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> Furthermore Google appears to be making another old Microsoft error: deprioritizing mobile. > Just as the evolution of Windows got sluggish once Microsoft h

> Furthermore Google appears to be making another old Microsoft error: deprioritizing mobile. > Just as the evolution of Windows got sluggish once Microsoft had domination of the computer space, so Google looks to be resting on its laurels in mobile with Android. I’m a huge fan of Android 5.0 Lollipop but in hindsight was prioritising ‘Material Design’ (illustrated above) over combating performance, battery life and fragmentation issues really a wise move? After all Android’s native UI is the first thing most handset makers throw out the window. What? Project Volta focused on Battery Life. They changed the entire runtime to ART for performance. Material design was a much needed solution to coherent UI across Google's properties. Also remember that Google brought us HTTP/2 when Microsoft and Apple were completely ignoring the web. GMail is great but they are still bringing Inbox which I find to be a good step towards better Email management. I understand it might now work well for everyone but still, they are trying to evolve it. And they are focusing on moonshot projects while continuing to improve existing successful products in a meaningful way for exactly the same reason - not to be complacent. How otherwise do you not rest on your laurels? The article is a bunch of baloney really.

ZoFreX 12y ago
> Project Volta focused on Battery Life According to Google. According to independent benchmarks, battery life got worse on a whole slew of devices. > They changed the entire runtime to ART for performance But did it actually get faster? Not by much. > Material design was a much needed solution to coherent UI across Google's properties Are the UIs coherent across Google's properties? Half a year on the answer is still no: Implementation is spotty across the first-party apps, many of which directly violate the guidelines given to developers.
- ocdtrekkie 12y ago
  More than likely, material design bloat ate any improvements in performance or battery life introduced by backend optimizations.
  - asadotzler 12y ago
    As I understand it, Material (and Microsoft's Metro, interestingly) aims to be better on battery compared to predecessors if only because it's a simpler UI with larger plain blocks of color, minimal decorations, and far fewer "expensive" effects like gradients or translucence\transparency. That doesn't mean said wins aren't immediately consumed by other parts of the system, even other parts of Material UI widgetry. Regardless, the simpler flatter design frees up some resources (battery, ultimately) which can then be used for other things, like smooth animations and transitions.
    - ocdtrekkie 12y ago
      Compared to Holo, Material adds a lot of generated shadows and animated elements. Holo was fairly 'flat' already, and far simpler.
- aceperry 12y ago
  "But did it actually get faster? Not by much" It's a new runtime, and expected to get better and faster. If you don't like it that much, and you sound like you really HATE Android, maybe you should use something else. You'll feel better.
  - ZoFreX 12y ago
    I think it's kind of unfair to accuse me of hating Android because I criticise it. I've been using Android since 1.6, always been a big fan, but as a power user and a developer I'm much more aware of Android's shortcomings than any Apple fanboy could possibly be.
    - aceperry 12y ago
      Maybe I've conflated your response with others here who seem to have a huge dislike for Android and an obvious bias against anything Google. If that's not you then I apologize for the misunderstanding. I can understand being realistic about a platform and providing criticism, but a lot of the comments here can truly be characterized as hate.
mburst 12y ago
Click bait at its finest
wbkang 12y ago
It's not a bunch of baloney. If you have used Nexus 5 post-lollipop you will experience significantly decreased battery life. http://blog.gsmarena.com/benchmarking-android-5-0-lollipop-battery-life-samsung-galaxy-s5-lg-g3/ http://blog.gsmarena.com/benchmarking-android-5-0-lollipop-b... Project volta doesn't mean improved battery life. There are many factors to battery life that are not addressed by Project Volta.
- blinkingled 12y ago
  It's a major release with ton of changes - there are going to be bugs. That doesn't mean entire release was useless. Besides this article isn't about execution quality - it is about where Google's alleged lack of focus is - it said Lollipop was all about Material design focus where as in reality feature focus wise it was a well balanced release.
- engendered 12y ago
  If you have used Nexus 5 post-lollipop Is this kind of a glass half empty thing? The dramatically more popular Galaxy S5 saw a significantly improved battery life. If we just include those data points, and average across users of Android, it was a huge net win for users. This article is clickbait garbage (again a "contributor"), and it allows people to ply their grievances as if they are canonical.
  - aceperry 12y ago
    This. Strange to see so much hate on Google. I've never seen that anywhere else.
- ocdtrekkie 12y ago
  The problem is Google is coupling improvements in performance and battery life on the backend with additional bloat on the frontend with all their design/animation stuff. So we're not actually getting any real gains here.
- fredliu 12y ago
  Agree, I've observed the same for L on Nexus 5, and battery life is not the only problem there, there seems to be a system memory leak that constantly eating up free memory until even the launcher is killed... I had way more free memory, and no leak on JB.
