Either it's no longer a priority and then you should cut 100% / terminate the product.
Or you can't afford the cash, but that doesn't check out here.
Or it's still a priority but then you just made execution wayyy slower.
It's hard to understand how an OS project gets to 400 people and then to 336 people. It doesn't sound like it'll help get to success. Armchair CEO predicts Fuchsia will not be able to take on a big launch crunch and will join Stadia in the graveyard of doomed investments that ran for way too long.
> Either it's no longer a priority and then you should cut 100% / terminate the product.
> It doesn't sound like it'll help get to success.
Fuchsia is in production; in people's homes today. You can't kill the whole project without a plan for those devices. What if there is a bug in the kernel? Who's going to fix those devices, who's going to ensure a security update comes out?
> Why cut 16% of a thing?
Well, maybe you realize that 336 people is enough? Or you cut 16% of the scope. Or you want to kill the project over the next year, but you need people there to help kill it gracefully, without jeopardizing a bunch of in-prod devices.
> it's still a priority but then you just made execution wayyy slower.
> you can't afford the cash
Fuchsia is in prod, but there is realistically not much google can do with it. Its in prod on a few devices, and based on leaks on HN/media, that may increase. But that doesn't mean its anywhere near a new alternative to linux/android. Maybe they realized that they can't afford to build a new full-feature operating system that they'll never use for anything more than a smart speaker, so they're cutting 16+% of the scope.
Rumors I've heard from contacts in google is that more layoffs are coming across the year. 16% could be the biggest chunk they can take out at once without jeopardizing too much "bus factor". Fuchsia may get cut another 16% in 6mo. If they're de-prioritizing all non-smart-speaker utility, then they may be able to cut 50% over the long run, without "graveyard"ing it.
Personally, I agree that it doesn't make sense to maintain a custom OS over a linux distro if it isn't going places. They used to want to grow in-house knowledge and research on operating systems, but I bet those days are over now. I hope more organizations started to invest in fuchsia before it dies inside google.
> Fuchsia is in production; in people's homes today. You can't kill the whole project without a plan for those devices.
Those devices never used to run Fuchsia, they ran the Chromecast linux distrib. When I left that team half the devices (the small ones) were being re-flashed with Fuchsia, but the big ones were still running Chromecast. The UI layer was the same (Flutter-based) on both and a consumer can't tell the difference. There were no feature advantages to the Fuchsia transition. (In fact the opposite since a bunch of stuff [e.g. accessibility features] had to be rewritten from scratch)
I'm sure some stuff has bitrotted, but last I looked Chromecast was still a thing, so the OS distrib is still there and shipping on devices. And it will still run on those devices in the field.
Not actually suggesting this as a course of action, but I think you're wrong that they have no alternative to keeping Fuchsia. It would actually be very easy to kill it. It was super late rolling out on the Home Hub, added nothing consumers didn't have already, and would not be noticed when it was gone.
Besides there was always a political turf war about those display devices in which certain product teams (with the ear of people higher up) really thought they should be running Android. Unfortunately Android was a pig and couldn't reasonably perform on the bargain-basement SoC that was used. If Fuchsia was gone, Android would take over.
> I hope more organizations started to invest in fuchsia before it dies inside google.
I hope they don't. There is no incentive to contribute to such a project where you have 0 influence - especially when it is steered directly by a potential competitor. From Fuschia's governance page:
> Google steers the direction of Fuchsia and makes platform decisions related to Fuchsia. While Googlers contribute substantially to Fuchsia’s code base, the Fuchsia project encourages contributions from anyone, not just from Googlers [1].
Why would any other tech company contribute to something like this?
I worked briefly on Fuchsia and LK (little kernel), years ago, as a contributor.
First of all, Fuchsia is SMALL. I mean it could easily be maintained and developed by 50 people. The kernel is tiny despite being of many modules and so is the application layer. I don't see any problems wit the 16% lay off.
>Fuchsia is in production; in people's homes today. You can't kill the whole project without a plan for those devices. What if there is a bug in the kernel? Who's going to fix those devices, who's going to ensure a security update comes out?
Given google's track record (cutting that RSS feed) wouldn't surprise me they would just cut the whole project. They main bread and butter is somewhere else. It is time to move away from this company product.
