I think the obvious notable exception is Android, which is not going anywhere and which now has a fairly delightful development experience with Kotlin and Compose.
Kotlin folks have prevented Java support on purpose, only to be forced to update Java support, as Android slowly started to be frozen in time, thus Kotlin losing one of its selling points, Java compatibility, with everyone on JVM world moving beyond Java 8.
Go check any recent Android conference, and most likely there will be a few talks related to Compose performance and gotchas.
I guess they know there will always be someone else to fill the void, but certainly by the time of GearVR and later Stadia the whole games industry was wise to allowing any of FAANG near the crown jewels, which is a major factor in why software support for VR has been so unenthusiastic. This was not helped by Oculus hiring the old Scaleform execs who had just pissed off half the universe.
Google doesn't work like this.
People can almost autonomously spawn up small projects.
If it looks promising they keep getting more resources until it either has explosive growth and profits or someone higher in the chain thinks there isn't a current viable path for THAT version of the project to profitablity.
Google might believe in XR and keep funding these small projects, but if none of them display evidence that that particular approach is going to be huge, then they move on.
It's not top down.
Sundar doesn't say, we need more XR. Team, go find me the most promising options, and then we'll fund it to the moon. And then a month later he gets bored and says, no, never mind, kill that. Let's chase another hype bubble. Only to then months later come back and say, team, we need more XR!
Anything on that scale Apple/Meta bets on is definitely brought up at the highest executive level and there has to be some thought going on what the response would be if any.
This may be the case, but everything eventually gets compared to the ad business, and the projected financials, no matter how optimistic, look terrible. Then the team leading the initiative wises up and drops it, gets tasked with something else or frustrated and those people leave.
Right, that's the job of some random PM who will launch a half-baked XR project that overlaps with a nearly identical XR project down the hall, which will compete with its fellow Google project/product in the marketplace and confuse customers before getting killed within 18 months of launch. See also Google Wallet and Google Wallet (yes), Allo and Duo and GChat and Hangouts, and so on.
... wat? Are you suggesting Google has two different services both called Google wallet?
Not one, not two, but three different things called Google wallet, and four different things called Google Pay, one of which was formerly called Google wallet and one of which went on to be called Google wallet.
How is this real?
I let my password manager handle it now.
Yeah, it was dumb having your app change names and slightly looks, but materially, little changed.
Disclaimer: I'm willing to believe that I just had less swing/power than you did at Google (or am not skilled at getting those things alight), but the idea that this was spun up "autonomously" (organically/grass roots) seems pretty far fetched.
tldr; Most things were delegated hierarchically from my experience.
It would also be ridiculous for you to even try.
But you can spin up smaller things, and L7+ can start major projects if they want to risk their career.
And that's how most of the non-massive initiatives have worked.
Massive initiatives like Stadia, Cloud, Maps, Social, Play, and Gemini are atypical at Google considering the thousands of smaller projects that have launched, maybe tens of thousands considering internal projects.
Even most of those project decisions aren't happening at the C level.
Problem is no one gets promoted for that. That would require a vision and strong leadership.
Something both Apple and Meta have but Google does not.
Whether or not that's "right" or "wrong" (or neither) is of course up for debate. I personally think they could probably use at least some top-down initiatives here and there, but overall I think having most of their decisions be bottom-up is a nice way to work. I think their culture around that may not be quite right, though, as it seems to incentivize project-hopping and not seeing things through past the explosive "wow factor" phase.
You may still have a broader point that's worth considering but I don't think it negates my characterization of their issues entirely.
They mostly talk about PlayStore analytics and marketing approaches, seldom about game technology or design.
Titanfall was a game that couldn't be made until the cloud and Stadia could have done the same for game streaming -- any new platform needs it's Super Mario Brothers that makes you rethink what games can be, otherwise players will ignore it.
Isn’t that just Niantic? They spun out of G and made Ingress and Pokemon Go
This with Google's background in long term investments.
And to come back to my point, many of the talks I was referring to, were in the context of Android games and Stadia, most still available online.
I'd contrast that to Meta which has been through various waves of scathing criticism and often comes across as responsive, for instance they've listened a lot to devs about weaknesses in the Quest platform.
Systems of standardized evaluation inevitably get captured by the masters of self-presentation who, in our culture, are narcissists and psychopaths.
The person who is stuck at the bottom will be humble but as you go up systems like that filter for morally worse people. You might as well try summoning demons.
And yet towards the end Stadia had a plethora of games from multiple big name studios (EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar) and a ton of indie games.
