Google and Ambient Computing
stratechery.comA handful of oligopolies coercing me to use overcomplicated always-connected gadgets that are orchestrated by "AI" that I don't control, can't train, and whose main objective is to manipulate my behavior and siphon as much of my private info to its corporate master as possible. All of this to solve "problems" that I never had, while a choir of corporate shills drones on and on that problems I actually have are not real or not important.
I'll take 80s dystopian cyberpunk over this crap any time of the day.
Isn't it time that Google grows up and becomes a true tech company? I consider products containing adware to be "half-broken" and I don't understand how Google engineers can feel proud of their work. As an engineer I want my work to be paid for because my users like my products, and I certainly wouldn't want any of my work to be used to serve anyone other than my users.
Do you pay for YouTube premium? Options are there, but it seems like most users prefer ad supported content to paid content in many contexts.
Google Play Music is awesome. I love that I can keep my personal collection of rare MP3s there and have them in a convenient cloud player. Ad-free YouTube is just icing on the cake.
Adware based products win in the marketplace.
Google can't change that.
At least the money from those adware products goes toward deep tech r&d. It could be worse.
Unless one day they take it a step too far, and the entire tracking-based monetization scheme is banned by the government or the EU. I hope they have a backup plan other than lobbying in the opposite direction.
Why do you think they are pumping dozens of billions into cloud and especially AI? At its heart, according to the founders, Google is not a search company, and not an ad company. Their primary long term goal is the creation of real artificial intelligence. The ad business provides the money. The money buys the best people and all the infrastructure. The user-facing business provides the data. By all accounts you need a trillion dollar setup, as much talent as you can , and pretty much all the data in the world to get started.
Considering the thread about Google's Soli [0] has a huge number of votes, there's a clear sign that many are still heavily plugged into the borg. I'd suggest that even more would disagree with the suggestion that Google isn't a real tech company.
The topic might be heavily upvoted, but the overall sentiment in the comments in notably negative.
Do you have an example of a “true tech company”?
Oracle fits this description nicely. :)
No that's a law firm :)
And a strip and gut, tech acquisition company.
SpaceX, Intel, Microsoft, Nvidia, ...
AWS is the most true tech company out there I think, I wish there were a way for me to invest in it outside of the Amazon borg cube media conglomerate trying to fight Disney.
I don't like the always-on surveillance either.
But if people choose these products because the convenience is worth it in their estimation, revealed preferences and all that.
Maybe this suggests a counter-product? An offline, all data is local, product opportunity. Who will build it?
Many (most?) that buy them don’t understand the value exchange they are signing up for. Look at all the breathless articles about how humans listen to Alexa, Cortana, Siri, Google, etc assistant chats. That’s an standard expectation from anyone that gets close to working with supervised learning but from the reporting and interviews it seems many didn’t know. How could they with the ever growing legal soup of privacy policies and tos.
I’d love to see a counter product but more than that I’d like to see more standardized and short/brief lay person understandable policies. Maybe like a nutrition label but for consumer data.
> But if people choose these products because the convenience is worth it in their estimation, revealed preferences and all that.
"is worth it" requires people to be fully aware of what's going on.
I've described what some of these devices are doing based on product announcements, patents, investigative news stories, and that sort of thing. I've had numerous people tell me that I'm wrong. That they don't believe companies are doing this.
This has caused me to come to the conclusion that people aren't aware of the trade-offs or what is going on.
That lack of understanding concerns me.
>This has caused me to come to the conclusion that people aren't aware of the trade-offs or what is going on.
But what exactly is going on? It's not like google going to blackmail you for 10K USD in cash, single payment please, once it will learn that you are going to the same pub and spend 2 hours there daily, "or we will let your boss know".
It will show you more relevant ads, right. But do you really expect an average person to be scared by this?
Google probably will not, but can you say that about every Google employee?
Seems a bit patronizing. People can actually make a conscious decision to prefer convenience over surrender of some privacy. Some people don't put shades or curtains on their windows.
