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."

Comments

They said that about cell phones

[TechyImmigrant]

But those early cell phone innovators got a lot of patents.
Google is probably rolling on driverless car and wearable tech patents.

Re:They said that about cell phones

[Kierthos]

Yeah, but the time limit is 20 years. It's not the OMGWTF time limit on copyrights in the U.S. (life of the creator plus 70 years, or 120 years for corporate copyright), but it's long enough to get some money out of it.

I mean, think about it. 20 years ago, cell phones were fairly large things that could really only make/receive phone calls. Now look at what they can do.

So, yeah, right now, you can't do much with Google Glass or a driverless car. But where will we be in terms of those things in 5 years? 10 years? 20 years?

Re:They said that about cell phones

[mlts]

Google knows Google Glass was a fairly niche technology, and that there would be some pushback against it. However, Google are true pioneers in this area, and pioneers are the ones with the arrows sticking out of their wagons.

The problem is that traffic isn't going away. Google's autonomous vehicles solve the problem in an effective way that few other modes of transport can, especially of one factors the inconsistent densities in US cities. Traffic is a problem that needs to be addressed, and most cities can't (or in Austin's case, won't) deal with the problem. So, the only real party that can do anything about it is an innovative corporation.

This isn't something that will pay off next quarter. However, this is a major infrastructure change, and it will affect positively the quality of life for all involved.

There are many benefits:

Roads can be designed a lot simpler because they wouldn't have to be as idiot proof as they are now. In fact, highways can intersect each other with a four-way, unmarked intersection, with car computers timing each car to go through and slowing down/speeding up traffic as needed.

Roads will be safer. Press the crosswalk button, cars will stop, and pedestrians can cross. Cyclists won't be victim to the "right hook" even though they might be on the sidewalk, going opposite of traffic, or otherwise technically not riding legally.

With smaller distances between cars (a computer can stop a hell of a lot faster than a person), a road can almost double its carrying capacity.

With destinations known, cars can be moved to proper lanes to make traffic flow as optimal as possible, where cars going on a road a longer distance go to the left-most lanes, while vehicles exiting go to the right.

DWI and distracted driving will be a thing of the past.

Vehicles can be optimized for usefulness. If someone has a long commute, they can buy a van [1] and sleep during the commute. Or read. Or use that time for something productive.

When a vehicle needs maintenance, it can go to the shop at night, and be ready for the road in the morning. This cuts down a lot of hassle.

Vehicles can be used for unmanned deliveries. Have a list of groceries, the vehicle can take that, head down to the store, the stuff gets loaded, and the vehicle back, all in time for breakfast in the morning.

Self-driving cars are not just an invention. They are an ecosystem, just like electricity, and can improve daily life by a large amount.

[1]: A Dodge ProMaster van (the US equivalent of the Fiat Ducato) diesel can get 30MPG in real numbers. The Mercedes Sprinter with the four-banger OM651 is just as good.

Re:They said that about cell phones

[Strangely Familiar]

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...

Re:They said that about cell phones

[bigpat]

For robotic cars to succeed they will have to work on existing infrastructure and share roads with human drivers. Everyone knows that except for the original author. Robotic cars aren't about designing a better transportation network, it is about designing a better driver. Every bit of the premise of this thread is faulty:

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.

For robotic cars to be successful they will have to be just as effective with one robotic car on the road as with a dozen or a million. For robotic cars to be successful they will have to have navigational control local to the car following a simple set of driving rules with minimal or no reliance on outside systems. For robotic cars to be successful they will have to work on dirt roads as well as they do on highways and city streets. For robotic cars to be successful they will have to sometimes go above the speed limit in certain circumstances. For robotic cars to be successful laws will have to recognize that the passenger is not in control of the vehicle and therefore is not legally responsible or liable for the operation or the results. For robotic cars to be successful they will need to be allowed by government regulations and not enabled by them. We need government to treat robotic drivers like they do human drivers... if they can pass a driving test then they should be allowed on the road. So autonomous driving systems will need to be certified by government regulators, certainly, but they shouldn't face a slew of requirements that human drivers don't have.

Robotic cars are not about creating a new transportation system, it is about fixing a design flaw in the current system that causes tens of thousands of deaths each year: the human driver.

`

The one mistake Forbes keeps making..

[faedle]

.. is assuming everybody is profit-motivated and is actually driven by "bringing something to market." Glass and the driverless car are both examples of Google's desire to simply push the threshold of technology to its limits. It's a product of "why not" thinking, and profit be damned.

As far as I'm concerned, Google has a product they're very successful at. Why not spend some of those dividends out on the fringe? That's how progress happens: sometimes you learn something (I'm sure the driverless car initiative has had lots of implications for Maps' imaging) you didn't expect.

Re:The one mistake Forbes keeps making..

[Noah Haders]

here's the secret: google at heart is a really boring company. they write algorithms to do internet searches, and other algorithms to place ads. then they make 80% of their revenue on ads. This is basically the same thing that yahoo does, and this terrifies the google execs. They stay up at night worrying, what can we do to keep from turning into the next yahoo?

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.

In a way, it doesn't even matter if these things make it to market or are successful, because any hobbyist knows that the fun is in designing and building something. When interest wanes or a key person leaves the company, they shut down the product and move on to something else.

Re:The one mistake Forbes keeps making..

[swillden]

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

The Driverless Car - Any Day of the Week

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> 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?

The Driverless Car - Any Day of the Week.

I commute. I always have. I've been dreaming of my own private "pod" that someone else drove while I read, created, slept or talked for 30+ plus years now. Bring it.

How is it a mistake?

[machineghost]

From the blurb:

"the company continues to make the same mistake over and over. Google's mistake, ..."

"But rest assured – Google knows this. They're not looking for short term profits"

So, it's a mistake ... but they know exactly what they're doing and they're not trying to make short term profits, which means it's not a mistake?

I think there is a world market for maybe ...

[Guillermito]

... five computers.

Laughably wrong.

[LightningBolt!]

Google glass may be a failure because it may never be socially acceptable.

But in 10 years, every new car sold in the US, including the lowest-end Fiesta, will have options for some degree of automated driving. At the very least, there will be a driverless highway mode.

This is happening. And it's happening quickly.

Re:Not quite without customers...

[gweilo8888]

And you'd have to root it if you wanted to choose where to go yourself, rather than Google choosing your destination for you. (But that would still be better than the Apple car, which would only allow you to travel to Apple stores.)