I'd recommend folks read the last section of the announcement where these changes were announced [1]. The section is titled "Mission First", and I'm pretty sure the recent altercations at Google Cloud's offices over the past week [2] motivated much of the writing in this section. This seems like a stark change in how things happened at Google, and to put it explicitly in a blog was something I couldn't imagined to have happened in ~2017-2022.
> We have a culture of vibrant, open discussion that enables us to create amazing products and turn great ideas into action. That's important to preserve. But ultimately we are a workplace and our policies and expectations are clear: this is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics. This is too important a moment as a company for us to be distracted.
Honestly, good on them. Having a culture of honest and open discussion about work is important, but there's a very vocal minority in many companies that thinks their political opinions are both objective fact and the most important thing to discuss at any given work function.
When that kind of attitude seems to receive official support from the company it actually does make people with different political opinions feel unsafe at work. This is not okay, and it's not healthy for the company, and I'm glad to see Google finally pushing back against the idea that loud political fights are appropriate in the workplace.
When the mission is make money within the existing institutional frameworks it's much easier to be apolitical and that seems to be the change here. But when your culture is explicitly "make the world better" you can't avoid getting mixed up in political issues.
How the devs felt about police for example likely affected the maps feature for reporting cops on the road. Same with Google Maps history at abortion clinics. The read on various news organizations definitely affected the choices for Google News partnerships. How you feel about government surveillance and "the deep state" likely affected how they built their messaging apps. Even down to the sign-up form where you're asked your name/sex. A conservative Google would have made very different decisions.
It's really hard to do anything non-trivial that doesn't end up brushing up against political issues de jour.
I'm not so sure. You point to a vocal minority, I see something amiss for the company.
If I were "corporate" I would be asking myself why it is a group of my employees faced arrest, job loss to make a statement about company policies. I would want to know if it suggests a bigger problem down the road for the company.
I find the use of "this is a business" logic to dissuade political discussion about a company's own business practices to be extremely troubling. Yes, there can be a discussion about the proper way to have these conversations, but dismissing discussion of ethics with an attitude of "this is a business" has lead to some horrific outcomes throughout history.
TJ Watson (of IBM) had a similar "this is a business" outlook: “I’m an internationalist. I cooperate with all forms of government, regardless of whether I can subscribe to all of their principles or not.” IBM's machines were extremely important part of Nazi Germany's Holocaust efforts, and there is evidence that IBM was actively working with Nazi Germany after the invasion of Poland [1].
Anyone notice the last few days tons of people bringing up the IBM/Holocaust connection? I've seen maybe half a dozen people in different threads bring it up. It almost feels coordinated, like those are the marching orders that were given out somewhere: "If this topic comes up, compare it to IBM and the holocaust, make these points, etc."
Stepping past all the AI hype, as an engineer in what was Play/Android/Chrome, I'm excited about being closer to hardware. The fact that Pixel was in another division was always weird and felt like it was an artifact of legacy decisions rather than the right way for things to work today.
>The fact that Pixel was in another division was always weird
Why? Having a separate division also has upsides, like keeping it away from terrible exec interference.
A lot of products we take for granted today succeeded because they were a sort of skunkworks project away form the reach of the mothership that's full of execs who would have tried to push their own agenda in the product or shut it down due to their lack of vision.
The original PlayStation, first Xbox, DirectX, Gameboy, etc.
I think there is value in having core android team that focused on AOSP separate from the product oriented pixel or apps teams.
And yes, in the end everyone end up using GMS (besides those who are banned, ie. Huawei). But still, it's better to have a separation that is imperfect, vs not having one at all
> The fact that Pixel was in another division was always weird
Was there a mechanism to communicate this weirdness to decision-makers? In a company that is in control of all of its teams, what is stopping a faster reorg?
Yes this was a well understood phenomenon. These sorts of things grow slowly over time though, and the orgs are large, so understandable why it took a while.
It was probably kept apart while Google was deciding if Pixel was going to survive and to not antagonize 3rd party Android phone OEMs. But all that is more locked-in now.
So the team that is in charge of the OS which is licensed to Hardware vendors in the world is the same team that's in charge to create competing Hardware?
I'd say that creates a huge conflict of interest.
That's one of the big reasons why Nokia Series60 didn't take off as a licensed OS: Whatever Samsung or LG or Lenovo wanted to build on that platform to differentiate, they had to involve Nokia during the development (who then developed the needed OS-feature in parallel to the Nokia product that will make use of it).
Google is either very secure that their grip on all these HW-vendors is strong enough forcing them to stay, or they are no longer part of Google's long-term strategy for Android.
