You'd probably write these off as "$BIG_CO reinvents the wheel", but a few things these things did really well:
- Big bright LED ring around the outside that glows red or green to tell you if the room was available. This was very useful when performing one of the most common big company rituals, craning your head while speedwalking to try to find a free meeting room.
- 1-tap to book a room when you found such a free meeting room. They listed a bunch of common durations, including ones that rounded up to the next half-hour/hour.
- The "outside" Gizmo is integrated with an identical Gizmo inside the room that controls the VC equipment, providing a consistent UX. This is something I only appreciated after leaving: at my current company, the two are sourced from different companies and don't integrate -- you have to exit the meeting room and use the "outside" tablet to extend your meeting or check in, for example.
- When a meeting was running over and people checked in on the "outside" Gizmo, a loud ping sounded on the "inside" Gizmo to tell everybody to GTFO. This was not always successful.
If everyone is reinventing the wheel, then it means the incumbent products are too expensive or lack some necessary features.
On the one hand, I agree that these devices are pretty useful, and there is some measure of thanks for the big companies inventing them. On the other hand, these devices don’t seem to be as well-marketed compared to the things the big companies are known for (probably because the margins are probably not as good at big company scale / the big company is too specialized around its cash cows to really refine these innovations into something that people or other companies would buy). It seems like an innovator’s dilemma to me.
I guess I have better idea of what Steve Jobs and Bill Gates meant when they said that they only used some of the ideas they saw at Xerox PARC.
Follow-up questions:
1. Have you seen anything at any of the companies that you’ve worked at and isn’t part of the company’s business, but is cool and should/could be used elsewhere?
2. In contrast to 1., have you seen anything that some of the companies that you’ve worked that isn’t part of the business that they repeatedly perform poorly?
Pro tip: once people are working in offices again, if this happens, whip out your phone and dial the room directly. People tend to speed up when they realize they are blocking someone far away from dialing in, even when they don't seem to give a crap about the people standing just outside the door.
Of course, the ones who see your name dialing in and then spot you outside the room a few seconds later will be confused at first, and later may get annoyed with you, but remember, they were the ones who were being abusive.
This is also a helpful tip if the room has more than one door.
I can't tell you how often my team knocked at door A to throw out another group that then all left by door B, leaving us waiting outside until we knocked again 5min later.
Which is probably good you didn't have the guts. Being passive-aggressive-impolite to people won't help them to be more polite about running over others' time.
I always did the knock-on-door + tell them my meeting time has started and never had an issue, be assertive and people will move quickly. Escalating impoliteness doesn't help anyone except your own sense of self-justice.
Back in school, I was one of those people who watched the clock so I could just zoom out when it was time. That habit led me to assume others did the same, so when I started my first job I assumed meetings would end on time and I tended to just walk in without checking who is actually in the room (then pause and quietly back out when they all looked at me).
Eventually broke the habit, but for the time I was doing it it did break up the previous meeting pretty quickly.
That’s definitely not reinventing the wheel. As someone who used to be Service Desk for a very large company I can say that those (not even cheap) off-the-shelf MIMO panels caused so many call-outs to reseat/restart/replace them that I bet you’d actually save money by developing something that works reliably well.
Google had the radishes, Facebook had the gizmos, and this is just one of those. This is in addition to countless other things used over the years at both places. (Sheets of paper in clear holders, Android tablets rigged to do PoE, you name it.)
The radishes were neat since they managed to do what they did from whatever power they could scrape from their solar cells. This is impressive when you consider they were indoors! They also had some 802.15 type thing going on, albeit with funky little boxes scattered throughout doing gateway work. I was disappointed when that project was discontinued before it got very far.
From the other comments here, it looks like this thing is basically the equivalent of the iPads we have running Envoy outside every conference room at my company. We weren’t nearly so clever. Our setup just has an ordinary Lightning cable going to a plain old, standard-issue charger to keep it going.
Lmao @ pink mustache factory. That slayed me. I was definitely uncertain if OP meant Envoy the service mesh or not. Was thinking, "has cloud infrastructure gone too far?" Thank you for clarifying!
It's even funnier because we also use the pink mustache factory tool at work, just not for scheduling meetings. I never thought to elaborate, because the meeting room management software is the one I interact with most. The other is mostly transparent to me as a lowly app backend engineer, and I'm glad for that.
I've heard more than once that tablets don't really cover the "running for hours, powered externally" use case very well (the constant charging/discharging leading to an exploding/expanding battery).
Was this just the early models or is this still the case?
I do wonder why there are so many commercial solutions for basically "a tablet, just a bit different".
Lots of places including Apple and Nordstrom use iPhone as a mobile checkout or scanning device. Lots of restaurants have iPads that just sit all day and are used as a POS.
Personally I think an iPad outside a conference room is a waste of capability but it shouldn’t harm the device or be dangerous.
iPad may be a waste of capability but there's no competition in the less-capable camp. Making less capable varieties is waste of design and manufacturing effort.
