Good for them and I think the best is yet to come. I view Google's work on robotics and automated vehicles as a secret weapon. Should the future consist of semi/fully automated vehicles (a very realistic possibility) Google is going to have a warchest of patents, licenses and technology that will generate tons of cash.
Good way to describe those 1-off/advanced initiatives. It really does seem like a hedged bet in some cases and a great way to keep people inside the company engaged/curious/thinking outside the box.
I thought Google was also doing significant funding (and research?) into high-efficiency solar panels.
To me, all of these efforts smell (in a good way) of some VERY forward-thinking people. Autonomous cars directed by Google technologies (Google Maps, showing Google Ads to the driver while engaged on an Android-based, internet device) and powered by ultra-high-efficiency solar panels is a future you can think yourself towards if you are ambitious enough and sitting there fitting pieces together.
Not saying they are going to get into all those industries, but it's not like these 1-off efforts are focused on optimizing vacuum cleaners to compete with Dyson or making the world's most resilient non-stick pan; there is some tangential connection to a greater future image in all of it, even if it's a vision 20-years-off.
It makes me really happy to know that there are people in this world, sitting around just trying to poke and prod the limits of what we know and drive us forward, even if the future ends up taking a slightly different shape.
In terms of automated vehicles, I think Google is in the same place as Xerox was 40 years ago with the Xerox Alto. Like Xerox at that time, they have a business that is absurdly profitable that funds interesting research that is well ahead of its time, but there is little motivation to make something commercially viable. I haven't worked at google, but I image the employees are motivated to do things that make a huge splash, rather than build businesses incrementally, because any business they could build within Google would be completely dwarfed by ad revenue, much like 1973 PC business compared to the 1973 copying machine business. If google were really interested in automated vehicles, they would be selling radar assisted braking software, pedestrian alert systems, lane control systems, etc.
Does Google really have any of that? The automated vehicle tech was entirely from the DARPA Grand Challenge / DARPA Urban Challenge teams who 'solved' the autonomous driving problem years prior. Any patents and licenses are owned by those teams and the universities they come from. From the articles I read way back when it sounded like Google was just working with those people to hook their systems up to Priuses with no mention of developing anything of their own. Maybe I missed it in other coverage.
It's true google hired many of those involved in the DARPA Urban challenge, and they are leading the effort. In particular, Sebastian Thrun, who appears to be in charge of Google's program, was the head of the winning Stanford team.
However, Google's cars are already far more sophisticated than those that won the Challenge, which involved navigating a relatively simplistic simulated urban environment. According to their blog post on the subject [0] Google has been running their autonomous cars on real roads and highways in real traffic, a dramatically harder problem.
"the technology is now advancing so quickly that it is in danger of outstripping existing law, some of which dates back to the era of horse-drawn carriages."[3]
HA, yeah heaven forbid that tech make driving safer and more efficient without the regulators and legislators along for the ride. because, you know, they make everything better.
Your right, companies should just be able to throw whatever they want on the road. How dare the government create rules to interfere in the safety of other people. After all, aren't we living in a post-apocalypse mad-max type world.
The fact is it takes a long time to decide how safe something is, especially on the roads. I know it is fun in the US to rail against the government, and forget about the wonderful world we live in, that is incredibly safe, thanks to these regulations.
The fact is it takes a long time to decide how safe something is, especially on the roads.
For each month this technology's market deployment is delayed, there's a 9/11 of American deaths in car accidents. Even if Google went ahead with maximally-unsafe public beta tests and killed a hundred people, that would still probably cause an enormous net savings of lives.
I know that, and you know that, but the general public is really bad at doing proper cost-benefit-analysis.
If 3000 people kill themselves (and/or their passengers) each month, that's "ok", that's accidents, they happen, it's noone's fault.
If driverless cars kill 100 people each month, then IT'S SOMEONE'S FAULT. Someone is liable. Someone can be sued. Someone in that case being the company that makes these driverless cars.
This means that personal cars will have a human somewhat in control to absorb the blame for a very long time.
I think the first driverless vehicles we'll allow on the roads will be unmanned trucks. They don't need a human onboard since they only transport goods, not people, and there's a huge efficiency gain if you can remove truck drivers, since they need to eat and sleep.
And then when people have gotten used to driving alongside fully automatic vehicles, public opinion might shift to also allow people to be transported by similar systems.
> I think the first driverless vehicles we'll allow on the roads will be unmanned trucks. They don't need a human onboard since they only transport goods, not people, and there's a huge efficiency gain if you can remove truck drivers, since they need to eat and sleep.
Rail and water-transport are a lot mot cheaper than trucks (either manned or un-manned). The only thing that keeps them (the trucks) running is the cheap price of gasoline in the States.
exactly. and google has a bigger incentive to prevent this, rather than a politician or regulator who has an incentive to react to how the public feels at any given moment
If a public beta test of driverless cars were to cause a significant loss of life, it'd sour the idea in public opinion to the point of killing all potential sales of the vehicles and probably lead to legislation banning the vehicles in at least part of the country. The tech would be set back for years more.
The road to driverless vehicle public acceptance is paved with extremely limited trials and an absolute focus on safety.
A hundred people out of how many beta testers? 10,000? That would be outrageous.
There are obviously a lot of legitimate safety questions about robot cars. Are they better or worse at avoiding pedestrian collisions than a good driver? An average driver? How does the average severity of an accident vary between human drivers and robots? It will take some expensive testing and stats/actuarial work to sort out whether they would actually save lives at this point or anytime soon.
