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People often make fun of Google/Alphabet for their graveyard of failed initiatives/products. While some of it might be warranted, projects like this—that strive
by Mistri 6y ago
People often make fun of Google/Alphabet for their graveyard of failed initiatives/products. While some of it might be warranted, projects like this—that strive to solve a large, global issue through somewhat charitable actions—are generous and have only increased my respect for the Google/Alphabet/X team. I hope they don't get flamed for this, and hopefully some of their research and donation funds can live on and solve the issue that Loon originally intended to one day.
- ogre_codes 6y agoI think the days of Google Moonshots are coming to a close. In general Google hasn't been very good at shooting for the moon. They've lost their leadership and vision and all that's left is a giant advertising behemoth. Did any of their moonshots really hit the mark or even come close?
- Mistri 6y agoWaymo seems like it's nearing its final stages. I have high hopes!
- ogre_codes 6y agoI think it's generous to say it's in its final stages. They haven't even left Phoenix have they? And even in Phoenix, it's still largely a beta project in a few predefined areas. It certainly seems like Google's most likely moon shot to take off. But considering only a few thousand people have used it, it's not exactly a big success.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- runawaybottle 6y agoGoogle has absolutely no choice but to make Waymo succeed with Apple and Tesla taking the space seriously. It’s not a moonshot, it’s an absolute necessity.
- DEADBEEFC0FFEE 6y agoOnly if that the market you want to win in. Where's the synergy between Waymo and online ads?
- runawaybottle 6y agoWhat are you gonna stare at in during robotaxi ride? How about some ads?
- DaiPlusPlus 6y agoWaymo, like any and all software, will never be “complete” - but I assume you’re referring to Waymo being ready for it’s first “real” release somehow - but we still don’t know how exactly Waymo will be integrated into cars or which automakers will go with them. That point of mine now has me wondering what Waymo will look like in 10-20 years’ time when autonomous vehicles become both ubiquitous and un-cool because it’s nothing new anymore (just like how Facebook is un-cool today). Will Waymo’s maintainers be adding new features that benefit the consumer, or will there be pressure to “monetise” it from every angle? And to what extent will brand-conscious automakers go to hide the fact they’re using Waymo, e.g. will they insist on rebranding it - not just for themselves, but between their own sub-brands (e.g. Ford vs Lincoln, or VW and Audi)?
- antupis 6y agoBrain is doing great and Waymo probably at least hits close.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- wutbrodo 6y agoHuh, I used to work next to the Brain team, didn't realize that they started out as Google X. Per their wiki article: > Astro Teller has said that Google Brain paid for the entire cost of Google X even assuming that Waymo has zero expected future profitability.
- jeffbee 6y agoIt's kinda weird to think of brain as an X project. DistBelief was developed out in the open in the main source code repo by people you think of as googlers, like Jeff. So what makes it "X"?
- Judgmentality 6y agoA need to justify X's existence?
- jeffbee 6y agoOr Jeff just wanted it that way. My own personal image of X was that if you had to drive to some old Air Force base to see it, it was X. Since brain was software, it doesn’t fit the model.
- dr_dshiv 6y agoWing?
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoWaymo may / will earn them some money, either they sell it to a crazy big investor, or they license the technology out to a company backed by a crazy big investor.
- refulgentis 6y ago_The_ moonshot, Waymo. People are sleeping on that you can hop in a perfectly safe robotaxi today, the ride along videos are stunning.
- anchpop 6y agoA robotaxi without a human driver! For some reason Waymo seems way ahead of everyone else in self-driving
- solarkraft 6y agoMaybe they are, but their service is super constrained and retains human supervision - just remote controlled.
- ra7 6y agoThey can't be remote controlled i.e. remote operators can't steer the car. They can only "answer questions" apparently. Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/e8bfse/waymo_explains_what_remote_operators_do/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/e8bfse/way...
- aetherson 6y agoThe actual thing that self driving cars get you is "not paying for a taxi driver." If one remote operator can supervise 10 mostly autonomous vehicles, you've gotten 90% of the economic value of full autonomy.
- Judgmentality 6y agoThis ignores the cost of sending data wirelessly over cellular networks so remote operators can see the vehicle, the cost of maintaining the software and hardware on the vehicle itself, the cost of maintaining the vehicle fleet, the cost of creating and operating a consumer-facing support system (!!! for Google), the cost of dealing with the enormous amounts of data those vehicles create (even for Google this is not trivial), the cost of maintaining the special HD maps necessary for the vehicles, not to mention the sunk cost of billions spent developing it. That's not to say you shouldn't dream big (it's a moonshot after all). But there are plenty of reasons to think it won't be viable even if they can solve the technical challenges, and that much still isn't even clear yet.
