How long do these “moonshots” have until they are considered failures?
It seems like an anti pattern that some huge, futzy organization launches a “moonshot” to explain why they burn money on something without needing a return because it’s a “moonshot.”
JFK gave his “to the moon” speech in 1962, targeting 1970 [0]. And the USG did it. So 8 years was the first one. It cost a ton of money and was successful and had massive returns culturally, scientifically, and financially.
Google launched its X/moonshot org in 2010 [1]. 14 years later, have any “landed?”
It seems like orgs should stop using this terminology unless they are seriously committed.
The USG launched their “cancer moonshot” [2] for very good reasons, and very sympathetic, but their goal was by 2020 and they didn’t make it. I think we should increase cancer research funding, but draping it in hyperbole is negative when we don’t achieve what we said we targeted.
I can't speak to the other two, but it's laughable to suggest in 2023 Waymo has "landed" - where is the contribution to Google's bottom line? Where can I buy or use Waymo tech outside of some very restricted demo neighborhoods? What is the likelihood this changes in the next few years?
I'd be far more prepared to argue Waymo is presently another poster child for a failing Google x project.
> outside of some very restricted demo neighborhoods
Nearly 200 square miles of the greater Phoenix metro. If Waymo services your home address -- and it services a lot of residential area -- then you can probably get anywhere you'd want to go around Phoenix in a driverless taxi.
> What is the likelihood this changes in the next few years?
I have no insider info, but I'd expect SF and LA County to roll out in the next few years and significant coverage of major metros by the end of next decade.
Sorry driverless cars aren't happening fast enough for you, but they are happening.
> Sorry driverless cars aren't happening fast enough for you, but they are happening.
Don't know why you are saying sorry to me either. They are happening of course, but to say its "landed" at Waymo is hilarious to me.
> Nearly 200 square miles of the greater Phoenix metro.
Precisely - highly restricted demo neighborhoods. This USA is a massive country. You've also conveniently skipped addressing the current lack of any profit for Google what-so-ever too - a core component of most people's definition of a new line of business being a success. You can't even point to meaningful user growth given the tiny percentage of the country it operates in.
> Precisely - highly restricted demo neighborhoods. This USA is a massive country.
1. IDK why anyone would spend the money to do driverless everywhere in the USA. You can get to 30% of the population and by far the most profitable taxi markets by going one metro at a time. Even just the major metros in the sunbelt would print insane amounts of money.
2. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the time to go from one metro to N metros in not N*(lifetime of waymo). Ie, the hard part is done. The product has made it to market, at least in the sunbelt, and the poo-poo attitude about being able to go anywhere in the Phoenix metro without a driver is a pretty amazing dismissal.
> You can get to 30% of the population and by far the most profitable taxi markets by going one metro at a time. Even just the major metros in the sunbelt would print insane amounts of money.
When this actually happens, then we can discuss Waymo's "landing". This is all hypothetical today.
It's not about traversing the whole USA - its about serving more than a handful of customers in demo areas, relatively speaking. Waymo has never done this to date.
I'm not disputing Waymo could go somewhere - it might! It hasn't so far.
Describing “landed” as “Waymo is profitable and deployed in most of the US” would be like arguing that the space program was a failure because it didn’t lead to profitable space ports and space routes.
The equivalent of the moon landing for self driving tech is closer to “they have driven a lot of miles without anybody in the driver seat”, which both Cruise and Waymo have done (>1M miles)
What utter nonsense. Google is a publicly traded for-profit company, not a sovereign government or charitable cause.
The entire point of Google's moonshots is new profitable businesses, of which Waymo is not and has never been. Comparing to the United States Government because they both used the term "moonshot" is beyond silly.
For a Google moonshot to land, it has to make money, or it won't continue to exist. It's really not a complex concept.
>Brain is everything you know of today in GenAI space
I know ChatGPT, Midjourney, StableDiffusion, Adobe Firefly, And GitHub Co-Pilot in this space. Where’s Google?
Let me guess: Brain’s research led to those products? Even if that were the case, Google still failed to market and capitalize. Are they running an open research lab for the greater good? Or are they still interested in launching market-leading products?