Sure, but people generally understand how window shades work, whereas people generally don't understand how the surveillance economy works. That would be a patronizing assumption inside HN, but outside HN it's a reality that I regularly observe.
Currently working on this with Secure Scuttlebutt, FWIW.
Don't forget that you pay them for the privilege of using such devices.
But "ambient computing" sounds so pleasant, so friendly.
It sounds like walking through a forest of ferns.
Perhaps that is true with Google’s products. As some else here said, they should grow up and figure out a business model that does not requires collecting so much data. I would prefer to pay them in cash than with my information.
For ambient computing, my favorite things are my Apple Watch and iPods. True enough, using Siri and these devices is using black box devices, but for now I am OK with them. I trust Apple, for now.
You think they could save some money offering people a yearly "no ads" plan, across all google properties and any site with doubleclick and ads words. Very strange that they only offer paid plans for office productivity, youtube, and backups.
It would be even cooler if a certain percentage of the rate was a "designate your target" that allowed you to directly fund things like google reader etc.
It's also kind of crazy they dont have some kind of pricing sheet that shows me all the subscriptions available to me, along with some bundle options. I have to search out each product to see its price. It's like they dont want me to look for ways to give them money.
The minute they put prices on their products managers, engineers, users and everyone will go crazy to game the system.
I'm not saying it cannot be done well, but there's certainly an overhead if you have to be explicit about what costs how much to whom.
Can't give you enough upvotes, but at least I gave you all I have.
"coercing" how?
You're no coerced in any way. Don't use Google.
That's almost impossible. If you were to send me an email you would be using Google and not even know it because I host my domain mx there.
So ? Don't host your domain there.
Google is failing to organize the world's information in a way that is useful to me. I wanted to look up how to split a NURBS surface in half. You know, the math behind computing the new point and weights. All I got was a bunch of stuff from CAD vendors talking about how to manipulate NURBS in their own tools.
Since then, I've seen more of this trend. It's hard to find information about how anything works now because most the results are commercial - SEOed to be high in the rankings.
I'd like an option to screen out commercial results in favor of more informational ones. They're supposed to be helping me find information right? But in reality they've shifted to feeding me marketing information.
Splitting a NURBS surface "in half" is an insanely complicated operation, and the way you do it almost certainly depends on your intended use case.
If you can't find a library (or engine) in your domain that has the operation, then you're kind of S.O.L., and have to start from first principles.
I don't blame commercial results and SEO for this. It's not like you used to be able to see a menu of rich choices for this, and now they're lost in the noise of companies with a mission.
> Splitting a NURBS surface "in half" is an insanely complicated operation, and the way you do it almost certainly depends on your intended use case.
It's actually not "insanely complicated", and there are resources around, like https://pages.mtu.edu/~shene/COURSES/cs3621/NOTES/spline/NUR... and https://www.amazon.com/NURBS-Book-Monographs-Visual-Communic...
> It's not like you used to be able to see a menu of rich choices for this, and now they're lost in the noise of companies with a mission.
I mentioned just yesterday that DDG results are better for me, and this case is an example. "NURBs splitting algorithm" turns up a bunch of results.
> It's actually not "insanely complicated"
Hi, your first link talks about NURBS curves, not NURBS surfaces. Cutting a surface in half is significantly more complicated than cutting a curve in half.
And your second link is to a commercial result, an entire book. Presumably because the topic is complicated enough that people are willing to pay $69 to $78 to understand the challenge well enough.
If your DDG search for "splitting a NURBS surface in half" are successful, I'd love to see the results.
>> Cutting a surface in half is significantly more complicated than cutting a curve in half.
No, it's actually the Exact same thing. Just applied independently to each of the curves in one direction.
But none of that is really important. 15 years ago it would be trivial to learn how to do it with a Google search. Today not so.
Also, a book result is still better for me than the commercial tool links which contain no math or theory what so ever.
> No, it's actually the Exact same thing. Just applied independently to each of the curves in one direction.
I can easily imagine situations where I would not be happy with that result.
If that works for you, that's great.
> Also, a book result is still better for me than the commercial tool links which contain no math or theory what so ever.
