The CEO's job is to allocate resources to initiatives that will make the company money. NOT to fool around with worthless projects like driver less cars and glasses that are just complete waste of money and resources.
Shouldn't they be spending time and money fixing Android and the Android market place?
The car business is fantastically large. If Google can license its technology to power the next stage of personal transportation, the revenue received will dwarf its 30% vig on selling Angry Birds.
Either way, it's not that they are taking money and resources from Android and dedicating them to cars and augmented reality. I don't think more money and more people is what Android needs.
If they were man enough to actually license. I recently say sebastian thrun speaking and he turns investor off. Hand a professor a cheque and he'll hand you a pipe dream. Google needs to be hiring more wall street sharks.
There are plenty of Wall Street types at Google, the last thing they need is to have them in control of innovation. The scientists won't be in charge of sales or licensing, I think it's great that the MBAs aren't in charge of product development.
Maybe Google won't license it, maybe Google will give it away like they do Android. Since I don't see them manufacturing cars, those are about the only options other than canceling the effort.
You are correct that "The CEO's job is to allocate resources to initiatives that will make the company money" and with driverless cars and google glasses the CEO is doing exactly that.
Also people working on these projects are scientists at googleX they are completely different from the Android team ... Google has enough resources (people and money) to pursue these long term research project without hurting their short term business too much.
> You are correct that "The CEO's job is to allocate resources to initiatives that will make the company money"
Actually that's not strictly true. The CEO's job is to satisfy the shareholders/board of directors. Normally that coincides with making the company money, but not always - the idea of a legal duty to maximise share value is a widely held myth. In the case of Google, most of the shares are still held by the founders. If they just want the company to do cool and impractical things they have the right and the capacity to make it do so.
A lot of people would argue that a CEO's job is to innovate and that profit is just a means. Starting a company (and making yourself CEO) doesn't mean you have to change your priorities from improving the world to increasing your annual return. Lots of world-changing technology has financial gains that aren't realized for years. As long as you have enough money in the short term, which Google does, you can afford such R&D. I can't imagine the inventions at Bell Labs were profitable in the short term, but we wouldn't be typing posts on HN if they didn't exist. Do you think expensive technological innovation should be relegated to the government? Who do you trust to get us to Mars first, NASA or companies like SpaceX?
The effect of a driverless car isn't necessarily that it drives itself. It's a car that's aware of its surroundings and provides feedback to the driver. Mercedes already implemented collision avoidance, driverless car can potentially prevent running over curbs, pedestrians or provide better control.
In any case, lack of innovation is a pretty easy way eventually lose ground.
Producing the best thing we possibly can for users is our paramount thing. I think we have demonstrated that over a very long period of time with a whole variety of different issues we’ve faced around the world.
Hilarious. Lately, Google's wannabe products/services are knee-jerk reactions to existing products. Google is driven by envy, not by the desire to innovate or create a better product or service.
I think Google+ is the only one that qualifies as a knee-jerk reaction, as Google realised very suddenly that social is a valuable currency on the internet, and they didn't have any.
Aside from that, there are no kneejerks in your list. Android was bought two years before the iPhone came out. Chrome was not a response to any kind of threat to Google. They created Google Offers after GroupOn refused to be bought. Google Docs was clearly an innovation, not a reaction. I could go on...
Not really relevant in this case, though. Clearly, Google was planning to get involved in the mobile space before the iPhone. The physical form of that involvement may have changed, but that doesn't qualify Android as a "knee-jerk reaction".
In any case, since then the iPhone notification tray has clearly copied Android, etc. etc. All to the benefit of the end user, IMO.
Considering the relative growth curves of RIM and Android since 2007, I think switching from "Linux/Java Blackberry clone" to "Linux/Java iPhone clone" was a solid decision.
In a theoretical world you might in principle be able to do more with Android, but given the "iOS First" approach that major developers take, it's hard to argue that it lets regular users "do more" in the real world.
Here's what I can do in Android that I can't do in iOS:
* develop an app on my own machine - you can't develop iOS on anything but AAPL hardware, android dev can be done on the big 3.