Yes, it was. It was a political program to gain reputation against the Soviets and phenomenally successful in that I think the US was happy with its ROI.
Sure, google didn't capitalize on their tech before others did.
But google is a fast follower. Let's wait and see.
Also - did you miss "many other internally used tools/infra" part - if they can feed ads infra and increase revenue by a meager 1%, that's more than enough to make up for all others combined in revenue generated.
How much of that was actually generated directly from "Google X"? Seems to me that most of it came out of DeepMind, which was just a run-of-the-mill big company buys innovative startup type of acquisition.
Brain and DeepMind were separate orgs until very very recently. Google's GenAI stuff was mostly out of Brain and its RL stuff was mostly out of DeepMind.
Bard just launched and it may be a $100B product in a few years, but now it’s still playing catch-up to OpenAI (that started without any moonshot and “only” with $1B in its first major seed round [0]).
Even though it came out of X, I don't see how Chronicle could reasonably be considered a moonshot for Google. A cloud-based SecOps suite that emphasizes integration with Google Cloud/GSuite seems like a fairly obvious vertical expansion. That said, I don't know much about SecOps.
I'd argue that the OG Moonshot was less of a metaphorical moonshot than most of the X projects. Self-driving is obviously WAY harder than going to the moon, and I think we were way further away from a science and tech perspective than we were from the moon in the early 60s.
> Self-driving is obviously WAY harder than going to the moon
I don’t think that’s fair in the sense that going to the moon was absurdly difficult in 1962. It’s hard to compare things so different, but going to the moon only seems easier now, 60 years later. At the time of the moonshot it was one of the most difficult things humanity ever attempted.
The main JFK speech about the manned moon landing was May 25, 1961, before a joint session of Congress. The “we choose to go to the moon” speech at Houston’s Rice University in the fall of 1962 was more a case of pumping up public enthusiasm about the very expensive program, given that polls — especially in that mid-term election year — were showing growing doubts among voters that the expenditure was worth it.
I think in retrospect, we can consider the Manhattan Project another moonshot, at least purely on a technical level, and that only took three years. The thing about moonshots is that you can't just declare a moonshot by fiat and expect anything to happen. The state of science and technology needs to have reached a point where a significant breakthrough is imminent, given sufficient investment. This is where atomic science was in 1942 and rocketry was in 1960.
Which is why the historic examples of moonshots didn't actually arise from government fiat, but from scientists. The Manhattan Project famously started from a letter, signed by multiple prominent physicists including Einstein, warning the US government that the invention of an atomic bomb was imminent enough that they feared Germany would accomplish it first. The moon landing was a little more complicated, but for the entire 20th century, rocket scientists understood it was possible to explore space and did everything they could to try and convince various governments to fund their research[1]; the imminent achievability of a moon landing by 1960 fueled fears in the US government that the Soviets might beat them there.
So who are the cancer researchers promising that any sort of "moonshot" breakthrough is imminent? Let me know if there is one, but the cancer moonshot idea seems to have originated in politics, and once politicians start promising "cancer moonshots"--even if no such thing is likely to be achievable--it's not likely cancer researchers are going to complain or refuse the new source of potential funding.
Unlike the government, Google at least has or had the potential to be the type of organization that actually listened to the relevant technical experts instead of being dictated by the whims of random executives receiving revelations from the Good Idea Fairy. But I agree with you that it doesn't seem like they've delivered.
Finally, I think even calling these projects "moonshots" sets them up for failure in a certain way. If you said "we can and will land on the Moon" in 1962, people will be impressed. If you say "we're going to achieve a 'cancer moonshot'", what does that mean? Does that mean you're going to cure cancer? No, because if you were going to cure cancer, you'd say "we can and will cure cancer". Except (as far as I know) that would be a lie, so instead they say "cancer moonshot", which doesn't mean anything. Any goal that's ambitious enough to be called a "moonshot" is a goal that you can just say out loud and it will impress people a lot more than calling it a "moonshot".
[1] Yes, this is my way of glossing over the V-2; I don't morally endorse Von Braun's work during the war and this is entirely beside the point I'm making here.
"Google X" actually made (and maybe still makes) a lot of sense.
