Slashdot Mirror
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.
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 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.
They haven't got a finished product yet, how are they supposed to sell it?
I thought it was blowing off IBM when they wanted to use your CP/M operating system for their PCs, forcing them to go to Microsoft. Either that or selling your QDOS to Bill Gates for a few thousand dollars, which Microsoft then used as the basis for MS-DOS.
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.