Searching Google for "NURBS Book", "NURBS Course", "NURBS filetype:pdf" all work great for me.
At a guess, most of the people who use Google are using tools, not making them. Yes, Google favors results that make the majority happy. I see that as a feature. If I'm in the minority, yes, I do need to become a more sophisticated searcher.
I am using DuckDuckGo too, but to be fair the first result in Google on that exact query seems relevant: https://computergraphics.stackexchange.com/questions/340/spl...
A better example would probably be to search for a way to fix something on your car. The results are overwhelmingly skewed towards selling you the part vs instructions.
Yesterday I wrote a blog post about an interesting company, I couldn't find the URL even though I knew exactly what they did and where they were located. It took forver - and DuckDuckGo - to finally find the website. I'd forgotten their name and had put of writing that blog post for long enough that it had slipped my mind.
That isn't the first time this happens either. It's extremely frustrating to not be able to locate a page that you know is out there.
I used to be able to find specific pages on the Web by googling for unusual words I expected would be used to link to them, not on the page itself, to pick an extreme example of the sort of triangulation one used to be able to use to track down lost pages or sites.
That kind of thing hasn't worked in... god, at least a decade, at this point. Not just because the Web is larger, but because search doesn't seem to work like that anymore and also everything got way spammier. "Clever" searching is a skill I was once (judging by people's reactions) notably good at but that is entirely obsolete, but not because the function it served was replaced by something better—it's just gone now.
Was this not a front-page result, as it was for me?
https://computergraphics.stackexchange.com/questions/340/spl...
That turned up at some point. But note that 1 it doesnt give an actual answer. And 2 I didnt need to read about knot vectors at all, so it wasnt the correct solution for me.
May be better to select by org type (site:.edu) or remove what might be obvious commercial results (-buy -"free download")
It seems like google has the unfortunate culture of just releasing a bunch of new services, not maintaining them, and allowing them to die. (Remember all of their chat apps?) I think I’ve read it’s due to google’s promotion process and needing to “release” something to move upward. I expect the majority of these service to no longer be around in 5 years.
I like that they have a "take the flag, but dont hold the ground if it isn't worth it" approach. Learn lots and fail fast. Smaller companies can find a niche for themselves in "we are basically X that google used to do". Let someone else make the market and create your marketing, right?
Maximizing profits (and innovation) over time may mean closing something profitable now, and focusing on new potential profits. Thats great.
I hate it. It means that I'll never be able to trust some new service they launch because (1) if I adopt it it will likely get killed and (2) even if they don't they are going to let it suffer a slow death.
I'm more than happy to wait for years if I have to in case something develops accidental mass market traction in which case Google will likely support it long term.
I wonder if Google realizes how much this works against them, without 'early adopters' you don't have much chance of success, even at Google's scale. Burn your early adopters often enough and you'll end up with unused new services.
I found it fun to use cassettes, laser discs, CDs, DVDs, mini discs, mp3 players even though I no longer use any of them. Also found it fun to go Atari -> Amiga -> DOS PC -> Windows. And Atari 2600 -> NES -> SNES+Genesis -> PS1 etc..
I agree it sucks when support ends but I enjoy it checking it out while it exists.
One major difference is that I can still use all those things you listed (and in many cases, do). I can't continue using Google Reader or Google Code.
There are alternatives, of course, but the burden is on me to migrate. When I'm forced to keep migrating away from Google products, I find it less and less appealing to continue using more of their products.
Why is Google the only acceptable vendor?
Yeah, great. Except for the users who Google got hooked on a given service, who then have troubles finding alternatives as Google tends to suck the oxygen out from the room whenever they release something.
They can't find someone to take their money in exchange for a useful service.
That isn't a Google problem. That's our opportunity. I can't think of a single company known for riding Google's coat tails. Why aren't people responding to the enormous wealth of Google by emulating them? We don't have to be beholden to a few huge tech companies there is space for so many more players.
I try to see things I can do when other people tell me a story about who is to blame for something. It's all a matter of framing.