* without having to pay anything - how much does dev license in iOS cost? don't need to pay for android SDK and tools
* without having to jump through any loops to distribute it - I can just pack up the .apk and email it to you, provide a dropbox public link (when I used to use k9mail, I got my updates at http://code.google.com/p/k9mail/downloads/list rather than the android app store), or put it up in my own app store for it (look at amazon app store, or http://f-droid.org/, or that adult themed one that came out some time ago).
I've had my first Android for the better part of a year now (after two years with an iPhone 3G) and I have to agree with you. I was pretty excited to get into the "open" ecosystem but my ATT-locked Atrix is really not taking advantage of Android's supposed strengths. I'd probably like it more if I were developing mobile apps.
Right now the only thing I'd really miss if I went back to an iPhone is the navigation. The GMail integration is pretty sweet on the Android too, but maybe that's improved on iOS since I jumped ship last year.
It may be a knee-jerk reaction, but it was also the best decision. The iPhone represented a gigantic leap in usability on phones, and if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. If Google didn't come out with Android, Apple would own even more of the market than they do today.
Android was purchased by Google two years prior to the release of iOS [1][2]
Tablets are the natural progression of mobile platforms, and existed prior to the iPad.
The massive contention about Android fragmentation and update/upgrade paths has steadily grown to the point that controlling an additional choke point in that process could significantly improve the ecosystem. By purchasing Motorola and operating it separately they can produce phones with shorter wait times between Android version releases and updates, and set precedents for other manufacturers to follow.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and a myriad of other platforms have proven that social is a huge market. Google+ was late to the party, but they would be stupid to ignore it altogether.
Google Offers is a natural tie-in with a mobile payments platform (Google Wallet), which they were essentially first to market with in the US despite having not yet gained significant traction.
I'm not very familiar with the Google Places, Hotpot, or Yelp services, but it seems like a natural tie-in with their existing Maps service. And sure, MapQuest was around first, but it still is, and I don't know anybody that prefers it to Google Maps.
Chrome may seem "me too" at the moment, but when it first released it was a pretty big deal. They proved that browsers could be minimal and functional, and as they said themselves it only made sense for them to contribute to the web at all points, from server to client.
Google Docs took Office products into a completely new space, one which Microsoft is now having a knee-jerk reaction to with their Office 365 platform.
On top of that, there's plenty of originality to be had still. Their self-driving cars project is really taking off, just a few short years ago nobody would ever have dreamed it would be possible to have a street-level view of nearly every road in the US (and tons of other countries now), their single account/sync structure is undoubtedly the inspiration for iOS's recent iCloud service, and they're in the process of revolutionizing internet connectivity itself right now with end-to-end fiber connections at reasonable consumer pricing in Kansas City.
Maybe there is a bit of envy in there, but who hasn't looked at something and said to themselves "I could do better"? I'd say that, for the most part, they have.
I'll grant you Plus, Offers, Places, and Tablets are due to competitive pressure. But even so, in most of those, they have not gone the route of just cloning the competitor.
Chrome was strictly about advancing the web platform, for users and application makers. Google figures that anything which makes the web better automatically benefits them. And it's been a brilliant success.
I agree in a lot of big categories - although I think they contribute even when they're nominal competitors more than leaders - but Chrome and Docs were both godsends. Chrome was a huge breakthrough in browser performance and I'll never buy a personal copy of Office again thanks to Docs. If you're going to call those "reactions", then any of their landmark products - search, Gmail, Maps, YouTube (an acquisition but a key one) - could be called reactionary.
You could come up with a similar list for just about any big corporation. A few of these really don't prove your point though, because you're comparing them to services that are also copies of something else.
iPad = Nokia N800
Facebook = Myspace, Friendster
IE/Firefox = Mosaic
MS Office = Lotus
I suspect that if we really put time into this, we could come up with examples of things the others might be considered copies of. Good artists copy, great artists steal.
Techies love to downplay the value of an MBA because they are insecure. Just because Jobs, Zuckerberg, Gates, Ellison, Page/Brin, etc. created world-class companies they think MBAs are worthless.
MBAs are indeed worthless if you're Jobs, Zuckerberg, Gates, etc.
BUT YOU'RE NOT.