The history is that around 2010 Google wanted to kick off experimental projects, in part because they were starting to lose top talent to startups. Since they had Google Maps and Google Images and Google Earth and Google Mail etc, they named the new org Google X as a space for the new and undefined projects.
It just reminds me of Telegram. This page I mean, and that too visually it kinda resembles some Telegram product pages. However, unlike Reddit, Telegram app is epic good.
Musk's original web payments company was x.com, which he started in the late 90's. Then it did a very early merge with some other startup, and the combined company rebranded to PayPal. At some point, Musk bought back the domain from PayPal.
I do not understand why anyone would think that it's a great idea to do a this major rebranding of an existing company with a well-known brand.
This entire endeavour not sure whether conscious or unconscious is Musk trying to -- gosh, there's a word for this but my English is failing me -- to finally get even with Thiel, to show Thiel he can do everything Thiel did but better. Someone like Musk never fully recovers from getting fired from his dear X.com post-merge. Make no mistake: back then Musk was doing a stupid by trying to force a Windows tech stack on a payment company which was using Unix.
Thiel was one of the largest donors of Trump in 2016, is a true darling of the alt right so of course Musk must rub shoulders with them.
Between the erstwhile x.com and Confinity the company which launched PayPal, the latter succeeded, gobbled up x.com so now of course Musk must show to Thiel that he can make a successful payment company called x.com. He must.
That's the reason for all this bullshit, I am certain.
I suspect the "X" branding for these companies has less to do with Roman numerals and more to do with the prominent use of "X" in mathematics as a unknown variable, and that's due to René Descartes according to:
I commented on Reddit's latest moves, downloaded their app just to use it for a while and give it a bad review. Deleted the app and haven't gone there in a while
Just because you comment on something doesn't mean you'll use it
You can't change font size? But what if I don't like to read walls of tiny text?
And what the hell is with the video playback UI? I want to see comments under a video post, why do you take me to full-screen video playback no matter what I do? About 50% of the time I manage to tap something somewhere which makes it work on 3rd try, but I wish that percentage was higher.
Their comments seem fine to me? They pretty clearly explained the reason for their dislike of the name - if anything, their ability to do so concisely should be praised
I guess I find the name collision with Google X—quoting the guidelines again—to be "too common to be interesting." But one man's pithy is another's snarky, so to each their own.
Having a critique of a thing is orthogonal to being interested in the thing.
There are plenty of topics I find fun to engage in dialog about, despite having no interest in the topic itself.
We, as humans, seem to generally enjoy being a part of the zeitgeist, being swept away with whatever the latest fascination is, even if we aren't interested in the actual topic. And that's ok. We are allowed to enjoy that social experience on both the micro ("all my friends are getting really into houseplants, I will too!") and the macro ("lol, Elon Musk is an unbelievable idiot") scale.
Also of note is that the stock ticker symbol "X" is, for whatever reason, US Steel [0]. If Elon ever takes his X Company public, I bet there will be a lot of erroneous buys of US Steel, similar to what happened when Twitter originally went public [1] (an unrelated penny stock with the ticker symbol TWTRQ surged), or when an unrelated company with the ticker symbol ZOOM surged when people started buying Zoom videoconferencing stock (ticker symbol ZM) at the start of the pandemic [2].
IIRC the X came from the 1980s when it branched out into energy, bought Marathon Oil, and reorganized into an umbrella company named "USX" in which the US Steel part became just a subsidiary. They exited that in 2001 but apparently? kept the symbol.
"Mr. Roderick explained that for months the company had considered more than 200 new names, ranging from U.S.S.A. and Amcor to Maxus. U.S.X. was selected, he said, because ''it had a continuity from the U.S. part.'' He added that X had been the company's symbol on the New York Stock Exchange since 1924. "
There's no obvious connection between X and US Steel - maybe somebody just thought X sounded cool?
Everyone is hating on "X" right now because of the bloviated way tech companies talk about "changing the world". I'm always pessimistic about things like this too, but I do have a soft spot in my heart for this stuff.
Why?, because it allows some engineers to work on cool stuff. Will it pan out, probably not, but I'm not going to cry if Google blows through a few million bucks. They won't even notice it.