As a former FBer, I can honestly say that I would buy these for my company if FB sold them (sadly I just don't think the TAM is there for them to even try).
My understanding is that they are basically secure terminals (PoE and requires network to boot, meaning it's hard to unplug and steal) that run persistent webpages (so people make "apps" by writing JS + HTML) and have unique names consisting of random words (e.g. "strong-blue-cardinal") such that you could go to an internal tool and push your webpage to any Gizmo you knew the name of (and were on the ACL for). At FB they are used for everything from
- meeting room booking (the LEDs on the side indicate whether the room is booked, red; booked but not yet checked in to, yellow; available, green; non-reservable, blue; looking down a hallway it was fairly simple to decide if something was available).
- dashboards (we used to use Mac minis)
- misc stuff (iirc there was even a hackathon to see what else people would build)
Contrast this to now where I need to run a metrics dashboard and can't figure out what hardware to use (we settled on a chromebit, but why do I need all of chromeos to basically run one webpage). Like I said, would happily buy.
If you're just looking for meeting room scheduling on a screen outside every door, buy the hardware, like a cheap iPad, and use Zoom Rooms for the scheduling.
Try this: Incumbent products are so bad and so expensive to the degree it’s noticeable for a company this rich. Noticeable enough that it decides to spend money in engineering and highly custom hardware manufacturing is still a better bang for buck.
The initial cost of the Gizmo was around the same as an iPad but the long term maintenance cost was significantly less.
Every building at Facebook probably has a couple of hundred of these devices between reception, building maps, room tools, monitoring dashboards and video conference controllers.
Unfortunately this thing is not as interesting as it sounds. This is basically a programmable terminal that is used throughout Facebook's campus. For example, they're in meeting rooms to dial other meeting rooms for video conferences or to tell people to get out of meeting rooms because their meeting time is up. If you've ever been to a Facebook office, this is actually one of the first things you'll see, since you'll be signing an NDA on it shortly thereafter to enter the office building.
It's packaged the way it is because employees can order them to hack on them. Presumably to encourage making more mundane office fixtures.
> I wonder what they were doing in this thing that needed this much CPU power?
Qseven is ... tiny, with total module consumption limited to a measly 12 watts.
For those who want actual massive lots of CPU power in their embedded projects, have a look at COMexpress. I've seen people stuffing i7 and Xeon processors on the Basic sized modules, there's a lot of power one can have with 130 watts. Only downside is, the connectors cost a boatload of money.
If you want a smart networked sign on the outside of your meeting rooms with some buttons, i think an ESP8266 with an e-Ink display would be perfect (and very cheap!). It could even last a long time with just a rechargable battery.
I think someone makes e-ink devices for specifically this purpose! My former workplace bought some, but it turned out they didn't work on our 5GHz-only wifi. Don't remember the name, sadly.
If you search the web for "FBG-1701", at least for me with ddg, it turns up a user manual for "Quanta Computer QF7" and the FCC reports. Theres the same ID mentioned in the tweets but no mention of fb. So just some OEM item rebranded?
Looks neat, wish I had these in my office. Anyone have recommendations for something similar? Really like the lights and the "report unattended" button for potentially clearing forgotten meetings.
Sure, it's easy enough to find network-attached screens. The hard part is giving those screens access to anything without them showing up as vectors for every Red Team exercise.
Gizmos are used for basically any screen at Facebook that needs to display "live" information -- conference rooms, building maps, monitoring dashboards, etc. Each one has a provisioned identity protected by secure boot and hardware root of trust. They have a minimum of onboard storage (maybe even nothing mutable/persistent after boot?) so they're not a foothold for persistence.
There are many reasons why Facebook could prefer going with homegrown hardware:
1) It allows them to actually work with hardware and cross pollinate knowledge to their consumer hardware businesses. And I’m not talking only about the hardware itself but all the institutional knowledge required to negotiate with vendors, outsource circuit design and procure parts.
2) They can create one device that is multi-purpose like this one and control every low level detail so it can be used even for security critical tasks.
3) They can test the devices against their own infrastructure and collect low level data that is useful for developing video/voice services and encrypted services in real case scenarios.
In general it just makes sense. Facebook’s market cap is 6X larger than Cisco and it employs 50k people. At that scale and for a company like FB, this doesn’t sound crazy.
Gizmo was from the group I worked with at Facebook. This was almost entirely from a "How can we make it easier for people to collaborate". 2 is the closest reason :)
They were multi functional:
- Room Check-in devices (replacing Nexus 7s)
- Building Maps (replacing mac-minis)
- Reception Check-in (replacing iPads)
- Employee Dashboards (replacing mac-minis)
- Video conference control panels (replacing the cisco device)
The advantages they had were:
- Single SKU for IT Operations
- Pulled down a fresh image on each boot and had no state which made IT and security happier
- Could join the correct VLAN via 802.11x, the key lived on the TPM chip which made security happy
> This is something companies would pay huge amounts of money for.
