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How To Make Moonshots
An anonymous reader writes Google Glass failed. Its self-driving cars might change the world. At Google[x], pursuing the biggest, craziest projects means getting comfortable with failure — and embarrassment. Astro Teller, who leads Google's experimental lab Google[x], embraces the idea that failing fast is a way to learn even faster. "Larry Page told me, a little over two years ago, that he wanted to see us crash at least five of these scale versions of the energy kite. Obviously he wants us to be safe and we work very hard to be safe in everything that we do. What he meant by that was that he wanted to see us push ourselves to learn as fast as possible and though the learning from the crashing itself would be close to zero, he was pointing out that if you aren't failing, if you aren't breaking your experimental equipment at least occasionally, you could be learning faster."
I don't see how you'll avoid the minefield that is considered "prior art" if you're just enthusiastically fucking around.
...if you have the financial resources to afford to crash and burn. For most of us there's a significant incubation period that might even require profitability before we can afford to push past the point of safety or reliability and dial it back.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
And when you're Google, you really do have more money than time.
Move fast and break things...
2 oz Gin
3 oz Clam Juice
1 dash Tabasco
They could have just googled for it :-)
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
This is ridiculous, upbeat bullshit intended to convince people that Google is a positive, dynamic, agile, bleeding-edge, open, otherbuzzwords place to work.
You learn no more from failure than you learn from success. There are many ways to fail and few ways to succeed, thus it is better to learn what to do than what not to do. Failure simply slaps people upside the head and makes them think before trying again. Failure is a learning experience if you didn't plan ahead in the first place. Further, there are many scenarios where failing is not an option (e.g., medical, military, and space ventures). Failure in these areas is seen as a shameful mark worthy of criticism, lawsuits, retaliation, etc. more than it is a learning experience.
If Google wants to drive people's cars around or float massive objects above their heads they better not be prancing about on Unicorn Rainbow "Failure is Okay" Island.
It should be "How to Make Segways"
This is how to blow absurd amounts of money on fanciful ideas.
More accurately, How to FAIL at a moonshot.
Tell me any of Google's "Moon shot" ideas that are actually worth a damn after as long as it took us to get to the actual moon.
Not one. Self driving cars? Google Glass? data blimps? etc etc.
Every one of these is an answer in search of a problem.
All of them are inelegant complicated answers too.
Data blimps? a friend of mine wired every single district of a sizable 3rd world nation with fiber in 2 years. Net access over cell phones and the people can afford it.
Energy kites? mechanical failure, faaaaaaar too complicated for mass deployment and support.
Self driving cars? even with their big data backing they aren't reliable and can't operate outside of a controlled environment.
and the list goes on.
I love new tech and research and problem solving, but these are masturbatory projects at best.
Google glass failed, but I suspect that they allowed it to fail due to lack of persistent development.
The way most people work is that they try something, it doesn't work, and they give up. I've heard lots of things like "I can't learn to whistle, I've tried" and "I tried that, but it didn't work". Mostly it's amateurs building stuff and giving up on the first try: "I put the circuit together and it didn't work", or "I tried to build a spice rack for Marge, but it turned out awful".
If you really want to make something, you have to be prepared to throw the first one out and start over. If the circuit doesn't work, find out *why* it didn't work and fix it. If your spice rack is awful, spend some time on YouTube looking at proper technique, then spend some time using the router (or table saw, or whatnot) with pieces of scrap until you get the hang of it. Then start the project over.
Google glass could have been popular if they noted the feedback and piloted the project into more popular waters. For example:
1) A flip-down cover for the camera, so you can interact with people and they know you aren't recording them
2) A less restrictive interface, so that developers can show anything instead of storyboard images like a viewmaster. IOW, a direct graphical interface.
3) a less expensive device (costs $150 to make, $1500 to buy). (Note: Cell phones have largely the same functionality and don't cost $1500)
Rather than fix the problems, they decided to just let it die. Maybe they did market analysis and thought that it would never sell in any form, but I really doubt they went that far.
Google Glass failed. Its self-driving cars might change the world.
I didn't know Google Glass had self-driving cars?
At first when I read about championing failure as a path to success, I thought they were talking about Larry Ellison.
It explained so much about the quality of Oracle.
Quantum computers, nuclear fusion and a manned expedition to Mars are moonshots. This is just a novelty. Please don't cheapen the actual lunar landings by overusing "moonshot" for what is essentially just regular R&D.
Easy. Do you have a mirror?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Yes everyone knows they set out with failure in mind with the Moon landing. It's not like people had been envisioning that for centuries or taking an attitude where "failure is not an option". No. Certainly not like that. The secret of success is simply failing as many times as you can, as fast as you can.
