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The One Mistake Google Keeps Making
HughPickens.com writes Gene Marks writes in Forbes Magazine that Google has brought us innovations that have literally changed our world yet the company continues to make the same mistake over and over. Google's mistake, which it keeps making, is building great products that no one will soon buy. Take Google Glass — a great idea with great technology that demonstrates the future power of the Internet of Things. There's just one problem: no one is buying Google Glass. And now there are driverless cars. After 700,000 miles of open road testing, Google has introduced its "first real build" of its driverless car and it's pretty amazing. But the mistake is the same as with Glass: it's a product without customers. "It's Google assuming that someday someone will actually buy a driverless car," writes Marks. "Not a hobbyist or an eccentric millionaire. But a customer who actually needs or desires a driverless car. Someone who, given the choice of spending $30K on a car that they fully control and can go anywhere they want at any speed they want – or another, likely more expensive buggy that will only travel on certain routes at slower speeds and with less options." Which car would you buy?
For driverless cars to work, to decrease congestion, increase safety, reduce lawsuits and lower our insurance premiums everyone would have to be driving one. For the driverless car system to truly work as desired, there would need to be more centralized control over our entire transportation system, from the roads and highways to the cars we're allowed to use, the speed we're allowed to travel and the places we're allowed to go. This, in the very country where the majority of the population fights against government regulations, red tape and bureaucracy. "But rest assured – Google knows this. They're not looking for short term profits," concludes Marks. "The dreamers behind Google, like the dreamers at Tesla and Virgin Galactic are people who are looking decades ahead."
For driverless cars to work, to decrease congestion, increase safety, reduce lawsuits and lower our insurance premiums everyone would have to be driving one. For the driverless car system to truly work as desired, there would need to be more centralized control over our entire transportation system, from the roads and highways to the cars we're allowed to use, the speed we're allowed to travel and the places we're allowed to go. This, in the very country where the majority of the population fights against government regulations, red tape and bureaucracy. "But rest assured – Google knows this. They're not looking for short term profits," concludes Marks. "The dreamers behind Google, like the dreamers at Tesla and Virgin Galactic are people who are looking decades ahead."
They just need to find a way to run a charge wire from the ear down to the arm/back/fannypack where a larger battery can be stored. Added bonus, if the glass itself is kept charged you can hotswap the big battery whenever you need, meaning 24/7 usage with day-long runtime is possible.
The fact that they haven't even attempted to push the idea publicly is sad. You could basically take it one step further than the currently available charge packs and make it a 'battery of things' to handle charging for all your personal area networking needs.
I think a big difference with the iPhone is that Steve Jobs, regardless of personal faults, was trying to solve a problem that bothered _him_.
Same with the folks that built the first search engines, including googol.
Now the company is trying to solve social problems, not personal ones, by using engineering techniques, not political or marketing ones.
Society works according to certain principles, all socio-biological, not engineering-mechanical. Whether it should work that way or not is useless philosophizing. We got where we are today by using those processes and those same processes are going to get us to tomorrow. Or not. The results are optional; the process is not.
Newsflash. Entertainment is bigger than intellectualism. The problem Jobs addressed was how to listen to more music. The problem Google first addressed was how to find web sites, because the searchers were highly interested in finding them.The National Enquirer outsells the New York Times. Not because of the quality of the news; it is because of the quality of the citizenry.
Driverless cars? A better feature proposition (it'd make the commute much easier and enjoyable), but the feature is limited to certain roads/speeds, and after seeing the price hikes for a hybrid, one can only imagine what the driverless feature set will cost you as someone out shopping for a new car.
I think you underestimate the potential demographic of drivers that only need limited access to roads and speeds. The elderly for one.
How many large demographics would jump at the opportunity for even "limited road access and limited speed "? My guess is large enough to be a descent success at the right price.
As for the costs, I am sure there is a point at which it is still profitable for Google and affordable to customers. Even if the first generation is a luxury item for wealthy andor semi-wealthy, prices will eventually come down. If Musk can do it with Tesla (assuming he accomplishes a 30k roadster) why can't Google do it for a driver-less car in a some odd years?
Google has investors, and eventually, this type of spending will be curtailed.
I don't think this Forbes clown comprehends the power of having 100 million Google StreetView vehicles on the road providing real-time surveillance across the entire country. Want to know exactly how many customers visit every retail business in the US, who they are, and where else they shop? Build a GoogleCar. Want to take the guesswork out of selling people what they want exactly when they want it? Build a GoogleCar.
Google's investors know exactly what this is about.
If Glass were affordable and worked a little better than I think it does, I could definitely see uses. I'd love it just so when I'm working on my car or assembling furniture for my kid or whatever I could have the PDF manual in my field of view without having to look away or use my hands. And it would be great for when I'm taking something apart to repair or tinker. Record the entire tear down process so when you're putting it back together and you run into that "no where did this wire go...?" problem you can scrub back through the video.