The first priority for Android is competing against iPhone. Any self-dealing to get Pixel to have more of the Android pie would be far down the list, and probably counter-productive. It was already possible under the previous structure anyway.
Correct, and it's clear that this isn't an outdated strategy from Google, just in the current cycle we saw Circle to Search launch on both Galaxy and Pixel, and most of the new AI stuff that differentiates Pixel is now coming to Galaxy as well. This might be a headscratcher if you think Google is trying to make Pixel the dominant Android phone, but that's not it. Google wants Android to be the dominant phone OS, and despite it being massively popular globally, in the US the numbers are dire, with 50-60% overall going to Apple, and as high as 80-90% of young people choosing iPhone. I love Pixel, but it accounts for approximately 5% of the market in the US, with Samsung at 22%. Those stats about young people nearly universally picking iPhone is a bad sign for Android and a bad sign for competition in the phone market as a whole.
That's the situation NOW, but it can certainly change in the future. Work with Google as a hardware vendor, grow the Android market with them, and eventually they don't need you and cut you out. It happens.
Conflict of interest is a human invention, and not a law of the universe. There is no "conflict" unless you see it as one.
You can play chess against yourself. AlphaGo can, because it wasn't brainwashed about this notion. ChatGPT can debate against itself. You can too, if you don't see it as a conflict. Humans might find it hard, only because they were brainwashed from a child that they need to pick sides. Your neural net is capable of operating on both sides simultaneously if you let it.
The market is big enough for Google to create hardware AND other companies to create hardware.
> The market is big enough for Google to create hardware AND other companies to create hardware.
You obviously didn't read the comment you're replying to. No one is challenging that.
Having the same TEAM in charge of the OS and in-house hardware is an entirely different story.
It's a conflict of interest because the person Samsung is talking to to have a feature implemented into the OS baseline may be the same person in charge of defining the competitive featureset for the next Google hardware.
Now this person knows that the product he and his team is designing will compete with a yet-to-be-announced Samsung-product with a new feature.
So his interest to support a licensee being successful with his product is in conflict with his interest to create a more successful competing product.
And even if he isn't, for SAMSUNG just the potential of this situation to happen can be enough to NOT cooperate with this team and scale back communications with the Android team as a whole.
>Conflict of interest is a human invention, and not a law of the universe. There is no "conflict" unless you see it as one.
That could be said for anything in the moral and judicial sphere. "There's no theft, property is a human invention", "There's no rape, animals don't have that concept", and so on.
> Conflict of interest is a human invention, and not a law of the universe.
Lucky for us, we're discussing this in the context of humans building stuff for other humans to buy in a human society with human governments and markets, not in some metaphysical 'but what does meaning means' context.
It feels like a large bundle to me, so they probably want to go for selling phones and computers much more heavily? Sounds interesting if you are okay with going all in with Google stuff, I'm not sure it's good news if you are using Android or Chrome otherwise.
Also, it feels like this merger will lead to a similar article to Hixie's in about 5 years:
> A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle management. Take XYZ, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it.
I attended the Android Dev summit a few years back, shortly after Flutter had made some public noise.
During a Q&A, I was literally laughed at when I asked the head of Android whether developers should take Flutter seriously. His eventual answer equated to "well Google is really big so we can't say".
I think that was the moment I understood just how deep the mismanagement at Google actually is. Just shocking.
None of this reorganization matters as long as the executive suite remains the same. Google's problem is top-down. This rearranging the deck chairs isn't going to cut it.
Much of Google's value proposition was in their ability to innovate. The current leadership has proven catastrophically inept at this. Without fresh leadership, Google is on its way to becoming some mid-tier ad placement agency at best. Engineering excellence won't save them as long as the top leadership is incapable of adjusting to circumstances.
There's still time for Google to leverage its competence at managing large infrastructure to regain its position as a leading technology company. But the window of opportunity is shrinking. Alphabet's board of directors needs to fire the executive suite, that's the easy part. The harder part is finding a replacement CEO and executive suite who will make the deep cuts and rearrangements necessary to get Google back on track. The longer they put that off, the less chance for Google to be relevant in the future.
It remains to be seen, but I don't really see it this way.
To me, this feels like Hiroshi went to Sundar and said that he wanted to step down or wanted to do something else or whatever. Sundar then had to choose whether to elevate one of Hiroshi's reports or elevate one of the other SVPs to lead two orgs together. Sundar chose Rick.
This feels more like a question of upper management politicking rather than mission change.
