Google Puts Boston Dynamics Up For Sale In Robotics Retreat (bloomberg.com)

An anonymous reader writes from an article on Bloomberg: Executives at Google parent Alphabet Inc., absorbed with making sure all the various companies under its corporate umbrella have plans to generate real revenue, concluded that Boston Dynamics isn't likely to produce a marketable product in the next few years and have put the unit up for sale, according to two people familiar with the company's plans. Possible acquirers include the Toyota Research Institute, a division of Toyota Motor Corp., and Amazon.com Inc., which makes robots for its fulfillment centers, according to one person. Google acquired Boston Dynamics in late 2013 as part of a spree of acquisitions in the field of robotics. Over the following year, the robot initiative, dubbed Replicant, was plagued by leadership changes, failures to collaborate between companies and an unsuccessful effort to recruit a new leader. Jonathan Rosenberg, an adviser to Alphabet Chief Executive Officer Larry Page and former Google senior vice president, said, "we as a startup of our size cannot spend 30-plus percent of our resources on things that take ten years," and that "there's some time frame that we need to be generating an amount of revenue that covers expenses and (that) needs to be a few years." In December, Google announced that Replicant had been folded into Google's advanced research group, Google X. In a private all-hands meeting around that time, Astro Teller, the head of Google X, told Replicant employees that if robotics aren't the practical solution to problems that Google was trying to solve, they would be reassigned to work on other things, according to a person who was at that meeting. Boston Dynamics, though, was never folded into Google X and was instead put up for sale.

Comments

Re:Quelle surprise

[Chas]

Yeah. I didn't get that either.

You have a division that supposedly has no revenue generation prospects.

But you're going to sell it? Who's going to buy something like that?

That's like selling someone a flat paddle of wood and calling it a hairbrush.

Intellectual Property?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google bought Motorola, took the patents that they wanted, and sold the rest to Lenovo a few years later.

It's probably the same deal with Boston Dynamics.

Re:dogs

[wardrich86]

Every push builds their calibration and balance. They're literally training it to become invincible. They should be pushing it with terror in their eyes knowing that one day they will be bowing to the robot overlords that they created.

Re:BD had a product - Google effed them

[Anonymous Coward]

The impression I had was that Big Dog was their big product. Google bought them and killed the program cause they don't do defense work. I thought the Army saying Big Dog didn't meet noise requirements was something that allowed everyone to save face.

Maybe Google shouldn't have bought a robotics company that was primarily defense funded...

Or maybe they *did* buy a defense company and closed it down because it fit the politics of their founders...
If google is good at anything, it's buying startup companies and shutting them down...

Why is google doing autonomous cars then?

[tekrat]

That's a field where you're spending a ton of dough, and you won't have a product for 10 years. At least, that's how long it's going to take for the adoption and legalization of autonomous vehicles -- hey google -- when a person with no driver's license can step into a taxi that has no driver, let me know.