Better that a few engineers get to have some fun working on stuff other than optimal ad placement. Who know's maybe they'll stumble across something actually helpful to humanity (not holding my breath).
My cynical view is that Google's X projects had great value to the company but not in the long-shot asymmetric return sense. X convinced engineers working on optimal ad placement that they were part of something grand and beneficial. Google becoming a financial mature company may be inevitable, but risks alienating engineers who want more meaning in their work, whether that meaning is real or superficial.
These engineers won't be having fun, because these engineers will be working for Elon Musk. Also, it's a rebrand. He fired the vast majority of the engineers he had.
Everyone is hating on "X" because the people who possess the ability to think critically, i.e. engineers, are rightfully perplexed by every single move that this moron makes. It taps into the uncanny valley response for smart people, and it is amplified because Elon Musk has branded himself a genius.
This is a shitty rebrand from Twitter to something that is impossible to search for on Google, and nothing more. It is the X-shaped shadow of a fiery ball of mediocrity that is hurtling towards San Francisco pavement as we speak.
But some companies have been around for a very very long time.
Kongō Gumi Co., Ltd. (株式会社金剛組, Kabushiki Gaisha Kongō Gumi) is a Japanese construction company founded in 578 A.D., making it the world's oldest company.
Huh, according to Wikipedia (without citation, unfortunately), that ancient construction company pioneered the use of CAD for temple design. I wanted to see if I could corroborate this claim, so "kongo gumi cad" on Google lead to: https://worksthatwork.com/3/kongo-gumi which makes a very similar claim. From what I can tell, this claim is echoed all over the (English) internet but originates from "worksthatwork.com".
The earliest wayback snapshot of that website from 2014 doesn't mention CAD, but the March 30, 2015 snapshot does. Looking at the wikipedia article edit history, there seems to be an edit war happening regarding the accuracy of sources (someone seems to believe very strongly that Nikkei Asia is not a reliable source): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kong%C5%8D_Gumi&o...
Well, this was a strange rabbithole to fall down. I'm interested to know from where this claim originates, or if "worksthatwork.com" just made it up in 2015. The answer probably lies beyond the English language internet.
I wish Wikipedia had a "blame" feature like git. If it exists, I couldn't find it.
> I wish Wikipedia had a "blame" feature like git. If it exists, I couldn't find it.
If there is an edit war going on, and this claim is being removed and added you’d still need to look at quite a lot of revisions manually.
But there are tools to export Wikipedia page edit history to git I think. And you could write a script to grep every revision of the article for the word “CAD” to determine at what point in time it first appeared in the article. And then from there you could look at who added it and so on.
From the submission tite I definitely thought "moonshot factory" would be some kind of analysis of how too-lofty startups fail, not an earnest mission statement from whatever this is. Blegh.
In Phoenix you can as long as you live in a 200 square mile area comprising big parts of the Phoenix metro. And not just to the airport -- you can take it dinner, to the golf course, etc. SF and LA "coming soon".
I, no joke, encounter 4-5 of those white Jaguar driverless Waymo vehicles that are covered in sensors and cameras every day. They're all over my neighborhood. I believe (but havent confirmed) that normal folks can use them in this area too.
Intrinsic managed to purchase Vicarious AI for so little money that my options were completely underwater (by a sizable margin too), so I guess that works.
Hard to argue Waymo hasn't gone anywhere with the number of their Taxis I see driving around Scottsdale. I see multiple everyday and I only really drive along a single road as part of my commute. I don't think they've "made it" yet, but it's impressive tech I can actually use nonetheless.
The information looks interesting but the site is so hard to navigate, there are 3-7 moving elements on the screen at any time, text runs away while reading it, scroll doesn't work as expected, information is presented in too many different ways.
I don't think you're really supposed to navigate it. There isn't any real content on sites like this. They exist to check a "we have a marketing website" box, that prospective parties can basically open, scroll half way down and think "yep looks very impressive".
If you're the public, there is nothing to learn, esp if they have a sub brand that actually does the thing (eg waymo). If your an investor (?) you have actual data to review, or dont care either way.
