stadia isn't going anywhere" announcement weeks before killing it comes to mind.

jillesvangurp 2y ago

There's a pattern here of not invented here and Google forever obsessing about injecting their own versions of things. Android brought in a lot of technology not controlled by Google. Java, mobile Linux, stuff like that. It rejected Java for systems programming and came up with Go. And of course with Go they built their own compiler instead of building on the llvm ecosystem as well (unlike what Apple did with Swift). It also rejected Java for frontend programming on the web, and Dart became a thing. Which eventually got repurposed for Flutter so they could get rid of Java on Android too. Early on, it started funding Firefox. But then it partnered with Apple on Webkit only to fork that into Chrome. And of course they then came up with Chrome OS (a linux based OS running their own browser. With Fuchsia the goal was to replace Linux and have a whole Google only stack and replace both Chrome OS and Android. One thing that keeps on happening to Google is outside innovation making their internal efforts redundant. And because Google is so big, it usually doesn't take long for external stuff to start getting used internally and become more or less strategic. Dart/flutter solved a problem. But they never really got rid of Java. And then Kotlin came along and largely replaced Java on Android largely removing the need for Flutter. Flutter is not dead. But at this point it's also clearly not replacing Kotlin. And Google's own Jetpack Compose was built on top of Kotlin in parallel to Flutter. Jetbrain's multiplatform version of that, which is now targeting everything that Flutter was targeting (IOS, Web, Desktop, Android), is starting to look pretty solid. Google just endorsed kotlin multiplatform at Google IO as well. And you'd be wrong to dismiss Kotlin as a frontend only thing because at this point Amazon, Facebook, Google and most other big Java server side users are also deploying Kotlin for that at scale. These companies have many millions of lines of code of Java of course and that's not disappearing overnight. But they are increasingly treating that as legacy code and transitioning to Kotlin for new projects. On the system programming side, Go has worked really well and it's pretty popular. But it did not really displace Java/Kotlin even inside Google. And now we have Rust popping up everywhere as a better C++. Including places like the Linux kernel. Rust is popular especially for things that need to be fast and secure. So, Go is kind of sandwiched between those ecosystems now. The pattern here is Google having the right analysis about what needs doing, work on some internal solution, only to then have external solutions popping up that that remove the need for Google's in house thing. This latest effort to reinvent sandboxing and salvaging some bits of Fuchsia needs to be looked at in the broader trend of people using WASM for that; especially server side. But of course WASM runs great in Chrome too. And thus on Android/Linux.