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Well, at least three of its products are being used in the real world (Glass, Loon, Self-driving cars) and at least one is actually being sold (Glass), so yes.

• ChuckMcM 12y ago
  So you are saying it share's PARC's affinity for inventing things that were both difficult to manufacture and not economically viable? (Only half joking there) I think it interesting that Sebastian left, he's a smart guy and I think he understood what he could do wielding Google X as a tool, that he left means he figured he could do get more of what he wanted to do outside the confines of Google X than he could with it. That makes for a really interesting thought exercise. And that brings us back to PARC, which discovered that the people who left PARC had a bigger impact outside of the lab than in it. The reasons for that were many but mostly they consisted of Xerox not actually being a 'research' company so much as it was a 'copier' company. What does that say about Google X?
• gress 12y ago
  Glass is a botched PR stunt, not world-changing research. So this underscores the GP's point.
• stonogo 12y ago
  I think you typed "yes" where you meant "no." Tech company R&D gave us things like the transistor and lasers (both from AT&T) and Mandelbrot fractals and hard drives and the entire concept of a relational database (all from IBM). PARC in specific gave us Ethernet, which I think is safe to describe as "being used in the real world." Google has a long way to go; so far, all of its real contributions have been in software, and all of their hardware R&D has seen very little "real world" deployment. Otherwise it's very much just a well-marketed implementation of traditional corporate R&D.
  • walshemj 12y ago
    And fibre optics from Martesham and before that Colossus from Dollis Hill