Have worked (or attempted to work) on numerous projects with these guys, and each one has been an embarrassing mix of them throwing money at us and then disappearing and it going nowhere. Half the time the project sponsor just disappears into some other part of google.
Actually someone described this phenomena really well: we are all tied up (psychologically, socially, economically) by these billionaires and the visions they bring up to us, that we let ourselves seduced by the spectacle, while surrendering our common sense and critical thinking, void of power, action, consciousness. The reality is that, even you fuel a revolution somewhere, there are massive opposing idiots out there willing to kill themselves for being quoted by musk etc. So just enjoy the ride and try to navigate this world as billionaires do: profiting from the stupid - but be cool & polite ;) not saying they're not driving innovation, but they're machiavellic the rest of the time (we are all the same, but for others it takes longer to realize). sure, downvote me, at least you have this power :)
Even @sama, as much as I respect him and look up to him (for both ycombinator and openai), disappointed me with his attempt at monopolizing AI. At the end of the day, he's looking for his best interest, who am I to comment? :)
You haven't understood my message because you are superficial. I don't have opponents, i'm not trying to convince anyone of anything, those are my sincere opinions, it was just an observation and i'm not trying to grow a cult. Don't be so reactive on the internet, it's like winning the special olympics (can we still make these kind of jokes today? .... people either forgot the Internet, either they're born in 2000 lol)
To add fuel to the fire, Elon has been quite vocal about his disdain for Larry lately. According to Elon, he got upset at Larry for not taking the risks of AI seriously. I wouldn't put it past Elon for this to be a bit of him thumbing his nose at Alphabet.
I always felt that calling this a “moonshot factory” was foolishly overblown. Just like you don’t generalise your code until you have at least two instances to work from, show us two successful “moonshots” before you even start thinking about a “factory”.
Moonshots don't imply moon landings. I take the name in a humbler manner — X is a lab that works on risky projects that might not make it anywhere, and Alphabet is okay with that.
Although, it still feels to me like the "factory" part implies they've figured out a good way to spot good investments:
At X, we’re trying to build a “moonshot factory”, a place where the processes and culture make it easier to make radical breakthroughs — repeatedly.
...but their track record doesn't really bear this out, I think?
If they had studied successful moonshots from the past and pinpointed some important elements of their approaches, that would make sense, but if so the website doesn't talk about it.
It looks like an incredibly cool and fun place to work, but who knows if they're funding the right ideas and the right people, or if it's all just random?
Microsoft just switched the unit from degrees to turns. I guess that would make more sense if they were rebranding the 360.
To be pedantic, there's no need for "very" in front of "unique", as my spouse is happy to pounce on despite my protests that English is a living language.
If it's supposed to be degrees, then since 360==0 doesn't that mean the range is [0,360) so 360 degrees is actually an out of range value for an angle?
I've always wondered this but never enough to ask it.
Z_719 is the shorthand for integers in [0, 718], with Z_n typically connotating the algebraic group or ring of integers up to n. In this case 360(Z_719) is an ideal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_(ring_theory)) over that domain.
While the ordered sequence of Z_719 is just {0, 1, 2... 718} then wrapping back around to 0, for the ideal 360(Z_719) you get {0, 360, 360*2 % 719 = 1, ...} which is the basis of my joke :)
Well, of course he does: his first start-up he managed sold (well, not exactly sold) to Confinity was called X.com [0]. And yes, it had image problems because people thought it was a porn site judging by its name.
Yep, he was forced out of PayPal for trying to make them rename themselves X.com after the acquisition almost 25 years ago.
So here he is again, pushing the name X. My understanding is he’s done it before. And he wants Twitter to be a huge financial payments player. Claims half the global market will want to use it.
Seems to me he can’t stop fighting past battles to try to prove he was right, when he clearly wasn’t, to assuage his ego. I’m hardly the first person to point this out. I learned it from someone else years ago, it just happens to fit perfectly again.
