from the how-many-programmers-does-it-take-to-change-a-light-bulb? dept.
A report from Business Insider claims that Google has axed "dozens" of employees from its laptop and tablet division. BI's sources describe the move as causing "roadmap cutbacks" and that Google will likely "pare down the portfolio" in the future.
[...] Google's Hardware division is run by Rick Osterloh and is expected to launch a game streaming console later this month. The division is responsible for the Pixel phones, Google Home speakers, the Chromecast, Google Wi-Fi, and lately, the Nest smart home division.
Why is Google having a hard time cracking the hardware market?
Related Stories
Google confirms its Pixelbook group has new laptops and tablets inbound
Last month, Business Insider reported that Google might be shifting employees out of the laptop and tablet division that brought us the premium, pricey Pixelbook and Pixel Slate, citing "roadmap cutbacks." But though Google originally declined to comment, the company now tells The Verge that its hardware division actually does have new laptops and tablets on the way.
While Google wouldn't talk details or timing, it did drop a big hint earlier today — as 9to5Google reports, the company led a session at its Cloud Next 2019 conference dubbed "Introducing Google Hardware for Business," where it suggested that a new device might help on-the-go employees in ways that the Pixelbook and Pixel Slate couldn't quite accomplish.
#g rumors death
Previously: Google Hardware Makes Cuts to Laptop and Tablet Development, Cancels Products
Google says it's done making tablets and cancels two unreleased products
Google will not be launching a sequel to last year's Pixel Slate tablet, according to Business Insider and Computer World, and will instead focus its Chrome OS hardware efforts on traditional laptop devices like the Pixelbook. "For Google's first-party hardware efforts, we'll be focusing on Chrome OS laptops and will continue to support Pixel Slate," a spokesperson told Business Insider.
[...] Google went so far as to reveal that it has axed two in-development tablet products, moving the employees who had been working on them to other areas of the company. (Most have apparently joined the Pixelbook team.) The tablets were both smaller in size than the Pixel Slate and were planned for release "sometime after 2019." But disappointing quality assurance testing results led Google to completely abandon both devices. Google informed employees of its decision on Wednesday.
Also at TechCrunch.
Previously: Google Neglecting or Exiting the Android Tablet Business?
Google Hardware Makes Cuts to Laptop and Tablet Development, Cancels Products
Google Pixelbook Tablets and Laptops: Not Dead
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @12:06AM (1 child)
Celebrity endorsements. If Kanye used a Google Chromebook, millions of brainless twits would buy one too. If Kanye used Google+ then Facebook would be out of business by now. Unfortunately Google management are racist and unwilling to do business with successful African American musicians.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday March 14 2019, @01:43PM
Some of us did not need Kanye to convince us to buy a Pixelbook. But no doubt Kanye's endorsement would inspire more of us to buy them.
Infinity is clearly an even number since the next higher number is odd.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday March 14 2019, @12:10AM (12 children)
Same reason that while I signed up for Google+, I never actually used it:
I do not want just one company in control of my life. For hardware, we have apple, we have samsung, we have acer. But for 24/7 surveillance, we have google.
Everyone who works for social change needs a manifesto. My much older and admittedly far-wiser mentor Stefan Pietrzak Youngs advised me not to publish the Soggy Manifesto until _after_ the close of its Indiegogo, so I won't, but I will tell you the TL;DR:
- In much the same way as that the recycling industry mantra asserts that "A big enough pile of anything is worth something", then if curated lists become widespread and popular, the significance of web search would wither away to the point that it will be merely useful again, in the way that altavista was, rather than a central core of our every waking moment.
In discussing this with my business partner and fellow Institute Alumnus Rod Schmidt, as we were at the time dining in a restaurant I suggested the example of used restaurant supplies - five gallon stainless steel soup pots and the like. Whenever a restaurant closes up as they so often do, they generally sell their cooking utensils and such fixtures as tables and chairs to a used restaurant supply shop. Newly opened restaurants in turn equip themselves by purchasing these used supplies.
After all: stainless steel soup pots last until the end of Time.
