Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

Given that Google's whole IoT world is seemingly moving to Fuchsia this is a bit of a surprise. That said, Nest Hub type product is I think the only one with user facing UI, and an extremely limited one; really more an appliance. With a couple fixed hooks/extension points 3rd parties can tap into (versus being a general OS).

I still have an ebay search I havent cancelled to show me results for one of the old 2-in-1 machines that had been a dev target, the Acer Switch Alpha 12 (https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/development/hardware). But that was sooo long ago now. And I dont really know what user-facing intents have really emerged or grown since. Seems hard to kickstart a new consumer os, turning a viable platform into something emd userable. Yeah, having your own niche appliance os is fine, but less interesting.

It'll be interestint to see what happens with 3rd party Chromecast/Google Cast products over time. Will Fuchsia ever have inroads on 3rd party products? Do many of them already run & will they continue to run CastOS? Are there other off the shelf Chromecast implememtations? I was surprised when Android Things got dropped, when the ecosystem fractured, given how much infrastructure/packaging/services they had been able to use. Interesting times.

> Nest Hub type product is I think the only one with user facing UI, and an extremely limited one; really more an appliance

And that took them probably 5x longer than they told mgmt it would and missed multiple deadlines.

(I worked on the product for its original launch, and before it was all rewritten for Fuchsia)

The whole world of shipping multiple OSes and home software stacks at Google was a minefield of politics, turf wars, and "shipping the org chart" that was just painful to watch and be a close spectator to. Much dysfunction.

BTW, I don't think any third party devices run Chromecast Linux; that was always only first party devices when I was there. The third party stuff was running Android generally.

We shipped the first round of the Home Hub stuff running on a Chromecast stack with a UI written in HTML/TypeScript, and it worked pretty good. Then a few months later they decided to rewrite the whole thing from scratch in Dart/Flutter and replace the whole OS with Fuchsia for some reason. So a whole elaborate transitional shim layer was built to get Dart/Flutter UI to host on the Chromecast distrib, while the Fuchsia people did their own thing that would also run the same UI. Every little had to be re-built from scratch, on an already shipping and successful product. It was insanity.

You had that due to poor C-Suite leadership. A good C-Suite would have noticed the in-fighting, and re-organized the group into a single threaded leader who is a benevolent dictator. Google's disfunction is due to the lack of clear organizational decision making leading towards a 'democracy' with no movement.

At the C level is hardly the only place where there is/was bad rot.

And in this case, it wasn't just one group. It was multiple product areas. Each trying to make the other one execute their vision for them, it seemed. It wasn't "democracy", it was more... feudalism.

Anyways, the parts of Google that were just shipping boring old unsexy $$ making core/search/ads stuff were managed much better.

If the group is well organized, you seldom need to have cross organization collaboration to achieve your goals. Then you cannot claim to have leadership or complexity because stuff accomplishable by a single team is considered simple to do. Bad for perf.

To be fair: From the little I heard at least the transition was super seamless, which is impressive for such a big change.

I always thought it was supposed to be a demo that Fuchsia is viable and can reasonably easily be migrated to.

From the consumer's POV it was fairly seemless. Behind the scenes it was a slog. And they kept missing deadlines. For what?

It seemed more sensible to me that they should have just done it with a new device, instead of taking an existing device that had already shipped successfully into millions of homes.

Financially, made no sense, if one actually cared about labour costs. Duplicated engineering effort all over.

Well the real question is what new capabilities did anyone justify that project with? Fuschia seems to lack a killer edge, some radical new take that can justify such an investment. If you read their website it's all about components and stuff but consumer IoT is the opposite of an extensible component platform.

Well, true. The main material advantage I've been able to gather is that it has "simpler licensing" (you can keep more code proprietary). But I don't know if manufacturer's really care about keeping their drivers proprietary all that much.

Linux on embedded devices is not sunshine and rainbows, especially when it comes to GUI. It is one of those messes that developers instinctively want to throw out. Companies like Google can afford lateral moves where the immediate business case is not there, but opportunities may pop up down the road. Of course, missing deadlines can easily get such moves killed.

Interesting, what's the biggest pain point in your view?

syscalls and drivers tend to be a big one. Android has a HAL to make it easier, and Fuchsia offers something richer. I know Amazon took a similar tack at one point of trying to build their own thing from FreeRTOS.

> Seems hard to kickstart a new consumer os, turning a viable platform into something emd userable.

Actually ... the Android runtime is pretty portable and works VERY well on Chrome OS (you can even connect to VPNs and use custom keyboards through it). That's kind of 80% of what you need. I mean of course it's still hard, but it seems to me like they have all the parts they'd need. Which makes it all the sillier that they still haven't managed to fix Android updates.

You do understand that the Android runtime on Chrome OS didn't just pop out of the ground fully-formed, right? Years of effort went into it.

Indeed!!

Making Android vaguely somewhat compatible with the rest of the Linux universe has been an incredible long & difficult struggle. There have been so many heroic works, to tackle the vastly radically different conpletely NIH-ed Android universe & make it deal-with-able.

I do, but it proves to me that it's possible. Google can do it and so (kind of) can Microsoft and the Linux community. Of course it's still hard, but a lot of what you need is already there; most importantly Google's moat, the proprietary Play Services.

Given that Google already killed two IoT OS projects, Brillo and Android Things, they can as well kill Fuchsia, it wouldn't be their first.

Were Google's IoT products affected by layoffs as well?

I know Nest lost headcount.

I don't think there was a single PA at Google that didn't lose people. From the stuff I've seen on LinkedIn via ex-colleagues, etc. I have a hard time believing that they d didn't just run a random # generator over the set of US employees, just drawing people out of a hat until they hit 12k.

Certain teams were impacted more than others. The actual distribution for like comp/seniority/whatever seemed random but some were entirely unscathed and some saw massive cuts.

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