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Google's Waymo Risks Repeating Silicon Valley's Most Famous Blunder (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Everyone in Silicon Valley knows the story of Xerox inventing the modern personal computer in the 1970s and then failing to commercialize it effectively. Yet one of Silicon Valley's most successful companies, Google's Alphabet, appears to be repeating Xerox's mistake with its self-driving car program. Xerox launched its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1970. By 1975, its researchers had invented a personal computer with a graphical user interface that was almost a decade ahead of its time. Unfortunately, the commercial version of this technology wasn't released until 1981 and proved to be an expensive flop. Two much younger companies -- Apple and Microsoft -- co-opted many of Xerox's ideas and wound up dominating the industry.
Google's self-driving car program, created in 2009, appears to be on a similar trajectory. By October 2015, Google was confident enough in its technology to put a blind man into one of its cars for a solo ride in Austin, Texas. But much like Xerox 40 years earlier, Google has struggled to bring its technology to market. The project was rechristened Waymo in 2016, and Waymo was supposed to launch a commercial driverless service by the end of 2018. But the service Waymo launched in December was not driverless and barely commercial. It had a safety driver in every vehicle, and it has only been made available to a few hundred customers.
Google's self-driving car program, created in 2009, appears to be on a similar trajectory. By October 2015, Google was confident enough in its technology to put a blind man into one of its cars for a solo ride in Austin, Texas. But much like Xerox 40 years earlier, Google has struggled to bring its technology to market. The project was rechristened Waymo in 2016, and Waymo was supposed to launch a commercial driverless service by the end of 2018. But the service Waymo launched in December was not driverless and barely commercial. It had a safety driver in every vehicle, and it has only been made available to a few hundred customers.
... they already repeated it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
You could design the most perfect self driving car, but it might not be the right time in the market for it, or it could be too expensive at the time. Kodak designed the first digital camera, but it was also at least 5 years too early. Just because someone can do something doesn't mean it's the right time to do it.
The technology isn't remotely close to being street-ready, and it will be a while before it is.
Right now it's less a technology than a nice, juicy, billion dollar class action suit waiting to happen...
n/t
The invention of the GUI and mouse to the extreme liability of putting a driverless car on the streets.
It's dangerous enough out there driving sober, or being a pedestrian.
Just too chaotic to toss a machine into the mix.
Rick B.
This "blunder" as it were, isn't even on the same calibre as Personal Computer Marketing. The self-driving car isn't ready (yet). How can they release it to the masses if it's going to injure/kill a bunch of them? Dumb comparison.
Burn the heretic! Burn him!
driver & driverless models..
I believe Wymo learned that the lawsuit and bad P/R risk is very high in their industry, and thus decided to take the careful approach.
Some slick-sounding startup may look like they are pulling ahead, until their crashes make the news and sink their stock. The careful approach is the best route in my opinion, no pun intended.
Table-ized A.I.
Creating the PC was game-changing, but creating the self-driving car is a waymo complicated problem than creating the PC. When your PC crashes, no one gets hurt. I think the basic comparison is a poor one. Microsoft and Apple blew past Xerox. Is anyone blowing past Google?
They haven't got a finished product yet, how are they supposed to sell it?
The difference being that the Xerox machine 1. sort of worked, and 2. didn't result in flaming death when it didn't?
I've heard that true steering wheel-less auto cars are at least a good 10+ years away, perhaps 20 even. Uber et al are all hoping for sooner. What is a realistic time frame?
I would have to consider that a stretch as it might have been available to (Xerox) researchers, but I don't think there was anything available from Xerox was mainstream until the '80s, well after there were a goodly number of small computers and IBM coined the term.
Just did a quick wikipedia search (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto) the Alto wasn't available for sale until 1979 and it cost $32k. I remember a friend of my parent's having a Xerox Star word processor in the early '80s, but that was a work machine, not a "Personal Computer".
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Xerox made copy machines, they still make copy machines, and they seem be be doing well enough.
Would the situation have been different if they didn't make Xerox PARC?
A blunder would imply they did something particularly stupid. They didn't. They invested some of their excess money in researching promising technology, millions of things could have gone wrong, turned out it was marketing, well, too bad, but it is not like Xerox completely disappeared. From the point of view of Xerox, it was certainly a failed experiment, but that's a controlled failure, hardly a blunder.
It is like calling the Apple Newton a blunder because the Palm Pilot took most of its success. Yes, it was a failure, but it didn't prevent them from turning it into the resounding success that was the iPhone 20 years later.
The behemoth that was Xerox was built to design and sell photocopiers. That's what the design engineers, field repair force, and sales and marketing were geared up to do. PARC produced a plethora of new technologies, but the one that fit the organization was the laser printer. Xerox coupled that to a scanner to create the digital photocopier, from which they made billions of dollars.