There are some important security questions too. How many exploits will be found per year? Will they be used to commit anonymous acts of violence? Do the cars connect to a network of any kind and pass viruses? If a car has been off or out of range during an infection, does it have to be quarantined from other cars and forced to update? "Pulling over to restart driving-service." How do you verify that an infected car has actually updated? Lots of completely untested, life-critical systems.
When other vendors enter the market, what kind of standards will they have to meet? How do we verify the security of their car software, will we require they be open source? If a vendor goes out of business, who is responsible for maintaining their upgrade distribution network?
There's a lot of important policies to decide on, it's going to take awhile.
The US government (and governments in general) has/have killed many, many, many more people than Google (and corporations in general).
Not sure why you think of them as so benevolent.
Maybe you trust the agencies entrusted with our transportation (DMV and TSA, anyone?) over Google. I think most rational people would make the opposite choice.
I'd find that especially amusing because "Google is an AI company, they just don't advertise the fact." If they can't make money on anything except AI, that would be strong confirmation.
Google is going to have a warchest of patents, licenses and technology that will generate tons of cash.
That would be the case if the patent system isn't completely different in 10-20 years, which I sincerely hope it will. Having Google as the next big patent troll would be a sad and ironical stain in its history and a deep stab at our generation.
It's useful to keep these numbers in perspective in all the excitement. Browse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_by_revenue and convince yourself that we're not quite living in a virtual world yet. The list is dominated by giant oil companies, with Exxon and Shell with $370 billion in annual revenues a piece (that's more than the GDP of all but around 25 nations). Manufacturing is also pretty well represented (Toyota: $240 billion in revenue in 2010). On the other hand, Apple now apparently outsells Boeing. That's pretty impressive.
The picture I was looking at is weight in the economy. We - I guess I am making some assumptions about the audience here - sometimes get so caught up in the kinds of things that are important to us, that we forget that this is not the whole world. I mean, Google+ vs. Facebook is fascinating, but this is probably not the most momentous conflict that history will record for the early 21st century.
And speaking of profit, apparently Exxon made $11 billion last quarter - more than the revenue number we're talking about here. Yeah, the margin is lower, but...
I once attended a job fair/event at my University, and the guy from HP said (to a crowd) they have PROFITS of $80 billion a year. I didn't inform him that was REVENUE, I just walked out on him.
It's possible that MS is prepared to spend money in "inefficient" ways if that means that they're preventing money going into their competitors' pockets.
Well is Google is making more money, then Microsoft should be making more money as well, since people are spending more on online advertising. This is not stopping anytime soon, so why would Microsoft give up just as they are starting to make some gains (albeit by buying Yahoo search).
What always strikes me about Google's numbers is that they seem relatively small when taken in context of how large Google seems to be in its presence and perception. People talk about Google as a tech "giant" - but compare revenue numbers:
Google - $9B
Apple - $24B
IBM - $29B
Microsoft - $16B
Based on this in terms of being a "tech giant" Google would seem to be the underdog - yet they certainly aren't perceived or treated that way.
Revenue is a bad way to compare these companies, Apple is selling $1000 iphones and $2000+ laptops, which have a fairly high production cost. Whereas the margin on a PPC click would be massive.
Yes, I thought about comparing profit but actually I think revenue is more interesting because it represents to some extent the company's "weight", or spending power. Apple may spend a lot to manufacture their devices, but that spend also represents part of their huge influence in the computing landscape. It accounts for things like retail stores and massive advertising budgets which are enormously important. Sure if you only look at revenue then you over-estimate their influence but you equally under-estimate their influence if you only look at profit.
If you just compare to companies in the semiconductor industry or other various "behind the scenes" players, practically all of them have billions of dollars in revenue.
So Google earning $9 Billion isn't as big of a deal as everyone thinks it is when you put it in context of the whole high tech industry.
What's impressive is that they'er doing it mostly by giving people what they want and providing best of breed services rather than by using every opportunity to lock people in and attack their competitors with underhanded tactics (cough patent trolling).
Edit: I'm no stock market wizard but I would still buy Google stock tomorrow. For the foreseeable future, they're going up up up. Mark my words, they'll be pulling 10 billion a quarter before too long.
A savvy investor would wait for the market to cool off in a bit and buy at a much lower price. We haven't seen $600/share since March, but if you see how these things operate over a duration you will see that after most spikes there is a pull back. Wait for the pull back.
EDIT: Also, options expire tomorrow (3rd Friday of every month), so there is ample manipulation opportunity.You can get an idea of what's going on in the options market here:
I would agree with this. Google is up over $100 since G+ came out, so I think there will be some people eager to sell tomorrow to cash in on the strong uptick.
Taking a further look: while just looking at the most popular options' strike prices, there are 10,141 put options at a strike price of $500/share, and there are 7,736 call options at a strike price of $550/share. I find looking at the spread with all the details interesting. I suspect most of the people modeling this are paid to keep it proprietary. I wish I had the talent, because it could probably start a fascinating discussion on a site like this.
EDIT: put option numbers were incorrect. Time stamp is ~6:30 PM EST.
It is interesting to compare that number to VC funds [1]. In the first half of 2011 there was 10.2B$ raised for funding startups, in the first half of 2011 Google put $5B in the bank.
Looking at the slide, with my limited accounting knowledge, it seems Google has managed to decrease the total cost of expense which contributed to the increase in revenue from Q1.
Cost of revenue = expenses that scale up directly with revenue. For a manufacturing company, this would typically consist mainly of what they pay to their suppliers. In Google's case, power and bandwidth are major items.
Gross profit = Revenue - cost of revenue
Operating expenses = costs that aren't directly tied to revenue, such as payrolls and building leases. Operating expenses also include depreciation of capital assets, the computation of which is somewhat of a black art.