There are thousands of world-class companies (Fortune 1000, small businesses, start-ups, etc.) that were founded/run by MBAs. the VCs, Investors, etc. who funded your worthless start-ups have MBAs.
Every Arrogant techie should remember this: For every successful start-up, there are 1000's other start-ups that failed because the techie founders did not have the business knowledge or experience to execute, manage and lead their companies.
> There are thousands of world-class companies (Fortune 1000, small businesses, start-ups, etc.) that were founded/run by MBAs.
There are hundreds of thousands graduating with MBAs each and every year. You are not going to be the guy running a world class company any more than you are going to be Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.
I don't think an MBA is worthless, but it seems a little foolish to think that it is going to change your life. There is no such thing as a magical formula you can follow to success. While an MBA might lead you to that million dollar job, taking time to do an MBA can just as easily take you away from a million dollar job.
All you can really do is focus on what you think is right. If that's an MBA, do it. If not, don't.
There is a difference between a small business, and a start-up. MBA's are suited for the small business, and suited very well for it. Techies are suited for start-ups.
My take is that Android is an unmitigated disaster for Google. It could go down in history as an historic error as great or greater than IBM's failure to secure the IP of MSDos and the x86 chip, giving away the PC market to Microsoft and Intel.
Look at what happened. Google were sitting pretty in a special relationship with Apple: with Schmidt on the Apple board and Page a friend of SJ and being mentored by him. Google benefitted hugely. Google was the default search engine and Google the default maps
They betrayed SJ, stabbed him in the back "Et tu Brute"? They appear to have used insider knowledge of the iPhone to secretly switch the Android from a Blackberry to iPhone look alike, allegedly stealing IP wholesale from Oracle, Microsoft and of course Apple and created a mortal enemy of SJ who, quite naturally declared nuclear war on these treacherous ......s. But far from benefitting Google shareholders, Android is a money pit sucking the lifeblood out of Google.
Google have invested countless billions in Android, even more billions in buying that other money pit Motorola, have enmeshed themselves in the most humungously expensive global litigation mess imaginable, being sued by three of the richest and most successful companies on the planet. They are facing death by a thousand cuts, with unimaginably large legal fees, damages, licence fees and compensation, to say nothing of destroying Google's reputation as the "Good" "Do No Evil" company, turning it into into the most sordid, hacker, privacy and IP robber of all time and the probability of facing serious anti-trust investigations by the US and EU.
And all for what? 80% of their mobile revenue comes from their mortal enemy Apple, who will leave no stone unturned to stick in and twist the knife and will doubtless use Siri to undermine and exploit Google search and Google maps, hiding the vital user information that Google need, depriving them of the advertising revenue which is their whole raison d'être.
Remember: this is just $1.70 of revenue (NOT PROFITS) per user. It means that Google are running massive losses on every Android device, while Microsoft are earning net profits from the licensing to Android OEMs amounting to more than 5 times as much as Google's revenue. To make matters worse, Amazon have castrated Google's revenue by forking Android cutting off their revenue stream. Samsung and other OEMs may do the same.
But the real sword of Damocles for Android is Apple's world wide legal battle to stop them using Apple IP. This campaign is still at an early stage, given the snails pace of litigation, but is beginning to show signs of real progress. Bit by bit Apple is degrading Android stripping it of the user satisfaction of iOS's look and feel. Perhaps the most significant Apple victory is the recent ruling by Judge Posner upholding the largest part of Apple's touchscreen heuristics ('949) patent in their case against Motorola. Winning this patent case against Motorola could be a turning point, stripping Android of its iPhone gestures, and turning Motorola to stinking, rotting carcase around Google's neck.
What is most amazing about Motorola and to a lesser extent Samsung is that their principle defence case against Apple and Microsoft consists of attempting to abuse essential patents protected by FRAND, which is likely to bring crashing upon their heads (and of Google who have publicly supported their underhand tactics) the wrath of the EU and US anti-trut bodies. Bear in mind that the EU can fine all three companies 3 times their annual turnover for such gross and barefaced violations. Google now have few friends in Europe and the knives are circling. Perhaps it is soon going to be "Et tu Brute" time for Google. Revenge is sweet, as they say!