Ok maybe not 100% but 300 people aren't needed to do the occasional security patch for some kind of smart speaker. Sounds like the future of this project is towards the trashcan then.
> Maybe they realized that they can't afford to build a new full-feature operating system that they'll never use for anything more than a smart speaker, so they're cutting 16+% of the scope.
An OS that is able to run the Chrome Browser? [0] The code to make this function is already there and I think this effort is more than just for smart speakers or Nest devices.
My understanding is that a large chunk of the Fuchsia team is dedicated to experimentation. It’s like asking why Microsoft laid off part of their Microsoft Research team: it’s likely many of those experimental projects weren’t paying off and now the project’s direction is being pared down to known needs. Additionally, probably only 50-75 of those engineers are considered “critical”, with the rest being used to alleviate load and accelerate velocity (if it’s like any other large incubation/startup team).
But what experiments did they do? Microsoft's Fuschia-like OS research project generated some interesting blog posts and research papers, it had a genuinely very different take on what an OS should look like. Fuschia seems like an ordinary microkernel written in C++.
Maybe. Unless it's a separate area that is purely speculative (within a business that is already a long shot itself), losing >10% of an org with no notice, no knowledge transfer, is a hard thing to adjust to, even if it's some moderately useful support function.
It's all politics. Top level leadership is triangulating between keeping investors happy and the business running. Product Area leads saying "we need to keep headcount to fend of competitor X" or "to stop customer Y from losing trust and abandoning us" (although that last one clearly doesn't work at Google).
The actual headcount number a team has at is the integral of a hundred political decisions, not any kind analysis of what headcount actually makes sense.
To play devil's advocate, in the case of a company like Google, it's unclear whether or not execution actually gets much slower. From what I hear the amount of people coasting or even distracting teammates with negativity is pretty high, cutting such people might even speed up execution in the net.
As for Fuchsia as a product I'm not really sure what exactly it is so if possible I'd love a 411 from any HNers with know-how.
From my contacts at Google, the cuts don't appear to be strongly correlated to poor performance, rest & vest attitude, negativity, etc. It has been messaged by company leaders as "role eliminations", not as "dropping underperformers", so it doesn't give anyone a reason to work harder.
> it's still a priority but then you just made execution wayyy slower.
I think in this case, letting go of the most senior decision makers may actually speed things up. Even letting go of senior talent may cause the upcoming engineers to grow faster and better. New nimble team that much rather fail fast than ponder long over what succeeds.
This might be a positive pruning. But yes letting go of staff is a short term loss. Hoping for the best in their future.
There was alot of rumours that they would eventually make this their mobile device OS. By cutting 16%, you're probably realigning goals of the project, and I wouldn't be surprised if those 16% cut are to shift away from making this to mobile.
Fuchsia is cool from an OS perspective but isn’t the problem that there simply isn’t a business case for it?
I see people comparing it to Chrome but the business case for Chrome is massive; protecting Google’s search and advertisement surveillance monopoly by avoiding to have to pay Apple and others big bucks to have Google as default search engine.
The business case is obvious: Google has little control over Android due to historical licensing and external dependencies (Java is the big one). Building their own OS with its own user space gives them the same control Apple has over iOS.
In addition, the team working on it has made the argument that there is a technical benefit and that Linux + ART has failed to scale (to their needs).
You combine both of those factors and you end up with a bespoke kernel, with a home brew environment (Dart-first, with Rust as a complement) and an Android ABI abstraction or virtualization (similar to Microsoft’s approach) to run legacy software until it’s phased out.
Google is in full control of android. Android open source is much more about making it hard for new competitors to emerge (as they would have to compete with something that is free). Fuchsia has similar open source components.
From a consumer (and therefore business) perspective Android is useless without Google mobile services. Just witness what happened Huawei to phone sales when they were forced over to Android open source on nearly perfect hardware.
> The business case is obvious: Google has little control over Android due to historical licensing and external dependencies (Java is the big one). Building their own OS with its own user space gives them the same control Apple has over iOS
If that was the goal they don't need to make new kernel to make new userspace.
They can just make new userspace, like they did when they created the android in the first place.
> due to historical licensing and external dependencies (Java is the big one).
If this is a big reason, then a big reason is eliminated since Google has won the lawsuit against Oracle and have moved to OpenJDK so the licensing concerns are moot.