I guess it makes them more like Apple, having a vertically integrated division for making phones. TFA says it might make other phone manufacturers struggle. Although I get the impression they are already struggling with the Open Handset Alliance terms from Google that they don't like. Maybe the best outcome is that AOSP gets multiple active forks supported by manufacturers, Google apps stop being distributed by default, and the phone software ecosystem gets more decentralized in general.
Forks supported by manufacturers don't work, because they only earn money when selling hardware. So they can't each operate a huge platform maintenance team on their own.
Also, the only glue that actually holds Android in place as a single platform is Google's CTS (compatibility test suite).
Without it being mandated for Googles Mobile Services (GMS) and its revenue-share, Android will stop being a single platform.
It will start drifting apart as soon as all vendors have to implement the next display/camera/sensor/form-factor support in the OS in parallel of each other...
"Merging teams" is such a Google thing. Merging DeepMind and Google AI, Waze and Maps, Fitbit & Nest and Pixel come to mind. I don't remeber reading such stories from other companies. Is my perception off or is "merging teams" something that Google likes to announce loudly and other companies don't or do other companies "merge teams" less often? I would like to have some input to this.
I think most other companies have not such a high amount of redundant teams to merge them all the time. So while merging happens occasionally in other companies, we usually only hear about them in context of one company buying out another one.
Not many other companies have the unique blend of being out of touch enough to think that anyone knows what this means and reality, and self-important enough to think that people care.
Are you anthropomorphising companies now? Google the company can't be "out of touch" or "self-important". The engineers maybe, but they don't make PR decisions like this.
In this case the original source is an announcement on a "inside-google" blog, and starts with "Hi Googlers", so the target are clearly mostly Google engineers. It ended up on HN because it was repeated by arstechnica, a respected and well-known portal. And here we are discussing it. So maybe people in fact do care about this?
I don't necessarily disagree, but structurally these moves can be very impactful, particularly in a huge company as sprawling and with as much overlap as Google.
If there's a lot of redundant work being done, maybe the teams will benefit from working together on the same problems.
You're right that most of us don't care, necessarily, but I think it sends some signals that the company is attempting to focus a bunch of less focused lasers at the same point.
It's less common in tech companies than in massive multinationals like GE or Sony that span a lot of different industries.
I'm not sure how I feel about this, as a user of google's services and as an owner of google's hardware (pixel 5, nest hub 2). I'm probably cautiously optimistic, seeing how high quality yet unique/quirky their hardware has been. However Tensor/Samsung fabs have had their issues, but maybe factors may have been out of the hands of those in charge?
Readit News
[1] - https://blog.google/inside-google/company-announcements/buil...
[2] - https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/17/google-workers-arrested-afte...
Honestly, good on them. Having a culture of honest and open discussion about work is important, but there's a very vocal minority in many companies that thinks their political opinions are both objective fact and the most important thing to discuss at any given work function.
When that kind of attitude seems to receive official support from the company it actually does make people with different political opinions feel unsafe at work. This is not okay, and it's not healthy for the company, and I'm glad to see Google finally pushing back against the idea that loud political fights are appropriate in the workplace.
How the devs felt about police for example likely affected the maps feature for reporting cops on the road. Same with Google Maps history at abortion clinics. The read on various news organizations definitely affected the choices for Google News partnerships. How you feel about government surveillance and "the deep state" likely affected how they built their messaging apps. Even down to the sign-up form where you're asked your name/sex. A conservative Google would have made very different decisions.
It's really hard to do anything non-trivial that doesn't end up brushing up against political issues de jour.
If I were "corporate" I would be asking myself why it is a group of my employees faced arrest, job loss to make a statement about company policies. I would want to know if it suggests a bigger problem down the road for the company.
I highly recommend listening to this podcast about IBM's role in Nazi Germany https://hbr.org/podcast/2019/11/lessons-from-ibm-in-nazi-ger...
TJ Watson (of IBM) had a similar "this is a business" outlook: “I’m an internationalist. I cooperate with all forms of government, regardless of whether I can subscribe to all of their principles or not.” IBM's machines were extremely important part of Nazi Germany's Holocaust efforts, and there is evidence that IBM was actively working with Nazi Germany after the invasion of Poland [1].
[1] https://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/The-business-of-makin...
Why? Having a separate division also has upsides, like keeping it away from terrible exec interference.
A lot of products we take for granted today succeeded because they were a sort of skunkworks project away form the reach of the mothership that's full of execs who would have tried to push their own agenda in the product or shut it down due to their lack of vision.
The original PlayStation, first Xbox, DirectX, Gameboy, etc.
And yes, in the end everyone end up using GMS (besides those who are banned, ie. Huawei). But still, it's better to have a separation that is imperfect, vs not having one at all
Was there a mechanism to communicate this weirdness to decision-makers? In a company that is in control of all of its teams, what is stopping a faster reorg?
