7 ms·

Mineral winds down: 'We will no longer be an Alphabet company'

44 points by adrian_mrd 2y ago

ipsum2 2y ago
Frustratingly it's never explained why the company failed.
- Scaevolus 2y ago
  I'd guess that the giant agricultural firms have already built quite accurate models using decades of data and expertise, and the addition of fancy new AI techniques didn't offer large improvements.
  - TaylorAlexander 2y ago
    As someone who worked at Google X robotics until leaving to start an open source farming robotics project very similar to Mineral (see my profile) I can say that there’s so, so much opportunity for new ideas in this field, but Google X is not very good at launching actual companies. So much of what’s done at Google X is canceled (I worked on what became Everyday Robots, now canceled), that you can’t take “project at X was canceled” as a sign of anything at all really. There are very weird forces going on at Google X. I don’t think I’m equipped to provide a thorough analysis, but I think there’s just too much easy money and the only people they really have to please are the guys at the top, who are deca billionaires who don’t even have to spend their own money to fund this stuff. It’s all a very fun and interesting R&D adventure, and those guys really have accomplished a lot in this life so I wouldn’t write off their abilities by any means, but the arrangement is very strange by traditional R&D standards. And it really seemed to me like the people in charge of our project were more focused on getting massive quarterly milestone bonuses than they were actually delivering something that would work. Honestly I really can’t say exactly what is going wrong, except that Google X is a very strange place.
    - pstuart 2y ago
      Acorn looks super cool. Fight the good fight!
      - TaylorAlexander 2y ago
        Thank you so much! I made some good progress tonight. Finished bringing up the system with all of our new electronics, and in the next six months we’re going to start building a small fleet of them!
    - killerstorm 2y ago
      I guess Google is not interested in small things. E.g. $1M revenue might sustain a startup in other parts of the world, but for Google it's a rounding error.
- a012 2y ago
  It seems like they have some techs but there’s no applicable products that can generate profits.
- vasco 2y ago
  > While the company had forged partnerships with some leading players in food & ag, said the publication quoting an unnamed source, it had “struggled to translate such deals into durable revenue streams.”
- schiffern 2y ago
  Basically they couldn't cross John Deere's moat. Looking at their video[0], it seems clear the right place for this technology is mounted to existing tractors. There are good reasons why farm machinery is designed like it is: durability, crossing rough and uneven terrain, repairability, economies of size, etc. All these sensors and monitoring systems are standard on a modern tractor or combine. For frequent close crop monitoring between drives, hyperspectral drones will probably win using a simpler software approach. The hardware looks great for inexpensive early learning (which was probably the goal), but uncompetitive as a real product. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmxrRps7DnI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmxrRps7DnI
modeless 2y ago
Google X is a failed experiment. Waymo is the only worthwhile thing they ever did and it predates X (as Chauffeur). Just look at their "Projects" page here: https://x.company/projects/ https://x.company/projects/ Still touting public failures like Everyday Robots, Loon, Glass, Makani, now Mineral. Fail fast shouldn't mean fail always...
- hiddencost 2y ago
  POSIWID? A lot of projects like X were really about keeping people off the job market. edit: or they were about finding a way to marginalize competitors for senior roles. Give them a cushy job that plays to their ego, so they don't fight you for the key positions of power in the company.
  - 0xB31B1B 2y ago
    or option 3: it was a way for senior execs at google to hire their friends from stanford.
    - otabdeveloper4 2y ago
      Spoiler: all three options are actually the same option.
    - Ekaros 2y ago
      option 4, standard empire building and appearing to be doing something...
- croes 2y ago
  Confusing that there are X and X. x.company and x.com. Seems creativity and memorizable branding isn't a thing anymore.
  - moralestapia 2y ago
    I could never, ever, confuse "X the messaging service/social network" with "X the experimental Google incubator". And I guess US trademark law agrees with me since they're both operating without hiccups.
datahack 2y ago
Man it’s so frustrating to see another failure to gain revenue from x labs. I really wish I had the resources to take one of these out and find product market fit. I just don’t understand why product market fit isn’t established and revenue found before launching — these failures seem to elementary to avoid. It just seems like they flail when they launch because they are science projects and don’t have established and verified customer pain. I really think that one exercise could reshape the whole effort. Just work on problems that also have some element of customer traction — it doesn’t mean you can’t moonshot. But it does mean you can stay in business long enough to have a chance at a moonshot which is the really thought part usually.