- Aperocky 6y agoThat's what moonshots are though, there is a high statistical possibility that 0/100 makes it.
- swirepe 6y agoWe put a man on the moon though? I thought a moonshot was hard but doable.
- stickfigure 6y agoThe internet says: "The Apollo program's total cost was about $25.4 billion, about $152 billion in today's dollars." That's about Google's entire revenue for 2020. I don't think even Google could put a man on the moon at those rates. Literal moonshots are expensive.
- snoshy 6y agoA public funding source can provide that kind of support for a decade, but even for the likes of Google that's a stretch. I prefer to think of a moonshot as longer than a longshot, whatever that might be worth. It sure is sad though, coming from the acquisition before Google X that had just so many great players throughout.
- ekianjo 6y ago> The internet says: "The Apollo program's total cost was about $25.4 billion, about $152 billion in today's dollars." And SpaceX will soon have the capability to do it with zillion times less. Seems like if you really want to make it possible, you can.
- qayxc 6y ago> Seems like if you really want to make it possible, you can. More like "if the hard groundwork has been done 60 years ago". It's not as if SpaceX had to quite literally invent the orbital rocket. So after 60 years of manned spaceflight, 9 manned lunar missions, and 30 years of flying reusable crewed vehicles with a space station that has been permanently crewed since 1998 someone better do it MUCH more cheaply. The culprit isn't just "space is hard" - it's decades of cost-plus contracts and heavy government involvement that kept costs high and results low.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tornato7 6y agoGoogle primary way of innovating these days is just buying promising startups. See: Android, Nest, DeepMind, Firebase, FitBit
- tim333 6y agoDepends how you define things but their work with Deepmind ('Our long term aim is to solve intelligence') is interesting. I'm glad we get breakthroughs in protein folding rather than just ads.
- Dig1t 6y agoThey bought Deepmind though, they didn’t dream it up as a moonshot. Plus you can argue that keeping the talent at Deepmind accessible to Googlers contributes to the development of Google’s internal models, which does mostly contribute to their bottom line.
- dehrmann 6y agoNever mind shooting for the moon; they were very late to a cloud game that they should have owned because they were too busy shooting for the moon.
- trhway 6y agothey missed cloud not because they were too busy. They thought of their internal cloud infrastructure as a competitive advantage to be kept to themselves. Very similar to the Intel's thinking of their own fabs which has brought Intel to the current failure. Wrt. moonshots - one need to have huge political capital inside the company to carry the high risk of large investment. I.e. one has to be Jobs or Musk. Even Yang failed. How Nadella succeeded it is kind of a miracle. It looks like there are no people of that caliber at Google these days, and without it you have a CFO touting "investing for long term" which in CFO mind obviously means investment like buying real estate and not a technology moonshot.
- ForHackernews 6y agoArguably, all there ever was was a giant advertising behemoth and everything else is window-dressing to disguise that fact and recruit talent.
- WanderPanda 6y agoAndroid was probably a moonshot at some point?!
- fakedang 6y agoAndroid was an acquisition
- ptero 6y agoI think the main problem is they lost the edge on execution. Traditional "vision" is not strictly needed for moonshot projects; the vision for moonshots is provided by a small team working on their idea. But should the technology start panning out, the company needs to focus aggressively on finding a commercial home for this technology. And this is where I think google (and many big companies) fail. Technologically, Loons worked. I did not believe it when I read about those, but looking at the trajectories in public ADS-B data (those balloons self-advertise) it is clear that they move as designed, doing 2D positioning using only vertical control and can stay afloat for months. Wow! Mission accomplished. But commercially, nothing happened. I do not know if it was because business types were not sold on it and did not build a commercial case; did the technical team simply live in their own bubble not talking to the outside; something else? But a 10-year "moonshot" project that pans out technologically and fails commercially indicates that the right hand ("internal VC") does not know or care what the left hand (techies) is doing, which is the problem at the company. My 2c.
- thu2111 6y agoWell, their target market is very poor people, which is not normally a great segment to expect to be early adopters of expensive new technoogies. Also they're competing against Starlink, which is basically the same concept but in space, which is probably impossible given that LEO is well understood and Musk can launch tons of long-lived satellites quite cheap.
