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Building computer networks and artificial intelligence are pretty much Google's core competencies. Most if not all other companies would struggle to fund and de

Building computer networks and artificial intelligence are pretty much Google's core competencies. Most if not all other companies would struggle to fund and develop this project. First of all, the system is in total very expensive: You don't get any coverage with just a few baloons, you probably need hundreds to make any of them stay connected to the rest of the internet most of the time. Second, this system is extremely stochastic and complex. The winds are mildly predictable, so they will have to optimize the balloon paths to cover their userbase. This is a very exciting problem once you think about it...

shantanubala 13y ago
> This is a very exciting problem once you think about it... That's a good summary of why Google has been so successful. They have a way of making engineers and regular people really excited about their projects. It's a feedback loop - have exciting stuff, recruit smarter people, work on more exciting stuff.
- Chronic24 13y ago
  Downvote.
- millstone 13y ago
  Google has many exciting projects, but those are not responsible for its success. Google's success is owed to comparatively pedestrian products: a search engine and an ad brokerage. Take away Glass, self driving cars, Loon, and all the other blue sky projects, and you still have a wildly successful company. But take away those two cash cows and Google is broke.
  - bayesianhorse 13y ago
    I think you are misunderstanding google. For one thing, search engines and their Ad system is the same class of problem as the Loon project: Large Scale stochastic computation. On the other hand there is no telling what sorts of massive successes will come out of Google. They will have their stakes in any mass-produced self-driving car, Google Glass is at least going somewhere, and Android is already very popular and enabling Google to get Ad revenue without being fought by Apple every inch of their way. The stock price and market capitalization is driven both by current revenue but more so by these insane projects and the probability that there will be another big success.
venomsnake 13y ago
Actually it seems cheap to scale. You need a lot of very very smart software but google have a couple of hundred idling geniuses to spare. And if you change helium with hydrogen (not a big deal if a balloon blows up) - everything else is standard components - i think that if they aim for third world coverage the price of transmission must be cheaper than current wireless. And you got much less regulatory hurdles.

shantanubala 13y ago

> This is a very exciting problem once you think about it... That's a good summary of why Google has been so successful. They have a way of making engineers and regular people really excited about their projects. It's a feedback loop - have exciting stuff, recruit smarter people, work on more exciting stuff.

Chronic24 13y ago
Downvote.
millstone 13y ago
Google has many exciting projects, but those are not responsible for its success. Google's success is owed to comparatively pedestrian products: a search engine and an ad brokerage. Take away Glass, self driving cars, Loon, and all the other blue sky projects, and you still have a wildly successful company. But take away those two cash cows and Google is broke.
- bayesianhorse 13y ago
  I think you are misunderstanding google. For one thing, search engines and their Ad system is the same class of problem as the Loon project: Large Scale stochastic computation. On the other hand there is no telling what sorts of massive successes will come out of Google. They will have their stakes in any mass-produced self-driving car, Google Glass is at least going somewhere, and Android is already very popular and enabling Google to get Ad revenue without being fought by Apple every inch of their way. The stock price and market capitalization is driven both by current revenue but more so by these insane projects and the probability that there will be another big success.

venomsnake 13y ago

Actually it seems cheap to scale. You need a lot of very very smart software but google have a couple of hundred idling geniuses to spare. And if you change helium with hydrogen (not a big deal if a balloon blows up) - everything else is standard components - i think that if they aim for third world coverage the price of transmission must be cheaper than current wireless. And you got much less regulatory hurdles.