No, it's the most important aspect for any new Google product announcement. It's not up to commenters to behave better, it is up to Google.

The comments cannot be considered garbage, since they ask the most pertinent question: why is this announcement worth talking about?

And yes, Google created this situation itself. And now it has to justify each new product's life span. Because we don't trust that at all. Unlike startups, Google can easily afford to run a product at a loss for years. Yet we trust them less than startups with only a few months of runway.

We're on a forum for startups. 99% of them get shutdown.

This is not a product, it's a free and open source OS, a gift to the world. You cannot shut down open source--if it matters so much to you then maintain it yourself.

It's a rare for-profit company that releases anything significant from pure niceness so I can't read it as a gift. It's part of a corporate strategy; don't confuse it with largesse.

I mostly agree with your comment. However I'll also say that Google, far more than any of the other tech titans, has a very long history of deeply supporting and embracing open source. It's part of the ethos, not just lip service.

TL for KataOS here. Yes, the actual point of the announcement is to get the word out about the project. We want to make it as open as possible, and while we have some hurdles with getting the entire system out in a collaborative fashion, we're doing our darndest to do so. This release actually reflects the hard-won efforts of several engineers on the team to get this out.

Respect to you + your engineers, I was not having a go at you all, and I genuinely thank you for your work. I was merely objecting to some commenter describing it in a way I felt was misleading. Keep it up!

> It's a rare for-profit company that releases anything significant from pure niceness so I can't read it as a gift.

Philosophically speaking, do most people do something out of pure altruism? I personally don't believe so. Everyone has an agenda - be it to feel better, to score brownie points, to make people like them, etc. Why should we expect for-profit corps to be altruistic? We should remember their for-profit motives and also accept they can do good deed for non-altruistic reasons.

It may be a cultural thing, I'm a brit, you're like from the US, but yes over here there is a culture of altruism to a degree that may be greater than in the US (eg. over here we donate blood for free). I'm talking monetary compensation thought. On a personal level I try to help because another's happiness becomes mine.

Pretty sure the majority of blood donations in the US are free (or freeish, like you might get a donut and orange juice).

> On a personal level I try to help because another's happiness becomes mine.

There you go, so you help others to feel happiness yourself. In which case, its not purely altruistic.

There is no such thing as pure altruism, where did I say there was? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism#Evolutionary_explanat...) I gave my own reasons, that's all. But it's not monetary.

Why do people like you seem determined that nothing good can exist in other people. Your tribe turns everything to shit.

> The comments cannot be considered garbage, since they ask the most pertinent question: why is this announcement worth talking about?

I disagree. Google's habit of killing projects off is interesting/annoying/frustrating but I don't think a trove of shallow "I wonder when google will kill this? lol" comments on every google product announcement add to the discussion.

They're a bit much, but in this case, they've clearly added to the discussion. It helped to show the distrust and skepticism around product announcements by Google. It also helps us question whether it's worth it for us to invest time, money and/or effort into a project.

The problem is that (HN) sentiment is generally lagging behind reality -- usually many-many years. There are still tons of comments on HN that refer to the evil Micro$oft as if 2022 MS was the same as the 1991 MS (while it is 'just' a large enterprise cloud company), etc. When anti-<some company> comments peak on HN then the company is usually already very different.

So if you're betting on a product / service, then relying on Internet sentiment is generally a bad idea.

Analogy: the best time to buy a car from a specific manufacturer is when everyone knows that the manufacturer is only producing crappy cars. Because that's when they're likely doing everything they can to rectify their reputation. (And the other way around.) Examples: French cars manufactured around 2010 have really good quality (especially the PSA models), because they produced crap around 2000 so by 2008 everyone knew that they should not buy a Citroen. BMW's from 2008 have incredibly many quality issues as BMW's reputation peaked around that era, so they reaped the profits that they could (and this was all based on the all-around great cars from a decade earlier).

That’s a very topical comment what with Google announcing they were killing Stadia two weeks back.

> Analogy: the best time to buy a car from a specific manufacturer is when everyone knows that the manufacturer is only producing crappy cars. Because that's when they're likely doing everything they can to rectify their reputation.

Maybe—or maybe they’re still in the stage when they’re producing crappy cars, and unwilling to commit to the serious changes that would ultimately lead to a better product and better reputation.