A product or service based on a reaction is driven by envy. not based on passion to innovate or the desire to provide a better service. it's just based on envy. all it cares about is what the other guy is doing.
This has been Google's strategy lately thanks to Larry Page.
Apple
Facebook
MS
Yelp
Groupon
the list goes on and on...
While Google's chief executive Larry Page recently described an $2.5 billion annual run rate for the company's mobile revenues, the company has testified that it has earned less than $550 million from Android across four years from 2008 to 2011.
As it happens, the Wall Street Journal reported earlier in the day that the Securities Exchange Commission was investigating the high-frequency exchanges -- including BATS -- as part of a broader probe into whether the new trading platforms are using their high-speed links to the major stock exchanges to gain an unfair advantage.
>And they are, the future just hasn't arrived yet. But microkernels see more and more adoption every day. They offer a degree of reliability that is unprecedented. But they also come with a performance penalty that is for a lot of people enough of a drawback that they would rather have 'good enough' than 'perfect'.
Correct. The future of computing is mobile and the weakness of the Linux kernel's monolithic architecture is highlighted by Android's numerous design and implementation issues as well as Android's numerous maintainability, upgrade, reliability and performance problems.
Sounds like an interesting thesis. You have a link to one of these design or implementation "issues" and how it's a reflection of the lack of address space separation and/or IPC design of the linux kernel?
No? Yeah; sounded like a content-free platform flame to me too.
Actually: I'd be curious to hear some more knowledgable folks on this. My understanding of the iOS kernel is that it's a microkernel only via historical label: the PVR driver stack, network devices and filesystems live in the same address space and communicate with userspace via single context switched syscalls. Is that wrong?
Here's one for you genius. This would not be such a hard problem to solve on a Hybrid/microkernel OS. And you wonder why some Android devices don't get updates?
The Android kernel code is more than just the few weird drivers that were in the drivers/staging/android subdirectory in the kernel. In order to get a working Android system, you need the new lock type they have created, as well as hooks in the core system for their security model.
In order to write a driver for hardware to work on Android, you need to properly integrate into this new lock, as well as sometimes the bizarre security model. Oh, and then there's the totally-different framebuffer driver infrastructure as well.
This means that any drivers written for Android hardware platforms, can not get merged into the main kernel tree because they have dependencies on code that only lives in Google's kernel tree, causing it to fail to build in the kernel.org tree.
Because of this, Google has now prevented a large chunk of hardware drivers and platform code from ever getting merged into the main kernel tree. Effectively creating a kernel branch that a number of different vendors are now relying on.
Now branches in the Linux kernel source tree are fine and they happen with every distro release. But this is much worse. Because Google doesn't have their code merged into the mainline, these companies creating drivers and platform code are locked out from ever contributing it back to the kernel community. The kernel community has for years been telling these companies to get their code merged, so that they can take advantage of the security fixes, and handle the rapid API churn automatically. And these companies have listened, as is shown by the larger number of companies contributing to the kernel every release.
But now they are stuck. Companies with Android-specific platform and drivers can not contribute upstream, which causes these companies a much larger maintenance and development cycle.
In Mac OS X, Mach is linked with other kernel components into a single kernel address space. This is primarily for performance; it is much faster to make a direct call between linked components than it is to send messages or do remote procedure calls (RPC) between separate tasks. This modular structure results in a more robust and extensible system than a monolithic kernel would allow, without the performance penalty of a pure microkernel.
The Greg KH link is very stale. All that stuff got merged. And you're interpreting it wrong anyway. Android introduced some new driver APIs, they didn't completely change the kernel. Check the .config file on an actual device and count the number of drivers that are absolutely identical to desktop linux.
And how exactly does having a microkernel fix the problem of having a stable driver API? Drivers must be written to some framework. Windows NT derivatives are microkernels too, and they're on, I believe, their third incompatible driver architecture.
And did you actually read that second link? It's drawing a single "kernel environment" with all the standard kernel junk in it. That is not a microkernel.
The CEO's job is to allocate resources to initiatives that will make the company money. NOT to fool around with worthless projects like driver less cars and glasses that are just complete waste of money and resources.
Shouldn't they be spending time and money fixing Android and the Android market place?