Ad companies like Google tend to be winner take most markets. Thats why you see it referred to as the duopoly of Google and FB, together they have ~60% of the digital ad market.
This doesn't address the question:
Why didn't something pop up and eat up the success left in the wake of a market Google left, like reader or inbox or wave?
I would guess because those products weren't profitable on their own. They were propped up by Google's massive advertising business.
I am rather curious about Stradia's longevity.
I'm still very pessimistic about the network resources that they expect the average user to have. The recent hubbub was about places that have data caps. I'm still not convinced that the latency is there for an enjoyable experience. I'll be incredibly surprised if it isn't a complete flop.
Every time something like this comes up, I imagine a bunch of giddy "world-changers" sitting behind Mac Pros with Retina displays and T3 lines, building something that works great under those conditions, and then convincing each other that they've helped people over $16 microbrews.
I know this is a caricature but it's how I get my kicks.
To wit, the conditions that the engineers inhabit in their lives has basically zero resemblance with the technology experience of the vast majority of people. Designing websites for 4K screens only, expecting <20ms latency over home lines when everyone else in the house is streaming video to their own personal devices, etc. One thing we can do collectively as an industry is put in place guidelines which steer development to minimalism and attention to the resources available to the median user.
Most tech-company engineers have exactly the same infrastructure at home as everybody else. Comcast and the like, also mad about data caps, latency and DNS hijacking.
Most tech-company engineers don't live in bad parts of town nor in the countryside, so I have a hard time believing that.
The latency is interesting, most people can't see it or feel it if it's under 100ms or so. There's already a button press -> screen change latency of ~100 ms in most AAA games except for twitchy shooters
If you're more of a hardcore player, you may feel the extra latency as all your reflexes being off. It's harder to make jumps, perform combos, line up shots, etc.
In my case, I absolutely can't stand network streaming latency. Even 50ms is completely unacceptable to me outside of turn-based games, and I go out of my way to look into the input lag for any new monitor or TV I buy. BUT you might be different, you should give it a shot.
Stadia will be a free gaming service next year. If they launch a free to play game, people will switch internet provider for it.
I would happily switch my internet provider for it.
I would switch my internet provider for literally anything.
The problem is I live in the country's main technological hub (the bay area), and I fucking can't. It's infuriating.
I think anyone that would and more importantly can switch to better internet for a free to play game already have.
In many places in the US people already have the best internet that can be provided to their home, and it's not good enough.
> people will switch internet provider for it.
Ha-ha, I wish I could switch over from Comcast.
They can't innovate, despite all of their "talent"
Innovation usually takes a much longer timeline than just launching something and killing it with a year or two when it’s not sufficiently Google scale.
The world would have a lot less great products if this is how it was always done.
This is why startups continue to be the primary innovation source. They are willing to go through the hard grind to find product/market fit over multiple years.
Most of the products purchased by the big guys are at least 5-7yrs old (WhatsApp, YouTube, Waze, Looker, etc). There are some rare exceptions like Instagram and Android which were both 2yrs old at acquisition.
Isn‘t that exactly what X is doing though? Waymo started as a project in 2009 I believe. It wasn‘t anything commercial until recently.
That's because that talent isn't allowed to own anything. Imagine you know what to do and how to do it. You go to YC, present your idea and ask for some funding. And imagine they'd tell you that "Yea, we can pay you this fixed salary and see if your idea works. No, we get 100% rights. No, we won't share profits, but we'll up your salary if things go well. No, we can't tell you by how much." Who in their right mind agree on these terms? That's why employees don't share any really interesting ideas: they go to YC, get money and retain 93%. Google has the right people, but it's not really interested in any changes because ads work really well. Afaik, they even cancelled the 20% time.
Google is good at innovating in computer science and computer engineering. Google is not particularly good at innovating product ideas. This makes sense given how they find and hire talent.
But they are innovating. New products all the time.
They just aren't staying around to collect the (relative to Google) meager profits. I wish more companies knew when to call it quits.
They create products but lack the leadership needed to follow through when the initial exciting moments are over. I'd say that if you can't follow through on your innovations then you aren't good at innovating. They can do it on the tech side, lots of successful projects there.