k-mcgrady 12y ago
>> "And they are focusing on moonshot projects for exactly the same reason that article claims is Google's problem - being complacent." MS Research has been doing this kind of thing for years. Most of the projects never go anywhere. Google isn't the first company to do R&D - they're just really public about it to try and improve their public image.
- blinkingled 12y ago
  Google is trying and delivering a whole lot more than MS Research ( did MS ever have a public prototype for anything?) - Glass, Self Driving Cars, Google Now are all tangible things that show concrete effort to make entirely new products and also make existing products better. They may not all be instant consumer hits but the point was about complacency - and this isn't complacency, it's the exact opposite. Microsoft became complacent with WinMO, even few office releases were meh. Windows stagnated until security blunders forced them to react. Google on the other hand isn't being complacent with GMail (Inbox), Android (Lollipop), Chrome (v41) or Search (Google Now).
  - icki 12y ago
    Microsoft famously launched the Surface tabletop computer :)
  - k-mcgrady 12y ago
    >> "Google is trying and delivering a whole lot more than MS Research ( did MS ever have a public prototype for anything?) - Glass, Self Driving Cars, Google Now are all tangible things that show concrete effort to make entirely new products and also make existing products better." Glass flopped. Self-driving cars haven't been released and there are plenty of people working on that (Google just makes a big PR thing out of it) and Google Now is great (although hardly one of their moonshots?). >> "Google on the other hand isn't being complacent with GMail (Inbox), Android (Lollipop), Chrome (v41) or Search (Google Now)." Inbox is certainly interesting but most people I know don't like it. I did like it but moved away due to rising features. Lollipop killed my battery life and slowed my device to a crawl. Chrome has become sluggish and bloated. Like I said Google Now is great but only if I give Google all my data and give up all my privacy (search history, location history).
itsbits 12y ago
Inbox is a copy of MailBox and Accompli's mail app...sometimes we have to give credit to others...
- itsbits 12y ago
  why downvotes when I said truth?
dmethvin 12y ago
> Also remember that Google brought us HTTP/2 when Microsoft and Apple were completely ignoring the web. You only have that half-right, Microsoft hasn't been ignoring the web for several years, but Apple still is. The problem for Microsoft is that it can't move the web anymore. The center of gravity is in mobile and they don't have any market share there. Apple doesn't want to move the web, their walled garden is making much more money for them and there's no need for competition.
- blinkingled 12y ago
  MS still has lion's share of the desktop and enterprise though - they could have put out something open like SPDY with IIS and IE support built in and that would have made a difference.
- zghst 12y ago
  Apple is damn right for ignoring the web, JS is an extremely immature language (I say that working with it everyday, even with ES6 and experimental ES7 features). Developing a real app with JS, where you have rewrite everything that's already in UIKit, Foundation, etc from the ground up, sucks ass. Your app is automatically slower, less APIs to work with, and is extremely limited in technologies. It can't do layout or many features better than the frameworks that countless engineers at Apple built and work on. It's waaay less about walled garden and more about quality and the philosophy of the web. Is the web supposed to be what many of us want it to be? I love that browsers are being beefed up, but it increases the attack surface for hackers, increases more points of failure in your application because of some weird quirk by one vendor, there will be 20 people with 20 different frameworks and 20 different ways on how to do an app the right way, and most important, newbies will become extremely overwhelmed by the noise and lack of direction in on the platform. If the web was a better platform, apps would not be so successful. But it's not (for now), it sucks so horribly and keeps me frustrated. We need more companies like Facebook (React) and Google (less so because of their scatter brain strategy: Angular, Web Components, Polymer, whatever Gmail and Youtube are built on) that shape the web
- rimantas 12y ago
  And now you got it completely wrong. Where did stuff like canvas, CSS animations and transforms appeared and who was driving that?
agumonkey 12y ago
They did a lot of great low-level yet user-facing work (butter, volta) but it seems like ART complete fruits are still to be seen.
benoits 12y ago
> Also remember that Google brought us HTTP/2 when Microsoft and Apple were completely ignoring the web. That's a terrible example since both companies contributed to the standard. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/2
- blinkingled 12y ago
  Huh? >The httpbis working group considered Google's SPDY protocol, Microsoft's HTTP Speed+Mobility proposal (SPDY based),[5] and Network-Friendly HTTP Upgrade.[11] In July 2012 Facebook provided feedback on each of the proposals and recommended HTTP/2 be based on SPDY.[12] The initial draft of HTTP/2 was published in November 2012 and is based on a straight copy of SPDY.[13]
Foralongtime 12y ago
It rather looks to me as if Microsoft arranged the article, as it is rather partisan, and then organised the comments - so the article and comments taken together indicate that Microsoft is still the old Microsoft. It is fairly easy to distinguish between the genuine comments and the deceitful ones. Typically, the latter have a somewhat unpleasing tone.