Here you have simply assumed that the business case for Fuchsia must be externally visible to consumers. Why assume this? The overwhelming majority of Google's software runs on Google's computers and you have never seen it. Perhaps they would consider it a success even if the only role for Fuchsia is in their datacenters. There are abundant reasons why Google would want a non-Linux operating system internally.
When gVisor was released to the public, my conspiracy theory was that the future of Google Container Engine was gonna be gVisor-on-Fuchsia instead of current gVisor-on-Linux. Consumers couldn't tell the difference, gVisor is the one implementing the user-visible "Linux" on both.
(What's visible of Fuchsia doesn't quite support running on "big computers" well enough for that to be true...)
> here are abundant reasons why Google would want a non-Linux operating system internally.
You may be in the right, but I personally don't see no reason for it. Linux is the best supported operating system in the world and Google always has the option to alter the OS if need be.
I do believe Fuchsia is vastly more secure and stabler than Linux, which could be a benefit, but Google isn't exactly being pilfered by miscreants on a daily basis, so that benefit is in doubt.
And eventually all the Java on Android - which apart from the issue around licensing would hopefully make the experience of using Android phones better.
But maybe they fear stepping away, because that can mean less influence in the Linux sphere and possible rise of competition. And since the Oracle decision, they don't have to make any moves that would jeopardize the status quo. If they allow things to stay as they are, they are arguably fine. They can afford to move slowly and extra carefully or not at all. Fuchsia seems more about extra insurance, just in case.
Worth pointing out that at the time Google first launched Chrome the business case didn't seem clear. The product itself was compelling, but it wasn't clear what Google would do with it and why. (Now we know)
There was plenty of discussion on this topic at the time, and there seemed to be a rough consensus: chrome was the google vote for choosing the direction of the www.
As other voters, we had internet explorer, where Microsoft basically decided to strangle the web and end evolution after it won the browser war, just to keep windows relevant. We had firefox, where mozilla is forever on life support and never very well managed. We had safari, only a valid choice in the apple world. So google's survival depended on the goodwill of an enemy actively trying to kill them, a drunk zombie, and an at best uninterested party.
In this world, google brought much better security, much faster javascript execution speeds, much better rendering. All of these were building blocks for a higher level of web-based applications.
I think everyone was surprised about how good chrome fulfilled its role. The desktop never got its central role back, to the point that electron a.k.a. chrome is now the dominant desktop gui paradigm for microsoft itself.
I think it was pretty obvious at the time. I don't recall anyone being surprised by it, except maybe how large the budget was. Google was paying for every search referral from browsers since nearly the start. If you search with their browser, they don't pay anyone else.
Yeah and Google’s motto used to be “don’t be evil”. Now it is a bit more like “yeah we are a nasty monopoly that spies on people, watcha gonna do about it”.
Times have changed but maybe the underlying factors driving the business were always the same.
I see Fuchsia's benefit mostly in security and stability. Linux is one big blob with potentially huge security holes in it, many of which simply haven't yet been discovered (except maybe by intelligence agencies).
Fuchsia's architecture is extremely resilient and secure by design and there's very little change culprits will be able to breach its security.
> At that time, Fuchsia was never originally about building a new kernel. It was actually about an observation I made: that the Android team had their own Linux kernel team, and the Chrome OS team had their own Linux kernel team, and there was a desktop version of Linux at Google [Goobuntu and later gLinux], and there was a Linux kernel team in the data centers. They were all separate, and that seems crazy and inefficient.
I have to disagree with Chris on this, it allows these teams to tune their products exactly to their needs. If they wanted to streamline this process then the most logical step would be to upstream their patches (which the Android team has been doing [1]).
Seems like the XKCD "Standards" meme stikes again [2]
From my own experience working there... On the embedded side the problem was that the various consumer device Linux distributions really reflected org-chart boundaries, not really technical/engineering requirements.
And this impacted velocity and quality.
And yes, Fuchsia was not the answer here. Rewriting a bunch of stuff in Fuchsia just meant that the existing Chromecast distrib got neglected, bitrotted, and mistreated and failed to improve. But AFAIK it still hasn't gone away -- and likely won't -- so was that smart?
Multiple distributions for specific needs are fine. Multiple distributions for political reasons is something else.