I couldn't see walking around with Glass every day. Even though I do wear glasses so it wouldn't be out of the ordinary for me, there would be that whole "glasshole" problem. But for special use stuff? Some really great applications I can think of.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
... it can pull a trailer, and back it into a driveway... or back it into the water. (think launching a boat) ... it can determine when a road is flooded, and choose NOT to enter the water. ... it can "feel" how much mass it is moving (think towing a large mass and needing to increase stopping distance/safety margin) ... it can anticipate snow conditions and make judgements about routes, grades, and plow frequencies (pull over and wait for a plow) ... it can make the decision to use the oncoming lane, because the travel lane is blocked, even if there are no signs/indicators that divert traffic. ... it can drive down a dirt road. ... it can make the decision to put it in the ditch because that was the best option (think pedestrian incursion, animal incursion, etc)
To me, driving is so much more than getting from a to b... we climb in our cars to escape the environment outside (especially in the winter), but driving is about understanding the environment outside, and making choices accordingly. I fully believe that driverless cars will eventually overcome all of these obstacles, but I'll likely be one of the last to buy, because my requirements are the highest. I don't need a car for commuting... I need a car for all the other things I do.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
Driverless cars open up huge possibilities. Think of long distance trips, where the drive is eight hours. With a driverless car, this eight hours could be spent overnight, so you go to sleep in your car in Plainfield, CT, and wake up in Jamestown, NY. (OK, maybe you need to wake up once to refuel). You didn't lose any time getting there! Right now, you can't get a plane or public transportation from one destination to the other without a lot of logistical connections. Flying might be a six or seven hour ordeal, and driving around eight. Also, I would have killed for this car at certain times in my life where my commute was upwards of 40 minutes of white knuckle driving each way. I could actually work on my way to work. If the car could also be passengerless, even more possibilities open up. What about taking the kids to school. Busses aren't always available, especially for private schools. Putting my oldest in a driverless car could save me over an hour each day. What about sharing the car or renting it out? A driverless car could make me money while I am at work. There could be an Uber or Lyft like app that would allow me to put the car to work, recouping my costs. And doesn't this make remote shopping more possible? Where I pick out my stuff online, and send my car to get it? Someone at the store just rings it up and puts it in my car? Picking up folks at the airport? Just send my car...
Join the IParty!
the only answer is to hire really smart and passionate people, but in order to attract and keep them you need to give them really cool things to do. really smart and passionate people don't want to make bleeding edge technology to push more ads. So they have their "20% time" policy, along with their google x projects, which are just ways to keep their workforce engaged while they improve search and ad placement.
The problem with your argument is that very few of Google's engineers work on search or ad placement, and those that do, by and large, don't work on other stuff. As a Google employee, I'll readily admit that the coolness factor of Google's moonshot projects does give me warm fuzzies, but those warm fuzzies don't really affect me on a day-to-day basis -- and I don't really need them because the stuff I do work on is actually plenty cool all on its own. I know some search engineers and some ad engineers, and they're really engaged in what they're doing, too... in fact, I'd argue that your basic premise, that search and ads are boring, is completely wrong as well.
Search, for example, is a really, really hard problem, for many reasons. To start with, the web is huge and continues growing rapidly, so the architectures and algorithms needed to handle that scale are pretty fascinating on their own. Speed is another really interesting challenge; Google wants to serve results, end to end, in well under a second (the actual target is often-discussed, but I don't know if it's confidential so I won't mention it). This requires not just making Google's systems very fast, but demands research into optimizing the user's browser and the Internet itself. Then there's the problem whose initial solution made Google into a success: Given some search terms and given a corpus of scraped data, how you do provide the best results? And the only reasonable definition of "best" is "the ones the user wants". PageRank was a good first approximation, but if Google were to go back to simple PageRank today everyone would abandon it in a hurry because today's ranking algorithms are far, far better. But they're still a long way from done. Significant recent improvements have come from the Knowledge Graph project, which aims to enable the search engine (and other stuff) with some degree of semantic knowledge about the queries and the content. To really solve search, you actually need to fully understand all of the content on the web and also make high-quality guesses about what the user is actually looking for. Larry Page often says that search is about 5% done.
Ad serving is actually a very similar problem. You have a corpus of ads. You want to display ads that the user finds useful. Or, ideally, if you can determine that nothing in your corpus is really useful to the user, display nothing. The perfect ad-serving system will serve no ads most of the time, showing only ads for items that a user wants to buy, when they want to buy it, and you have relatively little contextual information to use to make that decision. There are other issues as well. For example you want to maximize ad revenue which means you need to take into account the advertisers' bids, but in the long run users will more often click on ads if they have good experiences with the ones they choose, so there's a vague sense of user experience value as well. Choosing not to display any ads sometimes is part of maximizing user satisfaction as well. Arguably, doing all of this perfectly is an even harder problem than search.
So... no. Google doesn't do all of its moonshots merely to keep its employees interested. If that were the reason, it would be both unnecessary and ineffective.
The real reason, I think, is pretty straightforward. Google is looking for the next $100B product. Google was built on one solution that became massively successful. At the time, it wasn't even obvious how to monetize it. What was clear was that there was a challenging problem to solve, and that the solution would be useful
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