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bigkoi t1_j5evpmb wrote

I imagine Area 120 must have been expensive to maintain with few projects with an actual pipeline.

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thruster_fuel69 t1_j5fhk4h wrote

Innovation is usually the first to go, but for Google it's a surprising move.

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Last-Caterpillar-112 OP t1_j5fl379 wrote

In Google’s culture, innovation means the latest shiny thing that caught the engineer’s short attention span. Most of these products are completely useless with no perceptible use case, even though they may be “super exciting”. Once it is partly built, customer response is underwhelming, and the engineer moves on to the next gimmick.

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thruster_fuel69 t1_j5flaqi wrote

That is the way, yes. I once imagined starting a business around one of their experiments, very glad I didn't.

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existentialstix t1_j5i2auq wrote

If I may ask what was their experiment?

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thruster_fuel69 t1_j5i2maw wrote

I forget the name now, years ago, but it was a browser api that could detect nearby iot devices. It was super cool, probably about to be too spammy or whatever. They never really announced it though, just let it starve until a few developers did their own thing.

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existentialstix t1_j5i2vfj wrote

Ah good old IoT experiments back in the day

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thruster_fuel69 t1_j5i2zu1 wrote

I had my phone going through DC collecting pings off everyone's android devices. Maybe I killed it who knows 🤷‍♂️

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claimTheVictory t1_j5hyn14 wrote

Throw it over the wall and provide no real marketing or product development, that's one way to churn through billions of dollars.

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nowaijosr t1_j5jep1u wrote

That’s not engineers making that decision, its D/C level throwing it at PMs.

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bigkoi t1_j5fivv9 wrote

I believe the decision on area 120 was more about it's efficacy. Google has plenty of innovation departments.

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nowaijosr t1_j5jelp9 wrote

Like Stadia… oh

Google Glass…

Google Now

… Google Cloud?

wait… what have they actually made in house that wasnt a failure?

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