I wonder if all these massive amounts of layoffs from huge companies are designed to flood the employment markets with candidates and drive wages down long term?
this is definitely by design, but it is driven by public policy (reducing inflation), not private companies conspiring against their employees.
the worst possible thing from a central bank perspective is a wage-price spiral where employees can negotiate wage increases that keep up with inflation. increasing interest rates is designed to depress wages by cooling the employment market, which decreases income, which decreases spending, which then decreases the rate of inflation.
> I wonder if all these massive amounts of layoffs from huge companies are designed to flood the employment markets with candidates and drive wages down long term?
Massive? Head count is back to like it was on 2021, for all of the major tech companies.
What other explanation is there? The layoffs are Google were not tied to employee perf metrics. The company is still wildly profitable. The severance package costs are high, and they will likely hire in various places by the end of year or into next, undoing much of the layoffs, so costs won't really be reduced by much if any.
These layoffs were coordinated across our entire industry, starting with Twitter, to bring discipline and downward wage pressure to tech workers. Musk at least made some (implausible) theatre out of supposedly "measuring" employees to justify his moves. Sundar/Larry/Sergey just used a glorified random number generator.
To put things into an even better perspective, even if Google's revenue and net profit fall to pre-Covid levels, they would still be making about:
- $800k in revenue
- $200k in net profit
per employee.
And this is assuming in 2023 they drop to pre-Covid levels, which will probably not happen since the world has changed for good. So more realistically they'll be over:
I'm sympathetic to all those who lost their jobs, but I'm a bit baffled that 400 people were working on this. Can someone enlighten me as to why so much headcount was required by this project?
It's a microkernel-based capability-based object-oriented operating system. They're trying to make commercially viable what is essentially a research project.
I hope I'm just living under a rock but this made me realize I haven't heard anything about Fuchsia in years.
Reading the article now it seems to be the case that I have not been living under a rock, and they are just tight lipped about it. If it's being used for nest devices today then I imagine it is finding it's niche.
I was hoping we'd get a usable Capability Based OS soon. Genode is still in the works. I hear that there are some features slowly showing up in iOS and Android.
WebAssembly is still a hopeful, they haven't gutted the security in WASI yet.
There was another group inside Google that shipped something based on Genode.
The most valuable thing for the community to extract from projects like these would be capability based drivers, ideally on top of seL4.
The choice to not use seL4 as a base for Fuchsia is also confusing. It lends credence to the idea that Fuchsia is a project to retain engineers, rather than to build a solid OS. I think it would be possible for a team like the Fuchsia team to build a better platform than Genode, but starting from scratch without seL4 is unlikely to produce anything better. They definitely didn't come up with a better security model, or IPC performance.
The idea of capabilities is so foundational, and yet so obscure, on my darker days it seems like there's an active conspiracy to keep it out of general awareness.
Readit News
Either it's no longer a priority and then you should cut 100% / terminate the product.
Or you can't afford the cash, but that doesn't check out here.
Or it's still a priority but then you just made execution wayyy slower.
It's hard to understand how an OS project gets to 400 people and then to 336 people. It doesn't sound like it'll help get to success. Armchair CEO predicts Fuchsia will not be able to take on a big launch crunch and will join Stadia in the graveyard of doomed investments that ran for way too long.
> It doesn't sound like it'll help get to success.
Fuchsia is in production; in people's homes today. You can't kill the whole project without a plan for those devices. What if there is a bug in the kernel? Who's going to fix those devices, who's going to ensure a security update comes out?
> Why cut 16% of a thing?
Well, maybe you realize that 336 people is enough? Or you cut 16% of the scope. Or you want to kill the project over the next year, but you need people there to help kill it gracefully, without jeopardizing a bunch of in-prod devices.
> it's still a priority but then you just made execution wayyy slower.
> you can't afford the cash
Fuchsia is in prod, but there is realistically not much google can do with it. Its in prod on a few devices, and based on leaks on HN/media, that may increase. But that doesn't mean its anywhere near a new alternative to linux/android. Maybe they realized that they can't afford to build a new full-feature operating system that they'll never use for anything more than a smart speaker, so they're cutting 16+% of the scope.