> Our users tell us they find the Google Assistant to be smart, user-friendly, and reliable, and that’s so important for ambient technology. Interactions need to feel natural and intuitive. Here’s an example: if you want to listen to music, the experience should be the same whether you are in the kitchen, you are driving in your car, or hanging out with friends. No matter what you are doing, you should be able to just say the name of the song and the music just plays without you having to pull out a phone and tap on screens or push buttons.
This may be an unpopular sentiment, but at least for me, I find a certain indefinable pleasure in manual tasks, to a certain extent. Slipping a CD into a player or a cassette into a deck or having to browse through a shelf to find the book I want. I don't think people will realise the "ambience" of these minor things we do hundreds of times a day almost unconsciously until practically everything becomes voice/thought activated and almost anything you want is delivered right to where you are. I believe that there is a certain happy medium between entirely manual and being too automated. Obviously this will be different for different tasks but we must keep in mind that the aim of corporations will always be to make them fully automated because that way they and their services become indispensable for the world. Our aim should be to try to tread the happy medium where automation makes significant difference but does not turn us into instantly-gratified, grown-up children.
You raise a valid concern, but I think there's a stable equilibrium here. It seems to me that the current goals of ambient computing pretty much match the canonical utopian scifi vision; you can order the computer to look up information or play/display whatever media you want, but there are no little robots bringing coffee to your armchair. I don't think we risk automating so much that people (or, well, wealthy people at least) never have to stand up.
I wonder if this feeling plays into the comfort of noun-verb over verb-noun that is being discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21271212
There will always be a market for one man to foster another man's laziness.
Edit: Not sure how this is even debatable down-voters?
People really hate Google here. Look at this thread and the other about Soli. Not a single positive comment about Google. No wonder Google engineers have stopped posting on HN. Maybe Google truly is evil but I fail to see it personally.
It's a symptom of an underlying problem.
- companies used to respect us.
- computers used to belong to us.
The equation changed when companies found a way to charge advertisers big money by inverting these equations.
Google is just the poster child for all this, but there are lots of other players that have cashed in.
You are free to not use their services. People acting offended for using free services. Before you say "free" is not free, well no one pays for most web services. So this is an inherent human problem not one these companies created.
Well. How does Wikipedia survive? Or Archive.org? Or Open Streetmap? Maybe the people/haters don't even care so much about advertisements in general, but the sheer mass of them, which degrades the usability, and maybe some of the services aren't that good anymore in general, while having been better before? I remember the days i happily used Altavista Search instead of the Yahoo. Because Yahoo was spammed to death, while Altavista at the time wasn't.
It feels the same with Duck Duck Go vs. Google since at least 5 years now? I don't really care how it is financed in the background, i care about how much hassle it is to find something, or even being able to find it at all. Google fails there massively for me, and i wonder why that is? Maybe because it is Anglocentric? Or even US-centric? But then the same should apply to Duck Duck Go, which isn't the case, because it works fine for me. I know it's using inferior indices, but it doesn't matter when the better ones are so overblown that i fail to find the needle in the impossibly large haystack. I'm even using other search engines before i fall back to Google, in case of not finding something. Google has gone from something good to last ditch only for me.
That was for general search. Now to the maps. With the exception of satellite/air-imagery it leaves much to be desired, and that is the labeling of places. Which fails worldwide. That algorithm is just crap on higer zoom levels. At first i thought it would be because of my location, some country far away over the Atlantic in old Europe, but it's not. I recognized that while reading something about the history of building railroads trough the Rocky Mountains, and the Googlemaps made no sense at all, because it either omits small places altogether, or puts the labels where they absolutely don't belong. Bingmaps meanwhile were a joy to use, everything was there, at the right places, and it ran even faster! LOL?
Then there is this thing with business listings and reviews in the map which is useless in my locations. I don't read them anymore, because any i have read were wrong, or did otherwise not meaningfully apply. I don't know why that is, is it just vandalism from random people, coercion of services like Yelp, or whatver? I don't care anymore, because USELESS!
