I worked there from about 2008 to 2014, and definitely noticed the same thing. Once the core guys started to leave, and teams started to ballon in size, you could tell that the magic was gone. For me, Diablo 3 was really the turning point. Despite clear polish and triple A quality, it lacked the same soul that the predecessors had.
You’re confusing the product with production. Google has plenty of product people that can tell them what to build. FitBit has engineers, hardware designers, production capabilities, suppliers, distribution, as well as the ownership of name ‘Bit’ in the wearables space. Makes perfect sense if Google is trying to make a rapid push into a new market.
Google isn’t buying Fitbit to improve Fitbit, Google is acquiring a company to gain their experience in the wearables space to compete with Apple and Samsung. I suspect Google thinks AppleWatch is helping them erode the Android market share and/or preventing switchers from moving to Pixel.
So I think the fundamental problem with a lot of the arguments I am seeing presented here is this fascination with logic and thought as being a universal truth. We are, in fact, no different than Flatlanders.
If we walk through the evolutionary history, we can see a clear pattern of each advancing step slowly creeping into further and further dimensions. First it was single cell protobacteria being able to detect light or dark above them, and gradually growing more and more complex. A dog, while a 3 dimensional construct, is really little more than a 2 1/2 dimensional being. Humans, by extension, are really the first fully realized 3 dimensional being. And also one of the first to take steps into the perception of the 4th dimension. And as evolution continues to advance, there is no reason to suspect our ability to perceive the 4th, or even 5th dimensions won’t continue to advance. Soon our ability to manipulate those dimensions will follow suite, and with it, will come a fundamental shift in how that creature conceptualizes the physical world.
To say that a 4th or 5th dimensional creation would still use a binary logic system equal to true or false, on or off, is nonsense. And as such, any mappings of our current logic systems would fall relatively flat.
Our world is still flat, confined by the limits of our own physical hardware. In a billion years what ever comes after us will be completely different. Confined by its own limited hardware.
Honestly, I think this is going to be the end of Brack’s short tenure as top executive at Blizzard. I am reminded of the parable of the three letters. I think the company has backed itself into a corner, and the only way out is to let leadership fall on the sword.
Throwing multiple cores at the problem is not what I would call beating decades of optimized C. The author only utilizes multiple cores when he realizes the overhead of Haskell will not allow him to actually win. Author even admits the C program was more efficient. You can multi thread a C program as well, at which point it would retake the title.
(Desoxyn is meth btw)