However, as this is a very traditional brick and mortar business, it is uncommon for such shops to be online at all, and exceedingly rare for them to be actual eCommerce sites. It's impractical to ship such large items that are purchased in quantity, rather what you want is a delivery truck or cargo van.
Thus, your mission should you decide to accept it is to compile a curated list of all the world's used restaurant supply stores.
It's a beautiful day, so I'm going back to bed as the sunshine, she burns.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @01:03AM
"A big enough pile of anything is worth something"
Not always. For example a horder house.
A big pile of curated items though.... For example 10k in video games.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @01:07AM
Sent from my iPhone.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Thursday March 14 2019, @01:30AM (8 children)
"IF". We already had that battle with Yahoo, which had a bunch of nice curated lists. That battle was lost almost twenty years ago.
A good search engine can crank out on the fly a list of those that is adequate enough without requiring someone's life to be consumed by that task.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday March 14 2019, @01:38AM (7 children)
Yahoo Ate The Seed Corn when it accepted venture capital. This our curated lists must be compiled entirely by amateurs, for purposes of at most drawing organic links. In my own case, Soggy Jobs results in client inquiries to Portland Custom Software Development as the two sites are highly interlinked.
Consider IMDB; that was Just Some Guy's Hobby in the beginning, as evidenced by Wayback.
In the specific case of soggy jobs, I am _uncorruptible_, in that there is no amount of money - not even one billion - that could possibly convince me to favor any one company over the others. No sponsored links, no image links, not even such enhanced links as boldface.
Now I do not expect others to do without, however with respect to _tech_ recruitment to be a Saint is crucial due to the endemic corruption of the body shops.
I'll need to stop posting for a while as I just now polished off a Hershey's Cocoa-Laced Plate Of Pancakes:
The Theobromine is coming on. This is just gonna have to rock.
But for the case of restaurant supplies, that would work well for, say, a young culinary school graduate, to help them find work by placing their resume and some samples of their own original recipes on the same site.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 14 2019, @02:05AM (4 children)
While true, the curated lists were already obsoleted by Google search. Sorry, but automation of web search remains a vast improvement over what humans could do even if we threw armies of volunteers at the problem.
It's not merely web search, but provides a lot of data beyond that. And it works great with all of the common search engines.
An even better example is Wikipedia.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @03:12AM (3 children)
Absolutely this.
A person can not keep up with a machine that makes 'ok' lists.
When I first used yahoo. It was amazing. But the web was smallish and the high points were readily visible with or without yahoo. It got wildly larger and the 'good stuff' was not as easy to find. The spiders showed up. They did ok. Then google showed up. It blew everyone away.
Curated would fill a nice niche. But it will never compete in any meaningful way with a spider bot the size of google. A blended thing could be interesting though.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Thursday March 14 2019, @04:55AM
I don't know. I preferred AltaVista for a long time after most people were saying that Google was the right approach. But then I like to search by complex boolean expressions.
Unfortunately, AltaVista didn't grow with the web, and Google did. So eventually I was forced to change over. But AltaVista returned results that were more precisely what I was looking for...if they found anything.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday March 14 2019, @11:47AM (1 child)
The problem with Yahoo was that while categorized - soggy jobs is categorized geographically - it was not _curated_.
What's more, it was general purpose. That's what you wanted at the time but no longer, hence soggy jobs is specifically for employment and my hypothetical restaurant supply list is specifically for the hospitality industry.
Such curation must therefore be performed by experts; for the most part, serious hobbyists would do fine, or those who actually work in the industry. Again in the case of yahoo, even if it were not a general purpose list it was prepared by regular computer industry employees and not by application-area specialists.
Thus I expect IMDB's uncommon success is due to it having remained in control of entertainment industry insiders: it's not a sight for stars, it's a site for my friends Ted Arabian, Tammy Troglin (Tammy Klein) and Darryl Ferrucci.
If you do an image search for Darryl you'll turn up his deadly-serious photo holding a big pistol that looks rather like Dirty Harry's Magnum. That photo had me puzzled as I had not been previously aware that he had ever been an actor: he only did so as a very young man, now he's a photographer and graphic artists. While for reasons I am as yet not privy to my old friend is bitter, disappointed and depressed, when he and I first met during the Dot-Com Boom he was the most happy, friendly helpful guy.