Rumors I've heard from contacts in google is that more layoffs are coming across the year. 16% could be the biggest chunk they can take out at once without jeopardizing too much "bus factor". Fuchsia may get cut another 16% in 6mo. If they're de-prioritizing all non-smart-speaker utility, then they may be able to cut 50% over the long run, without "graveyard"ing it.
Personally, I agree that it doesn't make sense to maintain a custom OS over a linux distro if it isn't going places. They used to want to grow in-house knowledge and research on operating systems, but I bet those days are over now. I hope more organizations started to invest in fuchsia before it dies inside google.
Those devices never used to run Fuchsia, they ran the Chromecast linux distrib. When I left that team half the devices (the small ones) were being re-flashed with Fuchsia, but the big ones were still running Chromecast. The UI layer was the same (Flutter-based) on both and a consumer can't tell the difference. There were no feature advantages to the Fuchsia transition. (In fact the opposite since a bunch of stuff [e.g. accessibility features] had to be rewritten from scratch)
I'm sure some stuff has bitrotted, but last I looked Chromecast was still a thing, so the OS distrib is still there and shipping on devices. And it will still run on those devices in the field.
Not actually suggesting this as a course of action, but I think you're wrong that they have no alternative to keeping Fuchsia. It would actually be very easy to kill it. It was super late rolling out on the Home Hub, added nothing consumers didn't have already, and would not be noticed when it was gone.
Besides there was always a political turf war about those display devices in which certain product teams (with the ear of people higher up) really thought they should be running Android. Unfortunately Android was a pig and couldn't reasonably perform on the bargain-basement SoC that was used. If Fuchsia was gone, Android would take over.
I hope they don't. There is no incentive to contribute to such a project where you have 0 influence - especially when it is steered directly by a potential competitor. From Fuschia's governance page:
> Google steers the direction of Fuchsia and makes platform decisions related to Fuchsia. While Googlers contribute substantially to Fuchsia’s code base, the Fuchsia project encourages contributions from anyone, not just from Googlers [1].
Why would any other tech company contribute to something like this?
[1] https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/contribute/governance/govern...
First of all, Fuchsia is SMALL. I mean it could easily be maintained and developed by 50 people. The kernel is tiny despite being of many modules and so is the application layer. I don't see any problems wit the 16% lay off.
Yes, you can.
If small company can kill eye prosthetics project and leave people with implants without support, why does Google cannot kill thermostats project?
Google is known by killing projects which are still used by thousands, without any replacement.
looks at the graveyard of past Google projects
Which isn't to say you don't have a point, but Google do have form in killing stuff just like that.
Given google's track record (cutting that RSS feed) wouldn't surprise me they would just cut the whole project. They main bread and butter is somewhere else. It is time to move away from this company product.
> Maybe they realized that they can't afford to build a new full-feature operating system that they'll never use for anything more than a smart speaker, so they're cutting 16+% of the scope.
An OS that is able to run the Chrome Browser? [0] The code to make this function is already there and I think this effort is more than just for smart speakers or Nest devices.
[0] https://9to5google.com/2022/03/04/full-google-chrome-browser...
Deleted Comment
The actual headcount number a team has at is the integral of a hundred political decisions, not any kind analysis of what headcount actually makes sense.
I think this is a project that can meander rather than sprint, it's not that important to race to a finish line here.
As for Fuchsia as a product I'm not really sure what exactly it is so if possible I'd love a 411 from any HNers with know-how.
What's a 411?
I think in this case, letting go of the most senior decision makers may actually speed things up. Even letting go of senior talent may cause the upcoming engineers to grow faster and better. New nimble team that much rather fail fast than ponder long over what succeeds.
This might be a positive pruning. But yes letting go of staff is a short term loss. Hoping for the best in their future.
16% is approximately equal to one-sixth, expressed as a fraction.
I see people comparing it to Chrome but the business case for Chrome is massive; protecting Google’s search and advertisement surveillance monopoly by avoiding to have to pay Apple and others big bucks to have Google as default search engine.
In addition, the team working on it has made the argument that there is a technical benefit and that Linux + ART has failed to scale (to their needs).
You combine both of those factors and you end up with a bespoke kernel, with a home brew environment (Dart-first, with Rust as a complement) and an Android ABI abstraction or virtualization (similar to Microsoft’s approach) to run legacy software until it’s phased out.