Xerox (as the author seems to have forgotten or never bothered reading more than the pop history of computers) was a copier/business machine company not a PERSONAL COMPUTER company. Though they did invent the concept of the Windowed Interface there was no great call for it in the business side of things and Wordperfect was king. With 20-20 hindsight historians have pointed at this as the "ha ha - Xerox could've been rich but they wuz dum and Apple drank their milkshake". Which is somewhat true - but not really as early UIs were seen as toys and "not professional". Macs went to schools and creative types - but REAL work was still done with a CL as God intended! It took Windows 3 versions before the UI was stable enough and worked on enough hardware that software devs started shifting over (and then Wordperfect wuz dum because it didn't make the transition until Word drank its milkshake) and EVEN THEN - it was an extra that you ran on top of DOS!
This is, in no way, similar to getting a self-driving car out to market. There's safety and liability concerns along with the impacts on society as a whole (what happens when Uber drivers and bus drivers and taxi cabs and pizza delivery drivers ALL are out of a job because a self-driving car can do all that? No one is "missing" the technology and commercial gains here. But like New Coke and Nuclear Reactors a few high profile wrecks could turn public sentiment wholly against the concept.
Unless you make a road where ALL the cars are self-driving and are maintained separately just for self-driving cars then it will never become reality. Self-driving is one of those engineering problems where the first 90% is achievable, but the last 10% is not. The end of Moore's Law has put a further nail in the coffin since you cannot count on exponentially increasing processor power.
Which is more likely in this case:
Google are stupid and can't figure out how to make money from a product that everyone in the west would buy that would also give them access to even more personal data.
OR
Google did the hard work and innovated... but are hamstrung by government red tape and foolish handwringing on the part of luddites?
Mod parent and grandparent comment UP!
Wow! Amazing examples of management failure because of managers not understanding technology.
Kodak begat Polaroid, and Polaroid begat Xerox, and Xerox begat Apple.. It's weird because these were all agile companies. Perhaps you have to start afresh.
"Alphabet" is a really bad name for a company. Another, similar bad name for a company: "Spelling" or "Country".
Didn't edit my parent comment sufficiently.
I should have said: 'Other, similarly bad names for a company: "Spelling" or "Country".'
I thought Silicon Valley's most famous blunder was Perl.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
I thought Osborne's blunder was the biggest?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
With a price to match: ten of thousands of dollars per workstation at that point in time (likely in excess of $100,000 each in 2019 USD). Moreover, you couldn't run this without a dedicated support staff, because it was extremely raw technology.
It wasn't just a decade ahead of its time: it was a full decade ahead of any viable market. Commercializing this beast was a creative act of the first magnitude, all by itself. Xerox had very little expertise to offer in pinching pennies to hit consumer price points.
If they form a joint venture with some Steve Jobs figure down the road, Xerox probably turns into Daddy Bigbucks as the project goes over budget time and time again. You can't license this to a young, upstart, thrifty company like Apple Inc., because Apple certainly did not have the cash on hand at that time to pay hefty licensing fees.
What actually took the market by storm was the IBM PC shitbox, where tiny amounts of memory were suited to an appalling limited operating system. (We're looking at you, MS-DOS.)
How do you win the installed-base software war of the early 1980s, bootstrapping the world with Smalltalk? You can find a price and performance point for a Smalltalk system that will move hundreds of thousands of boxes per month, as the IBM PC later did? Before something else an order of magnitude less sophisticated (at a quarter to one tenth of the price) gains complete market control?
Normally, in technology, polishing something up for market is the other 90%.
But in this case, Xerox was multiple 90% efforts away from a viable sales model, if there was any such model at all.
Probably their best inroad to the future was to build a line of Xerox LaserWriters spanning desktop to enterprise, while pricing the desktop model so attractively that they rarely ever sold the enterprise model (except to displace a fleet of expensive Xerox copiers).
And then somehow you try to cram your LaserWriter authoring software onto any cheap-ass PC client that comes along. Not that IBM wouldn't change the API underneath your hands if you got too big and powerful as a result. So it's better if you own the cheap PC client hardware, too. But this is not a business Xerox could feasibly have entered. $$$ ran in their blood. Good grief, what other kind of company would have a research center with a $100,000 toy stuffed under every desk, ten years ahead of any viable market strategy?
Sure, Xerox built PARC because they were secretly Walmart at heart.
And I've got an Ethernet bridge to sell you, with 16 glorious switched ports of 10BASE5 coax.
I think for many technologies the question becomes is it being done because they can, or because their is a demand?
