Google’s newly formed 'Platforms and Devices' team is all about AI

I&#x27;d recommend folks read the last section of the announcement where these changes were announced [1]. The section is titled &quot;Mission First&quot;, and I&#x27;m pretty sure the recent altercations at Google Cloud&#x27;s offices over the past week [2] motivated much of the writing in this section. This seems like a stark change in how things happened at Google, and to put it explicitly in a blog was something I couldn&#x27;t imagined to have happened in ~2017-2022.<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.google&#x2F;inside-google&#x2F;company-announcements&#x2F;building-ai-future-april-2024&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.google&#x2F;inside-google&#x2F;company-announcements&#x2F;buil...</a><p>[2] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;04&#x2F;17&#x2F;google-workers-arrested-after-nine-hour-protest-in-google-cloud-ceos-office.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;04&#x2F;17&#x2F;google-workers-arrested-afte...</a>

Stepping past all the AI hype, as an engineer in what was Play&#x2F;Android&#x2F;Chrome, I&#x27;m excited about being closer to hardware. The fact that Pixel was in another division was always weird and felt like it was an artifact of legacy decisions rather than the right way for things to work today.

So the team that is in charge of the OS which is licensed to Hardware vendors in the world is the same team that&#x27;s in charge to create competing Hardware?<p>I&#x27;d say that creates a huge conflict of interest.<p>That&#x27;s one of the big reasons why Nokia Series60 didn&#x27;t take off as a licensed OS: Whatever Samsung or LG or Lenovo wanted to build on that platform to differentiate, they had to involve Nokia during the development (who then developed the needed OS-feature in parallel to the Nokia product that will make use of it).<p>Google is either very secure that their grip on all these HW-vendors is strong enough forcing them to stay, or they are no longer part of Google&#x27;s long-term strategy for Android.

It feels like a large bundle to me, so they probably want to go for selling phones and computers much more heavily? Sounds interesting if you are okay with going all in with Google stuff, I&#x27;m not sure it&#x27;s good news if you are using Android or Chrome otherwise.<p>Also, it feels like this merger will lead to a similar article to Hixie&#x27;s in about 5 years:<p>&gt; A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle management. Take XYZ, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn&#x27;t leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ln.hixie.ch&#x2F;?start=1700627373&amp;count=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ln.hixie.ch&#x2F;?start=1700627373&amp;count=1</a>

I guess it makes them more like Apple, having a vertically integrated division for making phones. TFA says it might make other phone manufacturers struggle. Although I get the impression they are already struggling with the Open Handset Alliance terms from Google that they don&#x27;t like. Maybe the best outcome is that AOSP gets multiple active forks supported by manufacturers, Google apps stop being distributed by default, and the phone software ecosystem gets more decentralized in general.

Google execs found incapable of speaking two sentences without mentioning AI

&quot;Merging teams&quot; is such a Google thing. Merging DeepMind and Google AI, Waze and Maps, Fitbit &amp; Nest and Pixel come to mind. I don&#x27;t remeber reading such stories from other companies. Is my perception off or is &quot;merging teams&quot; something that Google likes to announce loudly and other companies don&#x27;t or do other companies &quot;merge teams&quot; less often? I would like to have some input to this.

I&#x27;m not sure how I feel about this, as a user of google&#x27;s services and as an owner of google&#x27;s hardware (pixel 5, nest hub 2). I&#x27;m probably cautiously optimistic, seeing how high quality yet unique&#x2F;quirky their hardware has been. However Tensor&#x2F;Samsung fabs have had their issues, but maybe factors may have been out of the hands of those in charge?

While I think Google needs a better clear vision in many cases, god help us that the people who have screwed up every hardware launch for a decade now get to run the OS too.

I&#x27;m curious to see how the new HardChromeDroid division will fare. I cannot imagine that lumping hardware and software together in one division is a particularly good idea, but I&#x27;m open to surprises.

Google is a one trick pony. I&#x27;ve seen the same panic behaviour with Social &#x2F; Google Plus. Now they&#x27;re doing nothing but AI.

I hope ChromeOS gets some love. We need some competition to Windows. They&#x27;ve even experimented with ads in Explorer. They have no limits anymore :)

In terms of revenue relative to their search &#x2F; ads biz, how big of a deal is this? I understand there&#x27;s name recognition for Chrome and Android, but the Pixel product line is nothing when compared to the iPhone or even Samsung.<p>Is this more of just Google being Google, as the ads side of the house continues to print more money than God?

Google needs to properly absorb Android into Chrome before any antitrust measure forces it (along with the Play Store) to be spun out, as would be most healthy for absolutely everyone except the Google ads business.<p>There has been so much potential squandered with Android over the last decade it is amazing.

I think that this unification simply took place because Google Android in the future will only be the top layer and Fuchsia OS will manage phones, etc., so such a merger is needed to prepare for new changes.