> Any idea why Facebook never marketed these?
This was designed to fit with internal Facebook frameworks and network capabilities. The device itself does not do much, in most cases just starts a browser and points it to an internal webapp. The device is just the presentation layer of a great deal of backend work that can't be easily extracted as a product.
The first thing I thought of when I saw this was this was almost certainly some sort of precursor/inspiration for the Facebook Portal which is a video conference focused smart....thing. I'd say your #1 is really on point.
Unless I’m missing something, none of those reasons sound terribly compelling to me, given we’re talking about a social media company. Facebook is fundamentally not a hardware company, things like Oculus notwithstanding.
There are literally thousands of these machines at each office.
Maintaining a fleet of android devices sucks hard, especially when they are on devices that are not really designed to be remotely controlled (any kind of tablet is really not that well designed to be managed remotely (ie has batteries, only works on wifi, not onboard TPM thats useful))
Plus they are posted in every room where sensitive conversations are going on, not only that there is a list of who's going to be in those meetings. Not only that, they have access to video conferencing in each room as well.
Combine that with the portal offering, I can see the compelling value add.
as for "not a hardware company" their datacentres are almost entirely custom.
Not a hardware company yet. There was a time where Amazon and Google were not hardware companies.
But I think saying they are not a hardware company is a bit unfair. Oculus by itself is a tremendously hard and complex hardware business.
Portal less so, but it’s still a meaningful device with a lot of complexity.
Also Facebook infrastructure must have hundreds of proprietary hardware elements that are built specifically for their own use cases.
But I get what you’re saying. From all the tech behemoths, FB is the by far the least experienced in hardware. But I think it’s pretty clear that FB sees hardware as a column of their long term vision. That alone is enough reason to invest on developing your own hardware.
How about just as an exercise in actually having fun? I'm sure there are several qualified hardware engineers at Facebook and the company has plenty of money. All of the off-the-shelf solutions to this problem are complete garbage, so they just decided to make a better one. For fun.
But they are big enough that most hardware companies would be small-scale operations in comparison. Why wouldn't they set up a division to do something like this?
There's some projection-psychodrama to it, but it goes along with the tape on Zuckerberg's webcam: they really don't want Google, Amazon, or their Chinese competitors on their corporate network, especially not with cameras and microphones.
In my experience, most of the off the shelf systems for stuff like this doesn't work very well. Even when it does, it's not extensible. I could see it being appealing to have a more customizable in-house system, at least when you have as much engineering talent as Facebook probably does.
There’s a lot. Cisco makes them if you have their conference room hardware. Any new tech corporate office (and some non tech) will have some sort of hardware that lets you dial into the meeting and or reserve the conference room.
Sure, but it’s either too expensive (Cisco), too unreliable (MIMO) or both (Tandberg). Source: used to be a Service Desk tech for a giant conglomerate.
Parrrrrrtially disagree. Maybe it's because I'm used to Twitter for nifty info dumps like this, but threads like this can be fun, too.
You're seeing the discovery happen in realtime, and people can react and ask questions as it happens. It's quite enjoyable to see it all unfold if you catch threads like this happening.
Now, AFTERWARD, a more traditional blog post summing it all up would be nice. If the author has one, at least.
True. Foone's stuff is great if you happen to stumble upon it at the second they start the discovery. But because of the earth being round and us being on different sides of it, this never happens to me =)
Afterwards it's just tedious to wrestle with Twitter's shitty UX to get the whole thing.
Threadreader and its ilk are a good midway point, I'd still prefer for Twitter to have a native "make this tweetstorm a blogpost" button for those authors who don't do blogs for some reason.
I'm not sure what it says about me, but I wanted to make a joke about a pregnancy test running Doom, and all I could come up with is "imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!" and "cool, but does it run Crysis?"
Basically, that is 100% what they are known for. Foone has a lot of incredibly interesting posts on twitter around taking things apart and explaining the function.
If you don’t trust the various folks who work, have interviewed at, or have had meetings at Facebook, there’s also this New York Times article that happens to have a photo of one front and center: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/19/technology/facebook-elect...
- Big bright LED ring around the outside that glows red or green to tell you if the room was available. This was very useful when performing one of the most common big company rituals, craning your head while speedwalking to try to find a free meeting room.
- 1-tap to book a room when you found such a free meeting room. They listed a bunch of common durations, including ones that rounded up to the next half-hour/hour.
- The "outside" Gizmo is integrated with an identical Gizmo inside the room that controls the VC equipment, providing a consistent UX. This is something I only appreciated after leaving: at my current company, the two are sourced from different companies and don't integrate -- you have to exit the meeting room and use the "outside" tablet to extend your meeting or check in, for example.
- When a meeting was running over and people checked in on the "outside" Gizmo, a loud ping sounded on the "inside" Gizmo to tell everybody to GTFO. This was not always successful.
Some pictures: https://andrea-locatelli.com/facebook-roomtool