Kodak's problem was not being early or late to the market, it was picking the wrong end of the market. They chose the low-end point-and-shoots, leaving the higher end cameras to Canon, Sony, Nikon, etc. This strategy worked for them in the film era with their cheap Brownies and Instamatics. The goal was growing the market (and the demand for film and processing services), not competing with the likes of Hasselblad. In the digital era they saw digital coming before anyone else, but they failed to see smart phones coming. When everyone has a camera on their phone, there's still a market for high-end DSLRs, but there is absolutely no market for low-end (or even mid-range) digital cameras.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
To paraphrase Ian Malcolm, "If Xerox PARC breaks down, it does run over the pedestrians."
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Google's Waymo Risks Repeating Silicon Valley's Most Famous Blunder
wishful thinking or at best the toy of a few billionaires. They are *not* an investment opportunity. Poor Uber investors who are going to lose all their money.
Having a self-driving car under ideal circumstances can still be useful (which is what Tesla does), but it's not a self-driving car nor does it mean it can become one.
I know how to build a self-driving car in an alternate universe where we had faster computers. In this one, it's too early.
Self-driving cars are a *research* project with no certain outcome. Every company that puts engineers to work on it just has too many engineers.
Just like Xerox didn't invent the GUI, Waymo didn't invent the self-driving car.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Do you really want to suffer through ad after ad every time you pass a building? Pass a Wendys and have to listen to an ad about their Frosty and maybe a jingle. Pass a McDonalds and they pipe the smell of french fries into the passenger cabin. Pass a state farm agent and have to suffer the ‘like a good neigbor’ jingle. Only later will you discover they buried a clause allowing them to retain all location information where your car went and can sell it to any law enforcement or anyone else without your consent or even having to inform you they did it. They will completely destroy any right to privacy you have just like Google Home ‘accidentally’ called 911 on a donestic dispute. The curious part is that google home does not interface with the PSTN, it doesnt register a telephone number and address with your PSAP. It is amazing how it managed to deploy an entire SWAT unit to his house.
Mod this comment as overrated, too. I can afford the karma, I make more every day. You've only got so many modpoints. Mod away!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There is worse than that! A company could name itself "FussBudget" or "Ookly-Wookly.
Larry Wall developed Perl while working as a CIA contractor.
Personal Rapid Transit. It was an idea pitched initially in the 50s, and various govts experimented with it in the 60s and 70s. There is the Morgantown PRT, which sort of works. PRT was considered to have a big technological barrier to development, which computers, and Silicon Valley, seem to have overcome with billions of dollars. Viable PRT would be an achievement in of itself. It may be not worth billions of R&D.
Surely one of Waymo’s biggest challenges is that they are not a car manufacturer. As successful as they may be at developing the technology to drive a car by computer, its incredibly difficult and expensive to start building your own cars - just ask Elon Musk. At best Waymo could license their technology to existing manufacturers to use in their vehicles, but I suspect that every major car manufacturer on earth is working on their own solution. And they all have working vehicle platforms to fit them to.
I don't know about America, but here in the UK it's quite common to need to overtake another vehicle. A good example - well known to those of us who grew up in the countryside - is having to overtake a tractor on a country road. From a procedural point of view, you need to back off from the tractor to be able to see more in front, make a decision about which section of road is good for overtaking, take into account not only traffic coming the other way, but also looking in your wing mirrors in case a motorbike or another car is also taking the same opportunity... and so on. I'll step in a driverless car when you can prove to me that it can do all of the above safely every single time for, I dunno, 500 of these scenarios, all on different roads and in different conditions, from night time with black ice on the road, to a daytime blizzard, a mud-covered slippy country lane in the sunshine but just after a quick shower... We're not 1 year away from driverless cars. We're not 5 years away from them. We're not even 50 years away from them. It'll NEVER happen, as long as their are non-driverless cars (or tractors, or anything else) on the road. Unless you want to sit at 15mph and see a 20 minute country journey take almost an hour and a half? Serious question: have they even TRIED any logic coding of overtaking rules? Or, if the car in front happens to break down (for instance), will the "amazing new driverless car" just sit there for hours, assuming it's in traffic?
Aside from the myth that Lisa and Mac were derived from the PARC visit being thoroughly debunked, there is and was the significant issue of *price* . . .
Yes, the Xerox machine could do amazing things in its time (some of which were derived from the masters thesis of ma c designer Jeff Raskin . . .).
It was also built without a budget.
Selling it at a consumer price was *never* in the cards.
Just look at how few $10k Lisas and NeXTs sold--and the Xerox would have been a multiple of that.
Waymo's situation isn't even *vaguely* similar. They would not recover from even a *single* early catastrophic early failure by a vehicle; there will be no second chances for the pioneering models.
Apple's Newton would be a better analogy--pushged out too early, and mocked into failure.\\hawk