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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.
I read the article a few days ago on Ars and couldn't really agree with the author either. Google may or may not fail, but I just don't see many parallels with Xerox.
There is also a lot of talk about building a minimum viable product, with the implication that what Waymo is doing isn't it. But I think it's absolutely one (of many possible MVPs): operating in a limited geofenced area with pre-scanned environments that are very simple in the first place, and don't suffer from various weather events the way other places do. Compare this to driving in downtown Paris or Rome at night in winter.
This is the better starting point than making a delivery cart that crawls on the pavement IMO. Yeah they're behind schedule because it's a really difficult problem that 10 years ago everyone thought was struggling to make work at all. Remember the DARPA challenge where the vehicles couldn't drive in the middle of the desert?
I thought Silicon Valley's Most Famous Blunder was announcing a new and improved product before it was ready, causing sales of your current model to tank, bankrupting your company.
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.