- Waterluvian 2y ago
  I think the failure here, as it usually is, is doing it backwards: thinking you can invent X and then go find product market fit.”
  - jfengel 2y ago
    If I knew how to be sure people would pay for a thing without my having even created a prototype, I'd be way richer.
    - Waterluvian 2y ago
      Yeah. That’s fundamentally why we prototype and get to market fast and learn what we don’t yet know. And a perfectly cromulent outcome is, “this feels awesome but nobody wants it. Sunk cost. Shutting down.”
- kolinko 2y ago
  With ambitious projects like this, you’d expect the vast majority of them fail.
  - szundi 2y ago
    That was not the parent commenter’s point
ZeroGravitas 2y ago
An interesting wrinkle is that they only graduated from X to being a standalone Alphabet company a year ago. That was supposed to signal that they'd achieved a sustainable business model, but a year later, apparently that wasn't the case.
SebFender 2y ago
Interesting - but if I may - the bullshit generator force is strong.
dekhn 2y ago
Let's see what's left in Alphabet that isn't Google. There's Calico, CapitalG, Fiber, GV, Intrinsic, Isomorphic, Verily, Waymo, Wing, X. Nest and DeepMind were absorbed into Google, and many of the previous Alphabet mini-companies are already gone (Makani, etc). My personal expectation is that Calico will eventually wind down, as their research has been pretty unexceptional and I don't think they've managed to find any real revenue sources. Intrinsic is probably on borrowed time, looking for revenue, and if they don't get significant amounts in the next two years, will be shut down. Waymo isn't profitable yet but it looks like the execs have decided to give it a very, very long runway, and they are the technical leader in no-driver cars. It's still at risk if they don't find a good revenue model. Wing has no real revenue to support their costs, and drone deliveries just aren't going to be a great business, so I expect it to shut down in the next two years. Fiber- it's hard to tell why Google has allowed this to continue for so long. The only thing I can imagine is that they are somehow using the usage data to generate revenue or ML training data. Intrinsic is really new so they probably have a couple years runway, but pharma sales aren't a great business to be in if your only product is a protein structure predictor and binding predictor. I work in this field and I still see this as an unrealistic bet on Alphabet's part. That leaves Verily. It's clear Alphabet has downsized it significantly and scoped the projects down significantly. They have turned away from every single early idea and pivoted to a few remaining areas where they have some strength. I work in this field and it's amazing to me they keep it around- so I expect that unless they sell it in the next year or two, it will be shut down. CapitalG, GV, and Google's real estate ventures will probably all continue because they have generated a fair amount of revenue. Google Cloud is part of Google, not Alphabet, which IMHO is an insult to the people who run it. It could be spun off as an all-in Alphabet company but it's so closely tied to the rest of the Google infrastructure it will never live on its own. Truly impressive how little Alphabet has achieved.
- zamadatix 2y ago
  Google Fiber seems like a reasonable business, I'm just more surprised they haven't went and sold it off already.
- toast0 2y ago
  > Fiber- it's hard to tell why Google has allowed this to continue for so long. The only thing I can imagine is that they are somehow using the usage data to generate revenue or ML training data. I'd guess they signed long term agreements with the municipalities where they offer service and they can't find a good way out. That or they have acccess to some resource related to being a residential ISP that they want to use for other things (cable TV feeds?). Fiber sort of fulfilled its mission of getting more people connected at high speeds; the problem is the best way to do that is to annouce a build out in 20 cities, and look busy for 18 months while the telco and cableco upgrade their existing customers to something similar. I don't think you can do that more than once though. Actually building a network isn't fiscally responsible, since they won't see many takers when the incumbents can upgrade faster than Google can overbuild and most people are fine with ~50/5 service anyway.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
xnx 2y ago
3 days ago. 23 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40867508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40867508
ZaraHabib 2y ago
[dead]

44 points by adrian_mrd 2y ago

ipsum2 2y ago

Frustratingly it's never explained why the company failed.

