Sunday, January 13, 2013

Has Google Become Institution-Bound?


The debut of Google's new Nexus 4 phone has been a less than smooth experience for the internet giant, from minute one of day one. To the no-doubt embarrassment of the management of a company that is the embodiment of "big computing", their public-facing ecommerce systems were totally incapable of meeting the initial demand  for the new Nexus 4. Play.google.com servers crashed under load in the first few minutes after the phone went up for sale on November 12, 2012, and stayed down for most of the day.

The phone apparently sold out at some point during that day, but potential buyers couldn't tell because Google's servers kept crashing under the load of people continuing to try to buy it.

As if that was not embarrassing enough, when Google was finally able to get another supply of stock from the phone's manufacturer, LG on December 17, the same thing happened again! One would have thought that the poster child for scalable computing would have been able to ramp up their ecommerce systems to meet a now known demand in that one-month period since the initial fiasco.

But they weren't.  Why is that?  We have our suspicions, but let's tell a little bit more of the Nexus 4 story first. It will probably become clear.

Almost immediately after folks started receiving their new Nexus 4 phones, trouble reports began cropping up in places like this, and this. Oh, and this, as well. And this. And this. And this. And this. And finally, this.

If you have caught the gist of where we are going with the article, it will come as no great surprise to hear that it took forever to get Google's attention regarding broken wifi network behavior with the Nexus 4. As the problem reports contained in the links above demonstrate, the Google Device Support team appears to be a bit autistic.  Or, communication between the Google Device Support team and the Google Nexus 4 developers simply does not exist. If you read all of the bug reports listed in the links above, you now know that it took nearly two months before the Nexus 4 developers even became aware that there was a problem with the wifi drivers for the Nexus 4 that was severe enough to warrant assigning the problem to a developer.

So there we are.  Google oversaw the development of a potentially game-changing Android phone, but couldn't stand up an ecommerce system that would allow people to buy it.  Then they stood up a Google Device Support team that is seemingly completely tone-deaf. With apologies to Douglas Adams, we have met the Vogons, and they are the Google.

--Doug
doug@parrot-farm.net

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UPDATE: 9:15 am 1/14/2013.  The Google device developer assigned to the Nexus 4 wifi issue just posted in the code.google.com thread dedicated to this problem indicating that there is a "known problem" with the Qualcomm wifi driver used by the Nexus 4 that is causing most, if not all of the problems that folks are complaining about. See the next blog post for more info.

13 comments:

  1. You said that they sold out on day 1 and weren't resupplied until Dec 17. I purchased mine on 30 Nov and saw they were available the day before.

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  2. I guess it depends on where you lived that determined when the second replenishment occurred.

    http://www.ibtimes.com/nexus-4-sold-out-again-us-google-apologizes-calls-supplies-scarce-erratic-944032

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  3. The issue is not whether Goolge is Institution-Bound but how fast they became a bureaucracy out of touch with their customer.

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  4. In a bizarre sort of way, it continues to fascinate me how tone deaf the whole Google device support / developer team remains in spite of the onslaught of customer complaints about the phone. We have essentially no feedback on the nature of the problem, time to fix, anything...

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  5. I have purchased every Google device since the Nexus One, except for the Nexus 10.
    The N4 has such a myriad of problems, from bluetooth and wifi, but also broken OTA USB, processor throttling issues, etc... that I will think twice about spending my money on the next Google device unconditionally.
    The fact that Google has obviously no interest in fixing those issues (they removed USB OTA from the spec rather than fix it!) is another reason to think they are just another big company interested in hooking another group of suckers in their next "great" device.

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  6. I'd have to agree that Google is doing a very good impression of "Being Evil". 3:56.

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  7. @Anonymous on Jan 29:

    Just want to point out that the correct abbreviation is USB OTG.

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  8. Things Linux, where experts discuss state of the art technology.

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  9. I have tested four nexus 4 and I have a fifth on the way. I have never met this problem, or any other problem other than heating. It could be some incompatibility with your router. Did you let Google know what router you are using?

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  10. 12:12pm, have you verified that your Nexus 4 wifi does not go to sleep when the screen is blanked? You can easily test for this: find out what the IP address of your phone is when connected to wifi. Then from another computer, ping the phone. You will see your phone stop responding to ping requests about a minute after the the screen blanks. This issue is acknowledged by Google, and has been written about here: http://things-linux.blogspot.com/2013/01/it-was-known-issue.html

    When the screen is not blanked, wifi appears to work, but there are numerous reports of packet loss, also caused by the buggy Qualcomm wifi driver used by the Nexus 4.

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  11. Oh, and you can also read all about it here: http://gc.codehum.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=40065

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  12. I think we're being a little hard on Google. While I agree that the nexus 4 is less than perfect I also believe that the issue goes further down the rabbit hole. I think Google is having trouble with other company's getting source for hardware such as Qualcomm and the like. If you notice in 4.2.2 none of the hardware sources were updated. This is pure speculation of course. Just my opinion. I just think the problem isn't Google but the company's it is in bed with and relies on for binaries and such.

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  13. Well Maddoggin, if you're willing to cut the King of Komputing some slack for being incapable of hosting a web enterprise system that is capable of keeping up with buyer demand, I guess you're free to do so.

    But, Google had 93 days in which to get an updated wifi driver from Qualcomm to include in 4.2.2 to fix the wifi suspend problem with the Nexus 4, and they failed to do so. Failing that, they could have made the trivial change to the Qualcomm wifi driver init file described here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2072930

    as a partial work-around and included that in 4.2.2, but they could not bother to do even that.

    Google is doing a pretty shabby job of managing their retail product support obligations. Their QA kind of sucks too.

    --Doug

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