But a Magnum?
Hollywood!
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 14 2019, @05:08PM
I disagree. Yahoo's approach checks off the boxes.
Don't buy it. Expert knowledge would not be that useful in the case of Yahoo's lists. It's not going to make you more likely to know of obscure websites or add that much in evaluating the quality of known websites. And the kinds of expert knowledge that would apply, said computer industry employees could obtain just as well.
As to your examples, Soggy Jobs sounds like it might be useful as a curated target for a search engine to index, but not the case of the restaurant supply list (one doesn't need to be much of an expert to understand when people are selling restaurant supplies and there's a fair bit of turnover, particularly from businesses that occasionally sell such things, but not on a regular basis).
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Thursday March 14 2019, @02:34AM (1 child)
Is that a typo or do you have a meaning for that word that sets it apart from the usual incorruptible?
Ummm... really? How about some modicum amount of $$$$$ pussy [soylentnews.org]?
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday March 14 2019, @04:01AM
Despite my great passion for writing, I do have an odd problem with spelling:
It's easy for me to become completely convinced that an incorrect spelling is actually the correct one, thereby leading to for example my K5 and Reddit nick of "RepeatibleHairstyle".
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @03:58AM
"I do not want just one company in control of my life."
if only that applied to government...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @12:39AM (2 children)
I'm not sure why anyone is really surprised. Google's core business is search and advertising. Anything that isn't directly related to that typically lasts about 4 years and then gets the axe.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @01:00AM
The same reason Verizon failed at being a media/advertising company. It is not their nature.
It is 100% clear what the bread and butter is. Advertising. Anything that does not make that better is cut eventually. Just like verizon is a phone company through and through.
Take apple for example. They make computers. It is what they do. They pivoted to making ... computers for your pocket.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday March 17 2019, @02:54AM
https://chromeunboxed.com/google-laptop-tablet-team-shift-hardware-plans/ [chromeunboxed.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nerdfest on Thursday March 14 2019, @01:17AM (2 children)
I've actually been pretty happy with their hardware products. Pixel phones, Chromecasts, Chromebooks, Google home. They're all the best at what they do or close to it. The software and service side of things is a total clusterfuck. Google Plus, Allo, Duo, stuff in Google Suites not working with Google Assistant, etc. I had the "catch-all" bin of my suites email bouncing messages rather than forwarding them to an address. I would fucking *love* if their software and services were up to the quality of their hardware.
I had a chat with my mom today, and she was having trouble with the iPad she got for Christmas, and setting something up in iTunes. Six different supposedly Apple users, and the online help couldn't make it work, until a friend got it set up for her.
I think it's all a sign that the incompetent are taking over and driving us to Idiocracy.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday March 14 2019, @01:42AM
The FAA grounded the 737 8 and 9.
My reading of the preliminary investigations leads me to suggest it was a Software Problem [warplife.com]
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @03:11AM
Software and services are going downhill. The use of H1B visa holders in software and services is going up.
Correlation? Or is that one of those badthoughts I keep being yelled at for?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @01:59AM (1 child)
Google is associated with free stuff in most people's minds. Search engine, youtube, browsers, email. Free=Cheap. Google hardware=more expensive than apple (at least, to most people, because they're getting phones through contract rather than paying outright) without the "everybody else is doing it" allure. Also android="cheap and shitty" to the man-on-the-street, chromebooks="cheap and shitty". Premium android phones and chromebooks that are expensive don't even get a second look.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday March 14 2019, @02:47PM
Other companies have been putting out Chromebooks in the price/spec range of Pixelbook (various options from Acer, HP, and others). Google isn't the only game in town if you want a premium Chromebook.
