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Sergey Brin Says Google 'Failed To Be on the Bleeding Edge' of Blockchain (cnbc.com)
At an event over the weekend, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said that the internet giant missed its chance to be at the forefront of blockchain technology. From a report: Brin, who currently serves as president of Google parent company Alphabet, joined blockchain technology leaders and researchers on a panel at Richard Branson's exclusive Blockchain Summit. "We probably already failed to be on the bleeding edge, I'll be honest," Brin said. Although Google may have missed out on early adoption of the distributed ledger technology, Brin suggested that blockchain is within the wheelhouse of X, the company's semi-secret research division. "I see the future as taking these kind of research-y kind of out there ideas and making them real -- and Google X is kind of like that," Brin said.
Google was innovative when it was growing. Now, it's a huge conglomerate (or rather, Alphabet, it's parent, is). They don't innovate anymore. They wait for someone to innovate and then either buy them or, if that fails, throw a shitload of money into a competing product to muscle them out of the business.
Yes, that doesn't by accident sound like Microsoft. That's how big tech corporations work. Sergey, sorry to tell you, but Google has become too big to innovate. Innovation takes flexibility and the ability to risk something, both features large corporations lack.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's better than the opposite: applying blockchains to anything you can think of, like most companies are doing currently, when it is only suited for very specific and limited tasks...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Now we got fields of rotting tulips.
Google should let others bleed first to develop the technology, come out with their own version and then claim that they invented it first.
Goodbye, Slashdot!
Is there any blockchain system that is not the absolute electricity hog that is Bitcoin? Modern cash registers and credit card swipe machines use a trivial amount of electricity. The world cannot afford to dump a substantial fraction of its available power into bitcoin-type computations.
They don't innovate anymore. They wait for someone to innovate and then either buy them or, if that fails, throw a shitload of money into a competing product to muscle them out of the business.
And that's new how?
Android? Bought
Google Maps? Bought
Blogger? Bought
AdSense/Adwords? Bought
Picasa? Bought
Google Analytics? Bought
Google Docs? Bought
Youtube? Bought
The list goes on and on...
I see a lot of people hyping blockchain technology for non-cryptocurrency uses, but I have yet to see an application to which it is better suited than current transaction systems. I understand that a distributed ledger potentially lets you do away with things like reconciliation transactions. But there are some downsides with that: every participant has to keep a full copy of the ledger, and participants still have to use double entry accounting, which means essentially keeping two sets of books. And while the ledger itself may be secure and tamper-proof, there still has to be some way to turn entries into actionable financial transactions, which requires another system that can itself be compromised (e.g. the Bitcoin exchanges that have experienced some famous security breaches).
Maybe I'm just not looking at it right?
This.
In the cases of Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, etc., the owners sold the companies to public investors.
Shareholders don't give one good goddam rat's ass about anything except revenue.
When I worked at Mobil Oil years ago, I asked a new hire, "What business are we in?"
She said, "Selling hydrocarbon-based products."
I said, "Wrong! We are in the business of selling stocks."
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
What is supposed to be new about Google acquiring companies for products/services?
https://en.wikipedia.org./wiki...
Google's motus operandi is about amassing piles of stuff :
getting (initially) a huge index of the web,
piling large collection of data to train their IA (training voice recognition from their snippets of google voice),
piling large amount of private personal to better target ads,
etc.
Whereas, the whole key purpose behind all *distributed* ledger systems is to remove the needs of a central authority.
Google and blockchain are on the exact polar opposite of the decentralization scale.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
This a joke? Never heard of Adwords, AdSense, Google Maps, Youtube or Android? All acquisitions.
Even with search, they were late, with a pretty bad search engine that just managed to be the biggest one after a while.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
there are other ways to verify and sign records in a normal distributed database, the blockchain ledger system are constipated and bottlenecked, "poor scalabliity" and why transactions take so long.
google doesn't need such a thing, most businesses don't need such a thing.
blockchain is mostly a fad outside of crypto currency where it's a bottleneck
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When you look at it from an historical perspective, blockchain technology is merely a passing phase, to be replaced by less power-intensive methods that provide similar results.
It's kind of like the Stirling Engine, which was a thing for a while until we realized there were better ways to do things.
Blockchain will also be replaced. Think of it as early ECMAscript, or other coding languages, that have for the most part already been replaced.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
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Google never innovated. From day one they improved what others had developed, but they always stayed away from the bleeding edge and waited for other companies to really try things out first.
What company thrives on blockchain today? We see many announcements, but successful business cases are scarce.
They don't innovate anymore. They wait for someone to innovate and then either buy them or, if that fails, throw a shitload of money into a competing product to muscle them out of the business.
And that's new how?
Android? Bought.
Kinda like what Opportunist wrote, eh?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
If Google puts a small team together of some capable engineers it would maybe take them 6 months to have a nice open source package to handle blockchain and distributed ledger technology. :-)
If they're not into the distributed ledger technology yet it means they don't care about it. As if no one at Google isn't aware of it
No, because Google has been acquiring companies for products since 2001. Their claim is this is something new when it is not.
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No, because Google has been acquiring companies for products since 2001. Their claim is this is something new when it is not.
Innovation and acquisition are not mutually exclusive
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
What innovation have they done with email? Apart from reading other people's, that is - and Yaboo and Snotmail were probably already doing that.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'm no (longer a) fan of Google, but I'd disagree with a few of those inclusions. Sure, they may have bought them, but they don't serve to prove that Google doesn't innovate.
For instance, the Google Maps project may have been jumpstarted via an acquisition, but the thing they bought was a desktop application written in C++. Google Maps itself was actually highly innovative and influential when it launched, but not for any of the reasons that made the acquired product what it was.
You might recall that prior to (and even for a time after) the launch of Google Maps, Mapquest and its competitors all relied on page refreshes as you tried to move the map around. It's hard to believe that it was only 13 years ago, but it was revolutionary to be able to drag the map in Google Maps and have it load off-screen tiles without using a page refresh, all thanks to AJAX (this was back before AJAX had even been called that yet). Google Maps was a watershed moment for Javascript at large, which up to that time had largely earned a reputation as a cumbersome, clumsy technology with few uses and poor adoption, outside of its brief stint of popularity during the early aughts when DHTML was a thing and CSS adoption was still spotty. It's easy to claim that we knew better back then, but the fact is that many developers were dismissing Javascript prior to Google Maps' launch, and though it wasn't the first site to adopt AJAX (e.g. Kayak.com had done it the year before, as had Gmail), it was the first to make the benefits of it plainly obvious to everyone, showing the world wide web a different way forward.
Or, as an alternative summarization of its impact: you can blame Google Maps for Javascript bloating the web.