- ptero 6y agoAll good points. I am just saying that moonshot projects are supposed to be "very high risk, high reward" projects -- unlikely to work, but if they do would provide big benefits. Your points argue that this is a "high risk, no reward" project, which is not the way to run a 10-year moonshot. Occasionally starting moonshots as "high risk, uncertain reward" is OK for a short time, but if there is no clear reward on success after a year or two it might be continued as a PR or a charity, but not a moonshot. My 2c.
- rasz 6y ago> did not build a commercial case Selling stolen technology you tried to patent from under the company you suckered into believing into buyout, and then having those patents stripped by the Judge might have something to do with it.
- bergstromm466 6y ago> all that's left is a giant advertising behemoth Was there really ever anything more?
- ogre_codes 6y agoI think so. I used to be a big fan of Google, they made a great search engine, gmail was ahead of the competitors. Even the moonshots were pretty cool/ interesting. Not sure when things went really sideways.
- Taylor_OD 6y agoMoonshots are just that. Most will not work out and a few will be incredible successful.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- treelovinhippie 6y agoSo they extracted the PR value just long enough for people to think of them as "charitable", and then they bailed.
- mjfl 6y agoI mean some of their projects are a little... loony.
- goatinaboat 6y agothat strive to solve a large, global issue through somewhat charitable actions Capturing eyeballs and mindshare before anyone else can is hardly charitable. It was 100% for the benefit of themselves, and everyone knows it. Facebook have tried the same scam.
- hooande 6y agoWhile this could be considered a noble effort, I wish Alphabet would have tried harder. Google has enormous resources and talent. It seems like they dedicated relatively little to aggressively making Loon happen. When the US took a moon shot, we actually made it to the dann moon. It was very expensive and risky and lives were lost. But we committed ourselves and accomplished the goal no matter what it took. I hope that these Alphabet projects aren't just pr / recruiting investments disguised as big ideas about the future.
- wp381640 6y agoSince Ruth Porat came in they've really trimmed any expenditure that doesn't add straight to the bottom line It's really hard to be a public company and to take big risks like this. The Apollo Program never would have worked as a startup or public company. I personally had hoped they told analysts that taking large bets for often no financial outcome is just who Alphabet are - but they folded to the Wall St pressure
- enos_feedler 6y agoThey do often tell analysts this. I have heard Ruth say countless times that they invest for the long term. This usually buys lots of time but ultimately it does need to show financial outcome. It would be strange to not expect this.
- enos_feedler 6y agoI googled “ruth invest for long term” and sure enough here is a video: https://youtu.be/UYoSyLqv9rM https://youtu.be/UYoSyLqv9rM She does say this quite a bit!
- nickff 6y agoI am a staunch supporter of the space program, but... the Apollo program also got cut before it had achieved its objectives, and probably never would have made it to the moon at all if Kennedy had lived.
- ffggvv 6y agothe problem is it doesn’t actually solve problems or improve lives in any real way. if they wanted to do that they’d give people mosquito nets and teach them how to read it’s just corporate PR so people can fawn over them like your post and want to work there or use their products
- anhner 6y agothey're so generous, they didn't even finish the project!
- darawk 6y agoIt's depressing that you both have to worry about being flamed for expressing that view, and that those fears appear to be completely justified based on the responses you're getting. It's quite clear that Google's moonshots are largely about doing good for the world, and building exciting technologies to make the world a better place. And we should be commending them for it. Technology has consistently made the world better, and its been mediated by people and companies with an ethos of innovation, and a maybe slightly naive desire to pursue those goals even when they don't completely make financial sense.
- ulfw 6y agoIf it's so generous, why is it being cancelled like almost every other non-search product?
- londons_explore 6y agoLoon was a clear failure on the inside around year 3. That's when the rate of innovation dropped dramatically and key figures left. Google's main failing was continuing to fund it for a further 6 years with only mediocre progress.
- rasz 6y ago>charitable actions I just choked on my Tea. Did you perhaps miss the fact they stole Loon technology from a company they were in talks of acquiring? got sued, lost, and finally quietly settled? https://www.wired.com/story/the-lawsuit-that-could-pop-alphabets-project-loon-balloons/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-lawsuit-that-could-pop-alpha... https://www.law.com/therecorder/2019/07/29/google-settles-ip-case-over-high-altitude-balloons/?slreturn=20210022125647 https://www.law.com/therecorder/2019/07/29/google-settles-ip...