- moats
- "if we do this, XYZ is going to leave"
- weak leadership
- comfort zone
- too many managers risking being spotted as obviously redundant as a result of a reorg :)
What else?
Google sold just 10 million pixel phones last year. That’s not even 10% of Samsung.
I'd say that creates a huge conflict of interest.
That's one of the big reasons why Nokia Series60 didn't take off as a licensed OS: Whatever Samsung or LG or Lenovo wanted to build on that platform to differentiate, they had to involve Nokia during the development (who then developed the needed OS-feature in parallel to the Nokia product that will make use of it).
Google is either very secure that their grip on all these HW-vendors is strong enough forcing them to stay, or they are no longer part of Google's long-term strategy for Android.
Deleted Comment
(Sony) Ericsson used UIQ, a pen-based OS built on top of the core of Symbian foundation.
Nokia developed Series60, a key-based OS built on top of a Symbian core.
They were not compatible operating systems, and most of all Ericsson didn't license it from Nokia.
You can play chess against yourself. AlphaGo can, because it wasn't brainwashed about this notion. ChatGPT can debate against itself. You can too, if you don't see it as a conflict. Humans might find it hard, only because they were brainwashed from a child that they need to pick sides. Your neural net is capable of operating on both sides simultaneously if you let it.
The market is big enough for Google to create hardware AND other companies to create hardware.
You obviously didn't read the comment you're replying to. No one is challenging that.
Having the same TEAM in charge of the OS and in-house hardware is an entirely different story.
It's a conflict of interest because the person Samsung is talking to to have a feature implemented into the OS baseline may be the same person in charge of defining the competitive featureset for the next Google hardware.
Now this person knows that the product he and his team is designing will compete with a yet-to-be-announced Samsung-product with a new feature.
So his interest to support a licensee being successful with his product is in conflict with his interest to create a more successful competing product.
And even if he isn't, for SAMSUNG just the potential of this situation to happen can be enough to NOT cooperate with this team and scale back communications with the Android team as a whole.
That could be said for anything in the moral and judicial sphere. "There's no theft, property is a human invention", "There's no rape, animals don't have that concept", and so on.
Lucky for us, we're discussing this in the context of humans building stuff for other humans to buy in a human society with human governments and markets, not in some metaphysical 'but what does meaning means' context.
Also, it feels like this merger will lead to a similar article to Hixie's in about 5 years:
> A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle management. Take XYZ, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it.
https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1
During a Q&A, I was literally laughed at when I asked the head of Android whether developers should take Flutter seriously. His eventual answer equated to "well Google is really big so we can't say".
I think that was the moment I understood just how deep the mismanagement at Google actually is. Just shocking.
Much of Google's value proposition was in their ability to innovate. The current leadership has proven catastrophically inept at this. Without fresh leadership, Google is on its way to becoming some mid-tier ad placement agency at best. Engineering excellence won't save them as long as the top leadership is incapable of adjusting to circumstances.
There's still time for Google to leverage its competence at managing large infrastructure to regain its position as a leading technology company. But the window of opportunity is shrinking. Alphabet's board of directors needs to fire the executive suite, that's the easy part. The harder part is finding a replacement CEO and executive suite who will make the deep cuts and rearrangements necessary to get Google back on track. The longer they put that off, the less chance for Google to be relevant in the future.
To me, this feels like Hiroshi went to Sundar and said that he wanted to step down or wanted to do something else or whatever. Sundar then had to choose whether to elevate one of Hiroshi's reports or elevate one of the other SVPs to lead two orgs together. Sundar chose Rick.
This feels more like a question of upper management politicking rather than mission change.
Also, the only glue that actually holds Android in place as a single platform is Google's CTS (compatibility test suite).
Without it being mandated for Googles Mobile Services (GMS) and its revenue-share, Android will stop being a single platform.
It will start drifting apart as soon as all vendors have to implement the next display/camera/sensor/form-factor support in the OS in parallel of each other...
"Google is combining …, and it's all about Blockchain"
In this case the original source is an announcement on a "inside-google" blog, and starts with "Hi Googlers", so the target are clearly mostly Google engineers. It ended up on HN because it was repeated by arstechnica, a respected and well-known portal. And here we are discussing it. So maybe people in fact do care about this?
If there's a lot of redundant work being done, maybe the teams will benefit from working together on the same problems.
You're right that most of us don't care, necessarily, but I think it sends some signals that the company is attempting to focus a bunch of less focused lasers at the same point.
It's less common in tech companies than in massive multinationals like GE or Sony that span a lot of different industries.
Bingo.