Where Google screwed up with Stadia was expecting it to hit big immediately, being a bit slow with games, not talking enough about it and the games that were actually on it, not advertising what their shutdown plan is.
The vast vast vast majority of Stadia negative commentary was about how Google will shut it down, and "there are no games". The second point wasn't true for the majority of the platform's existence, but nobody bothered to check because they were afraid of Google killing it. If everyone knew Google will reimburse all game purchases, and they advertised stuff like Red Dead Redemption 2, EA's latest hits, and they managed to bring in the big studios a bit earlier (when I started using it about a year in, RDR2 was the only big game I cared about; GTA V would have been massive to have too), it would have been a massive hit. A lot of people would game casually on a basically-no-hardware-required platform.
To this day Xbox Cloud Gaming isn't close, performance and UX wise. GeForce Now is good performance wise, but UX is meh. Stadia was a golden opportunity for Google but they just blew it.
Go search for last edition of Stadia developer conference, where something like Proton for Stadia was announced, alongside the acknowledgement it wasn't working as expected.
Ubisoft's whole catalogue going all the way back to Black Flag, RDR2, EA's latest titles (FIFA, Star Wars), Cyberpunk, and tons of indie games (I had Premium, every month I got ~2 new indie games; by the end I had something like 50+ games).
What do you mean by this?
Wargaming it though there is no such thing as a "128GB world" from the player's perspective and for a long time high-end games have used many tricks to shoehorn huge worlds into small boxes such as
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto:_San_Andreas
which was released for the PS2 with just 36MB of RAM! A "128GB world" that is cheaply developed could probably be crunched into a 8GB world that looks good enough with an expensive development process (you need much more out of your systems programmers and artists.) To make something that's truly a different experience you need a "2TB world" shoehorned into a 128GB world which would be an expensive proposition.
I don't think Google could have talked any game dev shop capable of that sort of thing into doing it, it was something Google was going to have to do itself. They could have afforded it. And they could have entirely changed people's expectations about games.
https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/accelerator-optimized-...
A system with, say, 8 large GPUs could easily generate graphics for 24 or more players and support a complex world as in: something like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City
where you can walk through all the doors. A single SMP computer (kinda like couch multiplayer but with multiple screens attached) would run the whole thing which would put a limit on the player count, I can't see it exceeding 100 but the selling point would be the complexity of the world. If anybody could build a gaming cluster that could scale up to more players it would be Google.
And Google was already pouring money into Stadia on the infra side, hell they could have bought a whole studio to make games tailored for Stadia.
Then they didn't.
As a bystander, Stadia looked to me as the most egregious dropping of the ball, in a field where reputation is worth so much.
Only it actually worked (unlike Microsoft's poor excuse of an attempt at the time, it's finally decent), and it was cheaper and with better UX than GeForce Now. For a few years it was unquestionably the best.
Some credit is due to some Googlers: there are those that get it. Most people have no idea how close to outright failure the Play Store was, and to be honest one of my lasting regrets was not taking advantage of the situation to kill it. It is entirely on the action of those few Googlers that the Play Store turned into a remotely viable target for games, but once the beast was big enough the marketing analytics droids moved in and took over everything entirely. Today the Play Store is run with the same mentality you would run a casino.
I look forward to their definite announcement of Pixel Glasses in the coming months, as this certainly won't be something they completely forget about by next quarter
It feels like Google wants there to be an answer to Apple Vision Pro, still isn't completely sold on the idea, but wants someone else to build it using Android. I'm not sure what other Android-using company would want to take that on, though. This feels a little risky even for Samsung; I'm curious what their "Project Moohan" device will look like... will it be crazy expensive and high-tech like AVP, or will it be something much more lightweight? The photos out there seem to suggest something lower-end than AVP, but it's hard to tell.
Meta uses Android for the Quest.
Will Meta adopt Android XR instead of maintaining their own Android fork? Possibly, possibly not. But they are definitely an Android-using company willing to take on the Apple Vision Pro seeing as they are already, you know, doing that.
> That's basically Google's strategy on everything.
I showed it to my daughter the other day and she was really impressed. There's only one remaining app that can use it afaik.
The Sketchfab viewer still supports Cardboard: https://sketchfab.com/models/45f5e56887f44075bbf283977c99541...
The older Google Cardboard on the other side got open sourced and is still somewhat alive, works on modern phones and even the Youtube app still has support for it. It is however not getting any attention from developers, since everybody that cares about VR has long moved on to Quest or given up on VR. Cardboard due to not having controller and limited to 3DOF was a dead end.