Scaevolus 2y ago
I'd guess that the giant agricultural firms have already built quite accurate models using decades of data and expertise, and the addition of fancy new AI techniques didn't offer large improvements.
- TaylorAlexander 2y ago
  As someone who worked at Google X robotics until leaving to start an open source farming robotics project very similar to Mineral (see my profile) I can say that there’s so, so much opportunity for new ideas in this field, but Google X is not very good at launching actual companies. So much of what’s done at Google X is canceled (I worked on what became Everyday Robots, now canceled), that you can’t take “project at X was canceled” as a sign of anything at all really. There are very weird forces going on at Google X. I don’t think I’m equipped to provide a thorough analysis, but I think there’s just too much easy money and the only people they really have to please are the guys at the top, who are deca billionaires who don’t even have to spend their own money to fund this stuff. It’s all a very fun and interesting R&D adventure, and those guys really have accomplished a lot in this life so I wouldn’t write off their abilities by any means, but the arrangement is very strange by traditional R&D standards. And it really seemed to me like the people in charge of our project were more focused on getting massive quarterly milestone bonuses than they were actually delivering something that would work. Honestly I really can’t say exactly what is going wrong, except that Google X is a very strange place.
  - pstuart 2y ago
    Acorn looks super cool. Fight the good fight!
    - TaylorAlexander 2y ago
      Thank you so much! I made some good progress tonight. Finished bringing up the system with all of our new electronics, and in the next six months we’re going to start building a small fleet of them!
  - killerstorm 2y ago
    I guess Google is not interested in small things. E.g. $1M revenue might sustain a startup in other parts of the world, but for Google it's a rounding error.
a012 2y ago
It seems like they have some techs but there’s no applicable products that can generate profits.
vasco 2y ago
> While the company had forged partnerships with some leading players in food & ag, said the publication quoting an unnamed source, it had “struggled to translate such deals into durable revenue streams.”
schiffern 2y ago
Basically they couldn't cross John Deere's moat. Looking at their video[0], it seems clear the right place for this technology is mounted to existing tractors. There are good reasons why farm machinery is designed like it is: durability, crossing rough and uneven terrain, repairability, economies of size, etc. All these sensors and monitoring systems are standard on a modern tractor or combine. For frequent close crop monitoring between drives, hyperspectral drones will probably win using a simpler software approach. The hardware looks great for inexpensive early learning (which was probably the goal), but uncompetitive as a real product. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmxrRps7DnI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmxrRps7DnI

modeless 2y ago

Google X is a failed experiment. Waymo is the only worthwhile thing they ever did and it predates X (as Chauffeur). Just look at their "Projects" page here: https://x.company/projects/ https://x.company/projects/ Still touting public failures like Everyday Robots, Loon, Glass, Makani, now Mineral. Fail fast shouldn't mean fail always...

hiddencost 2y ago
POSIWID? A lot of projects like X were really about keeping people off the job market. edit: or they were about finding a way to marginalize competitors for senior roles. Give them a cushy job that plays to their ego, so they don't fight you for the key positions of power in the company.
- 0xB31B1B 2y ago
  or option 3: it was a way for senior execs at google to hire their friends from stanford.
  - otabdeveloper4 2y ago
    Spoiler: all three options are actually the same option.
  - Ekaros 2y ago
    option 4, standard empire building and appearing to be doing something...
croes 2y ago
Confusing that there are X and X. x.company and x.com. Seems creativity and memorizable branding isn't a thing anymore.
- moralestapia 2y ago
  I could never, ever, confuse "X the messaging service/social network" with "X the experimental Google incubator". And I guess US trademark law agrees with me since they're both operating without hiccups.

datahack 2y ago

Man it’s so frustrating to see another failure to gain revenue from x labs. I really wish I had the resources to take one of these out and find product market fit. I just don’t understand why product market fit isn’t established and revenue found before launching — these failures seem to elementary to avoid. It just seems like they flail when they launch because they are science projects and don’t have established and verified customer pain. I really think that one exercise could reshape the whole effort. Just work on problems that also have some element of customer traction — it doesn’t mean you can’t moonshot. But it does mean you can stay in business long enough to have a chance at a moonshot which is the really thought part usually.