Reminds me of the episode of Futurama where Zapp Brannigan hands Kif his book of pickup lines and instructs him to say as many as he can, as fast as he can :P
It always seems like these guys are missing something. Bell Labs had this figured out. Arguably, IBM has done a better job of this in recent decades. I get the impression the people at Google just kind of heard about a bunch of failed DARPA projects and decided to try and fix them up. Self driving cars, enhanced reality headsets, balloon based networks, nanoparticle diagnostics, jetpacks, neural network enhanced computer vision... all legacy military development projects... all very cool, but not really lightning strikes of inspiration.
Is it that they don't have the right people? Are their projects too fast? Are they too structured? Maybe they're purposefully trying to only do things others have already tried and failed for some reason. Perhaps it's that they've forgotten the difference between innovation and invention. Innovation builds successful companies, but they'll need a hefty dose of invention if they really want a "moon shot."
Article doesn't mention Hangouts, their worst moonshot yet.
All of Google's "moonshots" have crashed and burned. It's a little fresh for them to act like like the wise men of innovation when they haven't been able to innovate a profitable product since before their IPO. The only thing that keeps them afloat is the killing they make from ads on search.
I dont spend anytime thinking about larry page other than shooting down posts on slashdot evelvating him to a guru like figure above mere mortals.
Don;t have anything much against him either except the accumulation of vast amounts of money, power, and egoistic importance in the eyes of the world.
Of course the elite need compassion and suffer as well. But how he thinks I should test something, probably irrelevant, I'm sure many others could have provided the insight, however they weren't named larry page, for some reason, and for some other reason that was relevant.
Ha ha, If Intel made glasses, they'd need a 2lbs heatsink on them and have a 10 minute battery life.
From what we hear, Intel is offering discounts on Core processors for desktops if you use their chips in the mobile device. Google does not make desktop PCs so Intel's inducement won't get their chip into glass. There has yet to be a top selling Intel based phone, yet the new A53 and A57s SoC are in all the big sellers.
Nokia's market collapse was courtesy of Elop, who undermined and then killed their main product and had them adopt a really bad Windows platform that did less and had less market share. Having locked the company into Microsoft, he then sold it to MS on the cheap, and received a $25 million bonus FROM MICROSOFT for his work.
Blackberry simply made bad phones, they forget why their users liked them, and tried to copy Android. Lost the keyboards, their secure messaging was cracked (NSA and others), and so they lost their main advantage.
"and though the learning from the crashing itself would be close to zero" - he doesn't get it
I'd really want a guy named like that in charge of my experimental lab :-)
Or SDD as it is known in HughBar-Labs [inventors of llama-case, one capital letter at the beginning of stuff] has been in use since about 1930. Some blame it for the rise of the Nazis in Germany, they used plenty of slogans, too. Our lawyer tried to sue them, but we never heard from him again, last thing was a postcard from some place sounding like Tribblinka, maybe the tribbles ate him?
Seriously though folks.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
You have a point. On the other hand, many approaches that WERE impractical 10 or 20 years ago are quite practical now. Consider any solution that in involves a modern computer. Twenty years ago, you'd need a cluster of computers to do what can now be done on a cheap prepaid phone. Any solution to an individual's daily hassles that involves a multi-Ghz processor was written off as impractical. Now, there's an app for that.
Then there are all of the building-blocks that have become available. Facial recognition and machine vision in general cost a few million dollars ten or twenty years ago. Now it's a readily available service already built into the Android OS. When you have readily available modules to easily do what used to cost huge amounts of money, things suddenly become practical that weren't before.
Additionally, but in the same vein, the experts doing all the deep study for decades wouldn't have even THOUGHT of how to leverage technologies which were not available at the time. Knowing about the different technologies that are available or likely to become available, one sometimes sees solutions that you wouldn't think about if you weren't familiar with the tools.
Lastly, in my experience domain experts know a lot about how things are done. Their idea of how things should be done is often based on how they were taught to do it. That's an entirely different mindset from looking at it fresh and considering which methods are actually best suited to the current situation. I've been able to significantly improve processes simply by asking "why"? "Why is this data held in a Word document (actually three versions of the same document) rather than a spreadsheet?". The domain experts knew exactly which version of the Word document to send to each person, and had procedures for change control so that updates to one version normally ended up being reflected in the other versions. I pointed out the "hide column" menu item in Excel and now they no longer need to maintain three different copies of the data in order to look at different sets of attributes.
failing fast is a way to learn even faster.
This can't possibly be true. If it were...
For Democrats: Congress would be full of rocket scientists by now.
For Republicans: Obama would be a Republican by now.
Just another day in Paradise
You can only learn from the mistakes if you have the courage to make mistakes.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
I really don't get the fashion of saying 'fail' when they really mean 'take risks'. They aren't the same thing, and a lot of people misunderstand before they think about it. It's very easy to fail without risk of success or learning.
"Fail fast, fail frequently, fail cheap" I forget the book I read that in. --Josh
I suppose it depends on how you define "failed". In my book, no way was Google Glass a failure. If you think they meant to make megabucks by selling a product, sure... but I can't imagine that that's what they expected to occur. It was a big experiment, and a lot of data was collected from it.