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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...
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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.
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 ]
Back when I started (in the dial-up days, onion on belt etc) AltaVista were best. All of a suddent and for no discernible reason they went shite. Google were in the right place to recover the fumble.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Meh! Get back to me when they allow you to use regular expressions.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."