Waterluvian 2y ago
I think the failure here, as it usually is, is doing it backwards: thinking you can invent X and then go find product market fit.”
- jfengel 2y ago
  If I knew how to be sure people would pay for a thing without my having even created a prototype, I'd be way richer.
  - Waterluvian 2y ago
    Yeah. That’s fundamentally why we prototype and get to market fast and learn what we don’t yet know. And a perfectly cromulent outcome is, “this feels awesome but nobody wants it. Sunk cost. Shutting down.”
kolinko 2y ago
With ambitious projects like this, you’d expect the vast majority of them fail.
- szundi 2y ago
  That was not the parent commenter’s point

ZeroGravitas 2y ago

An interesting wrinkle is that they only graduated from X to being a standalone Alphabet company a year ago. That was supposed to signal that they'd achieved a sustainable business model, but a year later, apparently that wasn't the case.

SebFender 2y ago

Interesting - but if I may - the bullshit generator force is strong.

dekhn 2y ago

Let's see what's left in Alphabet that isn't Google. There's Calico, CapitalG, Fiber, GV, Intrinsic, Isomorphic, Verily, Waymo, Wing, X. Nest and DeepMind were absorbed into Google, and many of the previous Alphabet mini-companies are already gone (Makani, etc). My personal expectation is that Calico will eventually wind down, as their research has been pretty unexceptional and I don't think they've managed to find any real revenue sources. Intrinsic is probably on borrowed time, looking for revenue, and if they don't get significant amounts in the next two years, will be shut down. Waymo isn't profitable yet but it looks like the execs have decided to give it a very, very long runway, and they are the technical leader in no-driver cars. It's still at risk if they don't find a good revenue model. Wing has no real revenue to support their costs, and drone deliveries just aren't going to be a great business, so I expect it to shut down in the next two years. Fiber- it's hard to tell why Google has allowed this to continue for so long. The only thing I can imagine is that they are somehow using the usage data to generate revenue or ML training data. Intrinsic is really new so they probably have a couple years runway, but pharma sales aren't a great business to be in if your only product is a protein structure predictor and binding predictor. I work in this field and I still see this as an unrealistic bet on Alphabet's part. That leaves Verily. It's clear Alphabet has downsized it significantly and scoped the projects down significantly. They have turned away from every single early idea and pivoted to a few remaining areas where they have some strength. I work in this field and it's amazing to me they keep it around- so I expect that unless they sell it in the next year or two, it will be shut down. CapitalG, GV, and Google's real estate ventures will probably all continue because they have generated a fair amount of revenue. Google Cloud is part of Google, not Alphabet, which IMHO is an insult to the people who run it. It could be spun off as an all-in Alphabet company but it's so closely tied to the rest of the Google infrastructure it will never live on its own. Truly impressive how little Alphabet has achieved.

zamadatix 2y ago
Google Fiber seems like a reasonable business, I'm just more surprised they haven't went and sold it off already.
toast0 2y ago
> Fiber- it's hard to tell why Google has allowed this to continue for so long. The only thing I can imagine is that they are somehow using the usage data to generate revenue or ML training data. I'd guess they signed long term agreements with the municipalities where they offer service and they can't find a good way out. That or they have acccess to some resource related to being a residential ISP that they want to use for other things (cable TV feeds?). Fiber sort of fulfilled its mission of getting more people connected at high speeds; the problem is the best way to do that is to annouce a build out in 20 cities, and look busy for 18 months while the telco and cableco upgrade their existing customers to something similar. I don't think you can do that more than once though. Actually building a network isn't fiscally responsible, since they won't see many takers when the incumbents can upgrade faster than Google can overbuild and most people are fine with ~50/5 service anyway.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

xnx 2y ago

3 days ago. 23 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40867508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40867508

ZaraHabib 2y ago

[dead]