Two stories have me thinking about Google, today. Timothy B. Lee wrote about Waymo, the self-driving car company owned by Google, which has been operating a fully driverless taxi service in Arizona for months now. (Technically Waymo is part-owned by Alphabet, the holding company that also owns Google, but I refuse to use the name Alphabet except when I'm forced to because it 1. is trading under the stock ticker GOOG 2. has the same CEO as Google 3. is dominated financially by Google's finances 4. is based out of the same office as Google and 5. no-one knows what the fuck Alphabet is and the entire thing is almost deliberately designed to confuse and obfuscate)
Google have had a long history of pretty chaotic product development with lots of overlapping teams and priorities (hence the endless cycle of messaging / chat apps - Buzz / Allo / Meet / Hangouts / their RCS thing etc, etc) but also the randomness with which this all happens (https://killedbygoogle.com/) if you're anyone looking at their ecosystems - mobile carrier, gamer, developer - you have very little confidence that whatever they're launching will be around in 18 months time
Google have had a long history of pretty chaotic product development with lots of overlapping teams and priorities (hence the endless cycle of messaging / chat apps - Buzz / Allo / Meet / Hangouts / their RCS thing etc, etc) but also the randomness with which this all happens (https://killedbygoogle.com/) if you're anyone looking at their ecosystems - mobile carrier, gamer, developer - you have very little confidence that whatever they're launching will be around in 18 months time