My $100 machine works well, and the 2 GB of RAM actually works better now after OS updates than it used to a couple years ago. But I will be looking to quadruple that RAM at some point. With the price of DDR4 RAM crashing this year, I might have some good, cheap options by next year.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @02:40AM (1 child)
Qualcomm's are overpriced due to targeting the much more lucrative smartphone market while Intel is failing to deliver in price, quality or quantity. It became pretty obvious with the Pixel slate when they put a cheap under-performing Celeron in a $600 (+$200 for a keyboard) tablet and just couldn't match the iPad. Moreover there was the organizational failure that actually allowed such a turd to reach production... I mean, that alone merits the disbanding of the groups involved in the Q&A process at least. And that's still discounting the buggy and slow software...
Anyhow, they're still working on Fuchsia and stuff so they'll need hardware guys around. But in the next couple of years there won't be anything for them to do in the laptop/tablet world.
(Score: 2) by Absolutely.Geek on Thursday March 14 2019, @07:34PM
Google used to make the Nexus phones via hardware partners....these were the best android phones of their respective generations. Google needs to bring back the Nexus line; make good phones at a reasonable price; cranking out a Pixel 3 64GB at NZ$1,170 months after release is just stupid; i got my Nexus 5 for around $500 a month after release.
Google needs to bring back the Nexus Phones. Google is a software company the Nexus phones showed off the software at a reasonable price.
My phones over the years
Nexus One (I miss the little roller ball); but had a flaky touch screen sensor so the multitouch never worked correctly.
HTC One S; great phone was a bit expensive; hated the software so replaced it with Cyanogenmod quite qucikly
Nexus 5; best phone ever; power button failed; my partner is still using her one
Nexus 5X; great radio; I got reception in more places then the N5
Huawei P20 Pro; hate the software; hardware is great; running Nova launcher but need to look at some custom ROM
Don't trust the police or the government - Shihad: My mind's sedate.
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Thursday March 14 2019, @05:49AM (4 children)
Because they take mediocre to good hardware and saddle it with a truly crapulent operating system.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Thursday March 14 2019, @01:24PM (3 children)
ChromeOS is Linux done right (when sandboxed Android and Linux applications are enabled by default).
Probably Windows will follow suit within the next few years.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Thursday March 14 2019, @01:56PM (2 children)
ChromeOS is at least Linux done for the common man. Especially when Android and Linux applications are available.
Windows will try this and fail. The ENTIRE and ONLY value proposition of Windows is to be able to run the legacy software. If it doesn't do that, then why have Windows? See the failure of various ARM based Windows. "Oh, it won't run the software I already own? Then why did they call it Windows?" Now if it CAN run legacy software and be secure and sandboxed, then it would appear to be Windows that maybe only crashes one application at a time without infecting the entire machine.
One of the other things about ChromeOS and to a lesser extent Android is that they take security seriously from the get go -- where Windows has always had security as a bolt on afterthought. Security wasn't in the thinking of the basic design. The whole idea of a user visible global directory is a flaw. That application developers are allowed to develop "setup" installer / uninstallers is a major flaw. Install / remove should be part of the OS and applications are PASSIVE in merely CONFORMING to the specification to become installed or removed. I could go on.
Infinity is clearly an even number since the next higher number is odd.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday March 14 2019, @02:57PM (1 child)
I guess the question here is: Which OS(es) will have the best compatibility with Windows x86 applications?
Microsoft has kneecapped itself with lame attempts like Windows RT. Windows Lite [soylentnews.org] will probably have some similarly absurd limitations.
If a decently-speced Chromebook or Ubuntu laptop with WINE can run certain Windows applications better than Windows can, Microsoft might have a big problem.
On the other side, you have Windows Subsystem for Linux. It has some problems but they could be worked out.
Finally, you have the possibility of dual-booting Windows 10 on Chromebooks [soylentnews.org], which may or may not be a boon for Microsoft.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday March 14 2019, @03:17PM
I have not personally tried this, but . . .
RIGHT NOW on a Pixelbook (eg a Chromebook with Android) there is an Android app for Crossover Wine. That is a commercial version of Wine as an Android app. They make it easy to install and run Windows applications. Especially a fairly long list of recognized ones.
You can run Windows apps (in theory) on your (Android) smartphone -- but this would be much more suited to a Chromebook running old Windows apps better than modern Windows does.
Infinity is clearly an even number since the next higher number is odd.