Microsoft get schtick from people who know what they are talking about not because of their previous monopoly-abusing, security-insensitive ways, but because of their _current_ privacy-invading, data-harvesting, lowest-common-denominator-accepting approaches to everything. No amount of contributions to other projects is going to overcome that, nor should it, since it is possible to do some things well and others poorly.

The (awful) analogy certainly doesn't even hold: my late-2009 BMW is still going strong without a hint of anything beyond routine maintenance, yet according to this screed it should be crap...

As a car enthusiast, I have to disagree with your car analogy. Most carmakers deserve their reputation. While some Land Rovers were even more unreliable when they used BMW engines, and certain models were more reliable because they had more Ford parts, in general, all Land Rovers are unreliable.

Has BMW ever been reliable? Yes in the 90s and before, since then? No. They just don't care, they're sold as lease vehicles to people who care about having the newest stuff for 3 years and then move on.

I'm not sure that Google is in a similar place to carmakers. There are maybe 3 or 4 major carmakers, and their primary business is cars (well, maybe vans trucks etc too). If they stop selling those, the business is dead. There is really just one Google, which has range of quite different products, and it seems they can afford to fail in a lot of markets, but they'll still survive as a company despite that.

> So if you're betting on a product / service, then relying on Internet sentiment is generally a bad idea.

I don't disagree with this tho.

Well, as the TL for this engineer-driven research prject, I have to say it's quite demotivating to read these sorts of comments.

As an engineer, I don't get much say in what other parts of the company do, but unfortunately, I have to bear the brunt of the blowback every time it happens, in social forums like this one, and in B2B interactions. It's quite frustrating, actually.

Well then, I hope that perhaps you and similarly-minded engineers can channel that frustration into pressuring your incompetent leadership to alter their policy of mindlessly killing products.

I work for an automotive OEM, and when a car has a serious recall, I don’t get to say “gee it’s frustrating to see the whole of my company get smeared for one engineering mistake I wasn’t a part of.” There’s no reason for customers or the public to try and figure out exactly what part of the company failed. It’s a systemic failure of the entire company, and it reflects negatively on all of us.

Same for you. You either need to fix Google’s long term support issues from the inside, or expect more of the same.

> It’s a systemic failure of the entire company, and it reflects negatively on all of us.

> [...] You either need to fix Google’s long term support issues from the inside, or expect more of the same.

Some of us knowingly work for organizations that, in the aggregate, are crap.

We stay and do the best we can.

If somebody put that bullcrap of fixing our entire system on me, I'd laugh. Pretend you did that to me -- I would think that you have a poor understanding of the systemic issues causing the problems that bother you.

To me there isn't a clear line from "present" to "desirable future", and simplistic approaches ("antitrust disassemble google") to complex problems aren't actually going to work (all IMO).

Sometimes you do the best you can, help the people you can help, and feel sorry for the rest... but leaving isn't going to make it better, it's going to make it worse, because your work is above average.

Actually, I guess the parent knows this since the are still working in the automobile industry but for others - perhaps what's needed is just a thicker hide, and a willingness to say "yep, it's gonna get killed at some point, good thing we MADE IT OPEN SOURCE so others can carry it forward."

Don’t you think it’s at least equally frustrating to invest time in using and relying on a product that Google will kill whenever it feels like it?

Talk to your management about it or switch company, don’t whine about it to the users. These comments are a symptom, not the disease.

I feel ya. Have you ever seen a google project posted and NOT seen these comments?

First, thank you for taking the time to engage.

Second, I feel for you. This can't be fun, and it's not your fault.

Third, although I think I'm pretty squarely in your "target audience", if you will (Rust & SEL4!? Yes please!), my first reaction was "Oh well, too bad it will be cancelled before it goes anywhere."

Google has done this to themselves. There is a massive undertow against adopting anything Google makes. (I still sting from Reader, still, years later.) Stadia? Etc. Why bother?

Which brings me to my fourth and final point: Y U Googler? What I mean is, on the one hand no one is forcing you to work at Google? On the other hand when (sorry) IF they cancel this project are you going to continue to support it yourself? What is your personal stake in this project?

I'm willing to give you jtgans a break, but not Google.

