The bar raiser decides “hire for Amazon at X level and role” and then the manager decides if they want that person on their team or not. If it’s a hire decision but manager declines the specific person they find another team instead.
The reason they don’t push this is because Stadia, like a lot of things, is just a side project at google. It does nothing to drive significant new ad revenue, so it’s never going to get this kind of deep pocket investment.
Bingo. They didn't even bother to include Stadia support in the latest Chromecast. To me that says nobody high up at Google cares about Stadia in a meaningful way. At this point I'm taking bets on how much Play Store credit Stadia subscribers are going to receive when the service shuts down and all their purchased games evaporate.
The saddest part is, the technology works well. Really well. If Stadia had launched as a Netflix for games it would be very successful. Paying full price for individual games that stop existing as soon as Google gets bored? That's a dangerous investment my friend.
There's only two outcomes: Either Google gets bored and kills it because it doesn't generate ten billion dollars a year in profit or it becomes so ingrained in our society killing it might cause an angry mob to attack Google HQ with torches and pitchforks.
Why it can't spin these side projects off into their own companies to survive or die on their own merits I don't know.
You're implicitly painting "become an unqualified mega-success" and "become a large scale data gathering opportunity" as if they were mutually exclusive, but they're not. It's because Maps and Mail are so wildly successful that they're great data gathering opportunities.
Wasn't that sort of the point of alphabet? To put these into their own self sustaining "divisions" so they could be spun out easily or at a high level choose to fund them?
It's actually a pretty interesting element of Google, their adherence to a centralized infrastructure must make spin offs and acquisitions incredibly difficult.
Do you mean the Google TV? Because Chromecast Ultra has been how you use Stadia from the start. Google TV support is apparently coming this year but yeah, I am suspicious of the whole thing. Worst case, I am out $60 for the controller and not all my email or something.
Meh, another HN complainer going on about<click>...OMG, what the hell is up with that web page?! That some truly nausea-inducing scroll behavior. Is there a RNG behind it somewhere?
I think they know that it’s a sub standard product that is “good enough” for today but it will never be good enough for a use case like VR. I think the future of gaming is in ultra low latency, high resolution experiences and people will look at Stadia like a silent film from the 1920s.
Also it’s clear that by getting rid of their reference developer they don’t have the appetite to dog food Stadia for themselves. There is a secondary and tertiary reason Apple and Microsoft write software for their platforms, it’s to 2) serve as a reference for other developers what is possible and 3) iron out the bugs in their SDKs.
Google doesn’t take that seriously and it shows us the Stadia is already starting to wind down.
I think you are right that Google isn’t taking it seriously, but one of the futures of gaming is subscription streaming, for basically the same reasons as video. Streaming can dramatically improve user experience by making it trival to acquire or switch between games, and subscription revenue allows providers to sponsor the creation of content that doesn't make financial sense in a individual purchase model- think games that strongly appeal to a single demo or amazing, but short, experiences.
Then why do it at all? What would possibly justify such a large investment of capital if Google didn't believe it to be a potentially nontrivial contributor of future revenue?
Cynical answer: Because at big tech companies culture leads them to believe they have to have a competing product in every new market rather than letting their "competitors" go unopposed. Occasionally it works out, but often you just get a ton of also-rans. The companies are so big a profitable that even complete failure barely moves the stock price.
Nobody is incentivized to point out the proverbial emperor has no clothes. Top execs have something they can point to as "innovation" for a few quarters. Lower leadership for the project has their kingdom expanded and probably comes out the other end better off career wise. I would imagine its most frustrating for the actual IC's and PM's who pour their lives into something that eventually just gets unceremoniously deprecated, but they get to cash some pretty good paychecks and it probably helps their careers as well.
How do you increase revenue/stock price in meaningful way without expanding into other markets?
Google does these half ass attempts with minimal risk. They could be a major player in cloud computing, IoT etc. Amazon is dominating these areas with Ring and AWS.
Because of how Google's internal performance evaluation works.
You need to ship and show user growth. You are effectively punished for making improvements and fixes that do not have a clear connection to user growth.
When you have Google's resources and talent, you probably need a reason not to do these kinds of things. If a product has a decent chance of generating revenue or building out consumer profiles or reaching a new demographic and doesn't undermine the ads business, it has a shot of being pursued.
For gaming, I bet you could make a strong case that Google needs another hook into younger users who will stop using Google search the second their phone changes default search engines. Kind of an insurance policy.
The psychological profiles of users that could be built are also kinda terrifying. Hopefully that's not a part of the business case for Stadia.
Finally there's a case to be made for synergy with Youtube and its efforts to compete with Twitch.
but up until now they did apparently have funding to be running an internal studio? seems like those funds could have been better spent bribing tv companies like the parent is suggesting.
Google is a company of engineers. Engineers solve problems by building stuff, not by bribing companies. I think the main exception is Android and Ads, which also happens to be the main parts of Google I disagree with...
Building successful platforms isn't about engineering - many well-engineered platforms were market failures.
You have to enable third parties to be successful. Steve Yegge's Google platform rant[0] discusses this topic in detail.
If your platform isn't popular then you need to provide incentives for developers to target it.
"Each of the people we spoke with, who asked to be granted anonymity due to ongoing employment in the video game industry, echoed this sentiment — and said Google simply wasn't offering enough money, in addition to several other concerns." [1]
The interviewed developers also have doubts about whether Stadia has a future.
"This concern — that Google might just give up on Stadia at some point and kill the service, as it has done with so many other services over the years — was repeatedly brought up, unprompted, by every person we spoke with for this piece." [1]
What is different this time is cloud computing / always connected devices. This enables easy collection and access to enormous amounts of training (and continuous retraining) data needed, as well as offloading processing to a single, central model that can be optimized for fat hardware for runtime.
It is an ROI decision. Almost everyone on the planet now carries around an echo-equivalent in their pocket all day, that also happens to have video, GPS, text and call data, and as such is a far more significant personal privacy concern than a smart speaker in a kitchen. However, most people do so because the benefit outweighs the concern. Same with smart speakers. Whats the difference from having an Alexa and having your phone on the same counter from a privacy concern perspective? It is effectively 0.
There isn't though. This is just voice control of existing things people are already doing through Amazon. This is data they already have. Is data inherently evil? I don't understand how there is some significantly different privacy concern of using Amazon services (wish lists and purchasing things) via voice control than via their website or app.
There are many legitimate privacy concerns with ever-listening devices in your house, but having "data" from people directly using existing features of a company via voice instead of mouse clicks isn't really one of them.
I doubt they want to start a cell company, more likely it is to have favorable terms for embedding 4G into Echo devices, making car and portable echos possible. They have done this for years w/Kindle, which would also benefit.
I doubt that would be the intention. At least not only that.
Amazon has some incredible network effects that would create a compelling cellphone service offering. They could bundle cellphone plans as an extra in Prime an undercut competition while giving unlimited access to Amazon.com, Alexa, Twitch etc.
Having a cellphone company makes a lot of sense for any of the big tech companies. It allows them to create end-to-end experiences that are compelling just because they can vertically integrate different moments of their customers journey.
I think its really #4 - cloud is still a minor side bet for them, something investors are expecting them to try to work at but that the core company doesn't really care about. its kind of a bigger google X project. aws and azure are significant company bets from amazon/microsoft where they are staking their future, google cloud is not a bet on googles future.