Then general accuracy about what is where, and how to get there in my favored modes of transport. In my locations Open Streetmaps wins. EVERY TIME! (I know that is not applicable in general, because coverage/accuracy thereof varies regionally)
What else? Hm. Youtube. What can i say? Expect to get dirty if walking into a market for stupid pigs. Though it has not only some rare, but many pearls. Just difficult to find them in all that stinking shit. Apart from that, what are they thinking if i'm listening to some ambient psychill/progressive psytrance mix which goes about 1 to 2 hours and they are interupting that with at least 4 adverts per hour for stuff which is totally unrelated and i have no interest in? Who thinks of something like that? Are they on crack?
Is there anything i like about Google? Yeah, i like EARTH. Glorious! My digital globe. Great. But i don't need that, it's more of a toy for me.
So, emperors new clothes for all the gaslighted androids, anyone? :-)
This is so true. Half of these are people openly claiming they hate it because they couldn't get in.
""" So “being helpful” is the company’s goal, not its mission statement. """
The goal derives from the mission statement; it's an implementation strategy for "universally accessible and useful."
But Google isn't making iformation "universally accessible and useful" anymore. Now they are "slurping up all the information in the universe, and doling out in controlled ways to maximize user engagement metrics and advertising revenue"
They used to call this "Ubiquitous Computing" https://www.wired.com/1994/02/parc/
> So the devices aren’t the center of the system, you are. That’s our vision for ambient computing.
The vision is correct but the naming is off. Something like “embodied computing” would convey the key difference better than “ambient”, namely that the user is at the center. And yes this is a fancypants way of saying wearables.
But this is a nice attempt from google to paint the future as an extension of something it is good at (managing lots of ambient cloud-like things) while downplaying that what we’re really talking about is wearables (not really a strong suit for Big G).
I wouldn‘t say wearables. More like device-agnostic. You are giving commands to a system. That system might literally be your surroundings in the future. Wearables, like contact lenses, might be a part of it. But so could sensors in a road or a smart window you walk past.
They are not really being helpful to me, when organizing the worlds information means, that all search results on page 1 are paid advertising.
> The first thing that is striking about this list is how many of the announcements won’t ship for quite some time.
Literally everything there ships in a month, dude.
Ambivalent Computing is the new auto completed mission statement. It replaced Don’t be Drivel.
Google hired away Oracle's President, not VP.
as someone who switched to an iphone yesterday after having using google flagship models since the nexus one, i agree that this is an important direction for google's product strategy, but i think they're playing catch up from far behind.
i remarked to my wife last night that the biggest difference in the ux between the two was that my android was always a phone, and this iphone has become a platform/ux that's larger than a single device, a whole set of humanistic little devices -- airpods and the home ipad in my case. i'd always thought i couldn't switch because i use google services, but those are largely commodities now -- i've got a wide range of good enough options for photos/music/email/cal/etc. -- the google android apps are a little better, but not enough so to make a difference. even siri has been good enough so far, though my queries aren't especially complicated.
Assistant is so far ahead.
That might very well be true that Google Assistant is better but there’s a certain class of user, like me, that finds voice interfaces obnoxious.
The first thing I do with a new phone is turn Siri off because I don’t want to use my phone that way. So it doesn’t matter to me which is better or which is worse.
However privacy is important to me so I use that as a driver of purchases.
If Assistant is that far ahead, then it's really funny because assistant is very disappointing. These companies are pushing voice onto the general public before it is ready to be actually useful. I got a free google home with something and half the time I try to use it I end up closing the conversation with something like "hey google you are completely useless".
When it comes to voice recognition and language modeling we are still rubbing sticks together to make fire. But Google and Amazon are marketing their voice products like it's a zippo lighter.
They really have a chicken and the egg problem. They need more data input to train their AI and make the service better, but they need the service to be better before more people will adopt it and feed data to train the AI.
Assistant easily recognizes voice and even has continued conversation mode. One data point isn't going to change that. If these weren't ready people wouldn't buy them in troves.
More people buy Alexa devices