I totally relate. I previously worked for Red Hat and got a lot of hate for decisions I had absolutely nothing to do with and in some cases was vehemently opposed to them (but I had no power to change it).

Overall I love the HN community and think it is the best one on the internet, but it still has a vocal shallow-minded pocket of people who:

1. Seem to forget that they're talking to a fellow human being rather than a username, and don't engage any of their manners that normally filter out unproductive rudeness

2. Feel strong emotions toward big companies and think life is just as simple as telling a single engineer to "fix the company" as though that is even remotely reasonable.

3. Don't seem to understand how big corporate systems work. Suggesting that a single engineer (even if they are a team lead) is to blame for business decisions that get made almost entirely against what the engineers want, is absurd.

Good for you for speaking up though. It won't make a difference to the people you were commenting to, but overall it provides the masses with a reminder that there's a human on the other side of this.

It's the most relevant feature to speculate about for any non-ad-targeted product Google introduces, so I don't begrudge people for commenting on it.

It's to the point I just ignore any Google product launch, at least in terms of consideration for my own use. 5-10 years is an incredibly short lifespan, and there's usually no off-ramp. The product just dies off.

Agreed. It’s sad to see this site devolve into Reddit. Longevity aside I wish people would comment about the actual article in the main thread.

It's Google's own fault that anything new they launch these days has a meme status. I don't see anything wrong in pointing this out.

Similarly, many people avoid watching Netflix shows until they survive to season 3 at least because it's not worth investing your time in something that's likely to get cancelled after a season or two.

It's their own doing and mocking it is fully deserved

Maybe, just maybe more shows should be built around being a single season long with fewer rear end pulls. I'm so sick of these multiseason shows that just do nothing or don't answer questions.

This is already totally besides the point, but I fully agree. If writers know the show has a limited lifespan, they can build an actually coherent and interesting story. If they have to write season 5 out of X, it's going to be just disappointing and more of the same old. For this reason I rarely watch any shows these days.

I don't disagree with you, but it's the volume of the "pointing it out" that is tiresome. I was hoping to see an interesting technical discussion of the new OS, but instead any that might exist is drowned out with an avalanche of dumb. It's not a verboten thing to say, but it is very low effort and uninteresting, and when it makes up 90% of the comments on an otherwise pretty interesting announcement...

> I was hoping to see an interesting technical discussion of the new OS

But what would be the point?

For one, as some people said, it's secure but whatever it does will certanily pass information through Google, and you can't trust them.

And two, as some other people said, Google projects don't survive if they get less than 100 million users.

Maybe Google should build it. Then you use it for a year or two before it gets cancelled.

Exactly.

We're all better off when smart people can build something new, that advances the frontier of what's possible, and release it to the world for free, without committing to support it forever.

It's nauseating when lazy commenters parrot the same, worn-out arguments to tear down legitimate innovation.

Maybe it’s low effort but it’s actually the first thing that came to my mind when reading the headline, and it’s the same for lots of people. It’s natural that this comment comes a lot and it represents what people here think. Google brought it on itself.

This is a reason I’ll never use a new Google product ever again. I’m still stuck with Gmail and Android TV for now but that’s about it, and I’m working on that too. I slowly switch my accounts to a custom domain email, and plan on switching to Plex because they decided to start showing ads on the TV I paid $2000 for.

Google shutting down products every few weeks is getting a little tiresome.

Seriously, I don't get it because startups fail all the time.

Google quite explicitly has a startup mentality in trying to launch lots of things and see what sticks, and shut down what doesn't stick. A "fail fast" mentality that is very hacker-y.

Apple is the polar opposite -- they do oodles of internal testing and iteration and feedback and don't launch something until they're super-super-sure they've got a hit on their hands. Microsoft is closer to Apple but more willing to experiment.

So people hate on Google when they cancel products, but nobody hates on all the startups that simply go out of business. To the contrary, they say congrats on trying, hope you try again!

It's a bizarre double standard that I'll never understand.

Yes, Reader was cancelled, but if Google didn't have this "launch and see what sticks" mentality Reader never would have been created in the first place. Products like Gmail and Google News supposedly started as similar 20% products.

Why is HN so supportive of startups that try and fail, but not when Google does it?