Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Google's Waymo Risks Repeating Silicon Valley's Most Famous Blunder (arstechnica.com)

Posted by msmash on from the history-repeating-itself dept.

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.

23 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. It doesn't always work that way. by Higaran · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:It doesn't always work that way. by guruevi · · Score: 2

      In a lot of cases, it's failure to market the thing correctly. Kodak had a digital camera about 20 years too early (1975) but with very low quality and high price and nothing like the camera's we're used to today, they simply saw no market and didn't continue developing it.

      --
      Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
    2. Re:It doesn't always work that way. by rahvin112 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's not necessarily the timing but a life safety issue. This needs government regulation and the governments are wary as are the insurance providers. Until someone can demonstrate that they cars won't cause accidents there is likely to be a requirement to have a driver in the car as a safety measure. In addition it's highly likely that insurance providers would require the same thing.

      Keep in mind the whole liability of self driving cars is NOT decided. What happens when one kills someone like the Uber in Arizona? Is it the driver's fault? The Owners? The Software provider? The Car company? The Sensor company? Absolutely none of this has been decided.

    3. Re:It doesn't always work that way. by lgw · · Score: 2

      This is kind of a different problem than most etch anyway. With most new tech, the goal is to rush to market to dominate mindshare before your compeitiors copy what you did. Then, even if they do it better, everyone thinks of them as knock-offs and imitations.

      Self-driving cars are a different world. The pace of adapotion is a regulatory problem, not a market problem. No one is going to dominate the market by being slightly earlier than the competition, because everyone is going to be waiting on regulatory change. Bring first just means you get to be the first to advocate for the legal changes needed to allow the product, and the first to interact with the auditors for whatever the new regs end up being.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    4. Re:It doesn't always work that way. by Higaran · · Score: 2

      Yes, the way i said it was super simplistic, just like the article above.

    5. Re:It doesn't always work that way. by Penguinisto · · Score: 2

      Well that, and the fact that Kodak had one hell of a tidy business in selling and developing film; a digital camera would eliminate that (most profitable) bit of the business. So, Kodak decided to stuff it under a metaphorical rug.

      It would be like Gillette making and selling a razor with eternally-sharp blades.

      --
      Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
    6. Re:It doesn't always work that way. by Penguinisto · · Score: 2, Informative

      It's not necessarily the timing but a life safety issue. This needs government regulation and the governments are wary as are the insurance providers. Until someone can demonstrate that they cars won't cause accidents...

      Well, until someone can demonstrate that self-driving cars operate accident-free at the same or better rate than human drivers. That's going to take a bit of time to gather data on and prove.

      What happens when one kills someone like the Uber in Arizona? Is it the driver's fault? The Owners? The Software provider? The Car company? The Sensor company? Absolutely none of this has been decided.

      What happens when a car you let your girlfriend borrow gets in a hit-and-run thanks to her actions? The cops chase the plate and as the owner, you're on-deck for liability first and foremost. Even if they arrest her (after you sufficiently prove that you weren't in the car at the time), the victim is still going to chase you and your insurance policy as the liable party.

      I figure self-driving cars would work the same - the owner and/or the owner's insurance policy is financially liable no matter who is in it at the time. Whether or not you (as the owner) decide to chase the manufacturer in a lawsuit becomes your problem - same as whether or not the manufacturer chases the part(s) vendor(s) to recoup its costs.

      --
      Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
  2. you cant compare by Grand+Facade · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:you cant compare by mobby_6kl · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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?

    2. Re:you cant compare by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      A machine can't be drunk, angry, or irrational. You can see that human drivers are a problem, then you want to project the failings of meat onto a machine.
      That bias may be caused by doing your thinking with meat.

    3. Re:you cant compare by Tablizer · · Score: 2

      The invention of the GUI and mouse to the extreme liability of putting a driverless car on the streets.

      RSI sufferers may disagree. Keyboards spread the load between hands better, and arguably require less body movement if the keyboard-centric interface is designed well.

      It's dangerous enough out there driving sober, or being a pedestrian. Just too chaotic to toss a machine into the mix.

      I expect bots will be driving safer than the average human soon, but bot-involved accidents get heavy negative press. People afraid of bots taking their jobs or just taking over in general seem eager to see bots fail. The security bot slipping into the water fountain made international headlines.

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
  3. Apples and Oranges? by djbckr · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:Blunder? by nitehawk214 · · Score: 2

    Just a blunder, not one of the classic blunders.

    --
    I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
  5. Story of the Hare and the Tortoise by Tablizer · · Score: 2

    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.
  6. Failed to market what? by viperidaenz · · Score: 3, Insightful

    They haven't got a finished product yet, how are they supposed to sell it?

  7. Re:It sounds like... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  8. erm by cascadingstylesheet · · Score: 2

    The difference being that the Xerox machine 1. sort of worked, and 2. didn't result in flaming death when it didn't?

  9. Is it a blunder? by GuB-42 · · Score: 2

    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.

  10. Re:It sounds like... by slickwillie · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  11. No, PARC made billions for Xerox by klossner · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  12. the Xerox myth by epine · · Score: 4, Insightful

    By 1975, its researchers had invented a personal computer with a graphical user interface that was almost a decade ahead of its time.

    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.

  13. Re:This isn't the same issue at all by rahvin112 · · Score: 2

    Far more came out of PARC than just the GUI.

    They invented ethernet networking, object orriented programing, WYSIWG, bitmap imaging, laser printers, etc (see the wiki link below). Had Xerox utilized all those developments they would have completely controlled the entire computer marketplace and would probably be the biggest computer company in the world right now.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

  14. Re:When can auto-drive be trusted? by terrycarlino · · Score: 2

    I hear this all the time, but the fact is that when road conditions are bad people are told to stay off the roads and generally ignore that advice. That's why schools close on snow days and businesses delay opening when the weather is bad.

    The fact is that most accidents in bad weather happen because the road conditions are too hazardous for the vehicles out on the roads. A properly programmed self-driving car will simple refuse to go out in weather that is too bad for it to safely drive in. Weather that humans should also not be driving in.

    The sensor technology exists that can allow for better vision than any human. A properly programmed car will not drive faster than road conditions allow. Will that slow down traffic? Probably. It will also stop the 50 car pileups which happen way too often because people drive too fast in the fog or on the ice. It will be safer and less convenient.