Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

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