From a consumer (and therefore business) perspective Android is useless without Google mobile services. Just witness what happened Huawei to phone sales when they were forced over to Android open source on nearly perfect hardware.
If that was the goal they don't need to make new kernel to make new userspace.
They can just make new userspace, like they did when they created the android in the first place.
If this is a big reason, then a big reason is eliminated since Google has won the lawsuit against Oracle and have moved to OpenJDK so the licensing concerns are moot.
Fuchsia is orthogonal to Java. They could switch the runtime to anything they wanted without going down to the OS if that was the priority.
(What's visible of Fuchsia doesn't quite support running on "big computers" well enough for that to be true...)
You may be in the right, but I personally don't see no reason for it. Linux is the best supported operating system in the world and Google always has the option to alter the OS if need be.
I do believe Fuchsia is vastly more secure and stabler than Linux, which could be a benefit, but Google isn't exactly being pilfered by miscreants on a daily basis, so that benefit is in doubt.
As other voters, we had internet explorer, where Microsoft basically decided to strangle the web and end evolution after it won the browser war, just to keep windows relevant. We had firefox, where mozilla is forever on life support and never very well managed. We had safari, only a valid choice in the apple world. So google's survival depended on the goodwill of an enemy actively trying to kill them, a drunk zombie, and an at best uninterested party.
In this world, google brought much better security, much faster javascript execution speeds, much better rendering. All of these were building blocks for a higher level of web-based applications.
I think everyone was surprised about how good chrome fulfilled its role. The desktop never got its central role back, to the point that electron a.k.a. chrome is now the dominant desktop gui paradigm for microsoft itself.
Here is one random example from 2008: https://channeldailynews.com/news/the-business-case-for-goog...
Times have changed but maybe the underlying factors driving the business were always the same.
Fuchsia's architecture is extremely resilient and secure by design and there's very little change culprits will be able to breach its security.
I have to disagree with Chris on this, it allows these teams to tune their products exactly to their needs. If they wanted to streamline this process then the most logical step would be to upstream their patches (which the Android team has been doing [1]).
Seems like the XKCD "Standards" meme stikes again [2]
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/android-to-take-an-u... [2] https://xkcd.com/927/
And this impacted velocity and quality.
And yes, Fuchsia was not the answer here. Rewriting a bunch of stuff in Fuchsia just meant that the existing Chromecast distrib got neglected, bitrotted, and mistreated and failed to improve. But AFAIK it still hasn't gone away -- and likely won't -- so was that smart?
Multiple distributions for specific needs are fine. Multiple distributions for political reasons is something else.
the worst possible thing from a central bank perspective is a wage-price spiral where employees can negotiate wage increases that keep up with inflation. increasing interest rates is designed to depress wages by cooling the employment market, which decreases income, which decreases spending, which then decreases the rate of inflation.
Massive? Head count is back to like it was on 2021, for all of the major tech companies.
These layoffs were coordinated across our entire industry, starting with Twitter, to bring discipline and downward wage pressure to tech workers. Musk at least made some (implausible) theatre out of supposedly "measuring" employees to justify his moves. Sundar/Larry/Sergey just used a glorified random number generator.
- $800k in revenue
- $200k in net profit
per employee.
And this is assuming in 2023 they drop to pre-Covid levels, which will probably not happen since the world has changed for good. So more realistically they'll be over:
- $1m in revenue
- $300k in net profit
also per employee.
Also, history rhymes:
https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/15/7554397/apple-google-inte...
Reading the article now it seems to be the case that I have not been living under a rock, and they are just tight lipped about it. If it's being used for nest devices today then I imagine it is finding it's niche.
Actually I think the original vision was to get rid of the Linux Kernel in Android and have everything 'googled'.
They wanted to go full vertical but then not sure why it was downsized to more embedded targets.
WebAssembly is still a hopeful, they haven't gutted the security in WASI yet.
The most valuable thing for the community to extract from projects like these would be capability based drivers, ideally on top of seL4.
The choice to not use seL4 as a base for Fuchsia is also confusing. It lends credence to the idea that Fuchsia is a project to retain engineers, rather than to build a solid OS. I think it would be possible for a team like the Fuchsia team to build a better platform than Genode, but starting from scratch without seL4 is unlikely to produce anything better. They definitely didn't come up with a better security model, or IPC performance.