ZoFreX 12y ago

> Project Volta focused on Battery Life According to Google. According to independent benchmarks, battery life got worse on a whole slew of devices. > They changed the entire runtime to ART for performance But did it actually get faster? Not by much. > Material design was a much needed solution to coherent UI across Google's properties Are the UIs coherent across Google's properties? Half a year on the answer is still no: Implementation is spotty across the first-party apps, many of which directly violate the guidelines given to developers.

ocdtrekkie 12y ago
More than likely, material design bloat ate any improvements in performance or battery life introduced by backend optimizations.
- asadotzler 12y ago
  As I understand it, Material (and Microsoft's Metro, interestingly) aims to be better on battery compared to predecessors if only because it's a simpler UI with larger plain blocks of color, minimal decorations, and far fewer "expensive" effects like gradients or translucence\transparency. That doesn't mean said wins aren't immediately consumed by other parts of the system, even other parts of Material UI widgetry. Regardless, the simpler flatter design frees up some resources (battery, ultimately) which can then be used for other things, like smooth animations and transitions.
  - ocdtrekkie 12y ago
    Compared to Holo, Material adds a lot of generated shadows and animated elements. Holo was fairly 'flat' already, and far simpler.
aceperry 12y ago
"But did it actually get faster? Not by much" It's a new runtime, and expected to get better and faster. If you don't like it that much, and you sound like you really HATE Android, maybe you should use something else. You'll feel better.
- ZoFreX 12y ago
  I think it's kind of unfair to accuse me of hating Android because I criticise it. I've been using Android since 1.6, always been a big fan, but as a power user and a developer I'm much more aware of Android's shortcomings than any Apple fanboy could possibly be.
  - aceperry 12y ago
    Maybe I've conflated your response with others here who seem to have a huge dislike for Android and an obvious bias against anything Google. If that's not you then I apologize for the misunderstanding. I can understand being realistic about a platform and providing criticism, but a lot of the comments here can truly be characterized as hate.

mburst 12y ago

Click bait at its finest

wbkang 12y ago

It's not a bunch of baloney. If you have used Nexus 5 post-lollipop you will experience significantly decreased battery life. http://blog.gsmarena.com/benchmarking-android-5-0-lollipop-battery-life-samsung-galaxy-s5-lg-g3/ http://blog.gsmarena.com/benchmarking-android-5-0-lollipop-b... Project volta doesn't mean improved battery life. There are many factors to battery life that are not addressed by Project Volta.

blinkingled 12y ago
It's a major release with ton of changes - there are going to be bugs. That doesn't mean entire release was useless. Besides this article isn't about execution quality - it is about where Google's alleged lack of focus is - it said Lollipop was all about Material design focus where as in reality feature focus wise it was a well balanced release.
engendered 12y ago
If you have used Nexus 5 post-lollipop Is this kind of a glass half empty thing? The dramatically more popular Galaxy S5 saw a significantly improved battery life. If we just include those data points, and average across users of Android, it was a huge net win for users. This article is clickbait garbage (again a "contributor"), and it allows people to ply their grievances as if they are canonical.
- aceperry 12y ago
  This. Strange to see so much hate on Google. I've never seen that anywhere else.
ocdtrekkie 12y ago
The problem is Google is coupling improvements in performance and battery life on the backend with additional bloat on the frontend with all their design/animation stuff. So we're not actually getting any real gains here.
fredliu 12y ago
Agree, I've observed the same for L on Nexus 5, and battery life is not the only problem there, there seems to be a system memory leak that constantly eating up free memory until even the launcher is killed... I had way more free memory, and no leak on JB.

k-mcgrady 12y ago

>> "And they are focusing on moonshot projects for exactly the same reason that article claims is Google's problem - being complacent." MS Research has been doing this kind of thing for years. Most of the projects never go anywhere. Google isn't the first company to do R&D - they're just really public about it to try and improve their public image.