I think that this unification simply took place because Google Android in the future will only be the top layer and Fuchsia OS will manage phones, etc., so such a merger is needed to prepare for new changes.

Pretty much every LLM is a google competitor now. I guess Meta&#x27;s unleashing of AI is a huge thread to google&#x27;s moneymaker.<p>Maybe they see the writing on the wall and want to become Apple 2. Bad news for Samsung?

What for? The market share of Google’s hardware is minuscule, and other Android OEMs are unable to take advantage of Google stuff since they use their own chips.

I don&#x27;t know anything involved in the process, but I hope this doesn&#x27;t make it any harder for regulators to break them up when the day finally comes.

Does this mean we’re going to see a new secure OS?

The world needs a third party software and hardware stack that isn’t controlled by big tech walled garden monopolists &#x2F; authoritarians. Not just for phones but laptops and computers too. As far as phones go, unfortunately the best alternative I’ve heard of is Graphene and the best phone for Graphene is the Pixel series. And I assume using it as a daily driver is problematic without access to various apps or maybe if websites block them or even carriers - not sure.

Does this mean Android&#x2F;Google will scale down with all the cringe YouTube tutorials.

I wonder if Google is anticipating that they will be broken up.

It is unsurprising to see that RickO beat Hiroshi for the title of grand poobah of devices and platforms. Hiroshi always made the impression of a very smart guy. Rick always made the impression of a good politician. Politicians always win

The &#x27;consumer data extractor&#x27; (hardware) team is teaming up with the &#x27;consumer manipulator&#x27; (AI) team, and all free of any inconvenient &#x27;dont be evil&#x27; policy.<p>What a time to be alive!

I&#x27;ll wait for Advanced Platforms and Devices second edition.

I recently got a new Pixel phone and Google&#x27;s much hyped new AI features just seem so... gimmicky. One of the setup examples shows how you can circle a tent on the left side of a picture and move it more to the center. Neat, I guess? It&#x27;s kind of a fun toy but I&#x27;m not sure what problem this is actually solving. I&#x27;m sure there are some usecases for this out there, but it&#x27;s not a capability I have ever found myself wishing for.<p>Meanwhile the rest of the phone is surprisingly buggy and annoying. Basic functionality I use every day is worse than on any other recent phone.<p>Google has never been a great product org, but this desperate need to be seen as one of the cool kids in AI is making things worse. Granted I think of phones&#x2F;computers more as a tool than a toy and put much higher value on usability and reliability versus novelty; perhaps I&#x27;m outlier in that.

&gt; Under Rick Osterloh, a new platforms and devices team will be dedicated to bringing AI to your phone, your TV, and everything else that runs Android.<p>Who is asking for this? Why can&#x27;t they just make their search engine work again?

It seems like Google didn&#x27;t learn the lesson from Google+ and is going to do another fear-driven reorg.

&quot;Google is paninicking and chasing the latest buzzword&quot; would be a more descriptive title

Yawn. Get back to me when something of actual note gets launched.<p>Mobile OSes are now a boring, stable environment. All this noise about AI seems like an attempt to convince investors that some paradigm-shifting change is on the way. It isn&#x27;t. A mildly better Google Assistant is on the way.

It&#x27;s going to be a tremendous success, I can feel it already.

I believe I speak for everyone when I say: As long as the AI does something helpful I don&#x27;t care how you structure the team.<p>But the current generative craze with &quot;AI generated backgrounds&quot; is a dead end.<p>Give me better AI autocomplete, AI image correction, AI noise cancellation...

The comments here are trending towards &quot;stop cramming &#x27;AI&#x27; into everything&quot;. I am curious how the end-user consumer (versus &#x27;AI&#x27; for enterprise&#x2F;business) differ in experience and use. We are in the beginning of this AI-fication, and it seems deep learning models are doing really well and that DL can predictably scale [1.]; therefore, do we have to wait a bit for really life-changing AI for the end-user consumer?<p>I can see AI in enterprise&#x2F;business being extremely useful in different industries, but at the same time, is the current &#x27;AI&#x27; actually good&#x2F;useful for the end-user consumer?<p>[1.] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1712.00409" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1712.00409</a>

How is a reorg at Google any kind of news ?<p>Last I spoke to folks working there, these seem to happen every y-ending day.

I basically forgot that Google made Android.<p>Are they really making major contributions? Seems like Mobile OS are basically stagnant.

&quot;Google&#x27;s previous head of software platforms like Android and ChromeOS, will be headed to &quot;some new projects&quot; at Google&quot;<p>Ok so they&#x27;re more than willing and able to shut down divisions and relocate human resources to &quot;new projects&quot;.<p>Why not just do that with Nimbus? At least ChromeOS didn&#x27;t put Google in the position of being complicit in a plausible ........<p>Strange decision making, shutdown and kill things people love (e.g Google Domains, RSS, etc.) but not shutdown a project that puts the company at risk and that some of their own workers actively protest against.