blinkingled 12y ago
Google is trying and delivering a whole lot more than MS Research ( did MS ever have a public prototype for anything?) - Glass, Self Driving Cars, Google Now are all tangible things that show concrete effort to make entirely new products and also make existing products better. They may not all be instant consumer hits but the point was about complacency - and this isn't complacency, it's the exact opposite. Microsoft became complacent with WinMO, even few office releases were meh. Windows stagnated until security blunders forced them to react. Google on the other hand isn't being complacent with GMail (Inbox), Android (Lollipop), Chrome (v41) or Search (Google Now).
- icki 12y ago
  Microsoft famously launched the Surface tabletop computer :)
- k-mcgrady 12y ago
  >> "Google is trying and delivering a whole lot more than MS Research ( did MS ever have a public prototype for anything?) - Glass, Self Driving Cars, Google Now are all tangible things that show concrete effort to make entirely new products and also make existing products better." Glass flopped. Self-driving cars haven't been released and there are plenty of people working on that (Google just makes a big PR thing out of it) and Google Now is great (although hardly one of their moonshots?). >> "Google on the other hand isn't being complacent with GMail (Inbox), Android (Lollipop), Chrome (v41) or Search (Google Now)." Inbox is certainly interesting but most people I know don't like it. I did like it but moved away due to rising features. Lollipop killed my battery life and slowed my device to a crawl. Chrome has become sluggish and bloated. Like I said Google Now is great but only if I give Google all my data and give up all my privacy (search history, location history).

itsbits 12y ago

Inbox is a copy of MailBox and Accompli's mail app...sometimes we have to give credit to others...

itsbits 12y ago
why downvotes when I said truth?

dmethvin 12y ago

> Also remember that Google brought us HTTP/2 when Microsoft and Apple were completely ignoring the web. You only have that half-right, Microsoft hasn't been ignoring the web for several years, but Apple still is. The problem for Microsoft is that it can't move the web anymore. The center of gravity is in mobile and they don't have any market share there. Apple doesn't want to move the web, their walled garden is making much more money for them and there's no need for competition.

blinkingled 12y ago
MS still has lion's share of the desktop and enterprise though - they could have put out something open like SPDY with IIS and IE support built in and that would have made a difference.
zghst 12y ago
Apple is damn right for ignoring the web, JS is an extremely immature language (I say that working with it everyday, even with ES6 and experimental ES7 features). Developing a real app with JS, where you have rewrite everything that's already in UIKit, Foundation, etc from the ground up, sucks ass. Your app is automatically slower, less APIs to work with, and is extremely limited in technologies. It can't do layout or many features better than the frameworks that countless engineers at Apple built and work on. It's waaay less about walled garden and more about quality and the philosophy of the web. Is the web supposed to be what many of us want it to be? I love that browsers are being beefed up, but it increases the attack surface for hackers, increases more points of failure in your application because of some weird quirk by one vendor, there will be 20 people with 20 different frameworks and 20 different ways on how to do an app the right way, and most important, newbies will become extremely overwhelmed by the noise and lack of direction in on the platform. If the web was a better platform, apps would not be so successful. But it's not (for now), it sucks so horribly and keeps me frustrated. We need more companies like Facebook (React) and Google (less so because of their scatter brain strategy: Angular, Web Components, Polymer, whatever Gmail and Youtube are built on) that shape the web
rimantas 12y ago
And now you got it completely wrong. Where did stuff like canvas, CSS animations and transforms appeared and who was driving that?

agumonkey 12y ago

They did a lot of great low-level yet user-facing work (butter, volta) but it seems like ART complete fruits are still to be seen.

benoits 12y ago

> Also remember that Google brought us HTTP/2 when Microsoft and Apple were completely ignoring the web. That's a terrible example since both companies contributed to the standard. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/2

blinkingled 12y ago
Huh? >The httpbis working group considered Google's SPDY protocol, Microsoft's HTTP Speed+Mobility proposal (SPDY based),[5] and Network-Friendly HTTP Upgrade.[11] In July 2012 Facebook provided feedback on each of the proposals and recommended HTTP/2 be based on SPDY.[12] The initial draft of HTTP/2 was published in November 2012 and is based on a straight copy of SPDY.[13]

Foralongtime 12y ago

It rather looks to me as if Microsoft arranged the article, as it is rather partisan, and then organised the comments - so the article and comments taken together indicate that Microsoft is still the old Microsoft. It is fairly easy to distinguish between the genuine comments and the deceitful ones. Typically, the latter have a somewhat unpleasing tone.