Well, Max Levchin (the actual creator of PayPal) also had some problem with the guy's, uh, technical (mis)contributions as well, as he recalls in one of his interviews (excerpt from "Founders at Work", Livingston is the interviewer):
Levchin: [...] For a while, Peter took some time off. The guy who ran X.com became the CEO, and I remained the CTO. He was really into Windows, and I was really into Unix. So there was this bad blood for a while between the engineering teams. He was convinced that Windows was where it's at and that we have to switch to Windows, but the platform that we used was, I thought, built really well and I wanted to keep it. I wanted to stay on Unix. By summer 2000, it seemed like the Windows thing was going to happen because Peter was gone. He took a sabbatical to make sure there were no clashes between the CEOs. So, this other guy was pushing me toward accepting that Windows was going to be the platform. I said, "Well, if this is really going to happen, I'm not going to be able to provide much value, because I don't really know anything about Windows. I went to a school that was all Unix all the time, and I spent all my life coding for Unix." I had this intern that I hired before the merger, and we thought, "We built all these cool Unix projects, but it's kind of pointless now because they are going to scrap the platform. We might as well do something else." So he and I decided we were going to find ourselves fun projects. We did one kind of mean project where we built a load tester package that would beat up on the Windows prototype (the next version was going to be in Windows). We built a load tester that would test against the Unix platform and the new Windows one and show in beautiful graphs that the Windows version had 1 percent of the scalability of the Unix one. "Do you really want to do that?" It was me acting out, but it was kind of a low time for me because I was not happy with the way we were going. Part of having a CEO is that you can respectfully disagree, but you can resign if you don't like it that much. But then eventually I became interested in the economics of PayPal and trying to see what's going on in the back end, because I was getting distracted from code and technology. I realized that we were losing a lot more money in fraud than I thought we were. It was still early 2001. If you looked at the actual loss rates, they were fairly low. You could see that we were losing money, but, given the growth of the system and the growth of the fraud, fraud was not that big of a problem. It was less than 1 percent — it was really low. But then, if you looked at the rate of growth of fraud, you could see that, if you don't stop it, it would become 5 percent, 10 percent of the system, which would have been prohibitive. So I started freaking out over it, and this intern and I wrote all sorts of packages — very statistical stuff — to analyze "How did it happen; how do we lose money?" By the end of the summer, we thought, "The world is going to end any minute now." It was obvious that we were really losing tons of money. By mid-summer, it was already on a $10 million range per month and just very scary.
Livingston: Did the rest of the company know you were right?
Levchin: Through the summer, I think various people were slowly coming to understand that this thing was really serious. It was pretty obvious at a certain point. I didn't have to really convince anyone. In the beginning some people said, "Yes, it's a lot of money, but we're really growing, too. As an absolute amount, $5 million is a lot of losses, but, if you are processing $300 million, whatever." There was actually a bit of an altercation at the very top management level, which caused the CEO to leave. Peter came back as the CEO. The first decision that he and I took was that my new job — in addition to technology — was going to be this fraud thing, because I already spent so much time looking at it. This guy Bob, the intern, and I — I convinced him to drop out of Stanford for a year and work with me more on it — for the next year, we just worked nonstop on trying to understand and fix these problems.
Livingston: So the CEO left and Peter came back?
Levchin: The three of us are pretty good friends now. At the time, already I had hated the guy's guts for forcing me to do Windows, and then, in the end, I was like, "You gotta go, man." My whole argument to him was, "We can't switch to Windows now. This fraud thing is most important to the company. You can't allow any additional changes. It's one of these things where you want to change one big thing at a time, and the fraud is a pretty big thing. So introducing a new platform or doing anything major — you just don't want to do it right now." That was sort of the trigger for a fairly substantial conflict that resulted in him leaving and Peter coming back and me taking over fraud.
Notice how he doesn't even refers to him by the name.
I’m no Xbox fan but I always felt the appeal was it was almost a palindrome and it’s a box to play games on.
X has a cool sound and mystery so I think it works when paired with someone that fits. X-men is one for me at least.
Brand-less unpaired “X” is the epitome of bland. I have no doubt Twitter will be around in the next ten years.
But just like AOL, Yahoo, and MySpace no one will really care except a fragment of their original demographic. Which I’m going to assume with Musk at the helm will be aging genx'ers. Which is kinda fitting.
...with an unhinged protofascist billionaire at the helm.
This sort of "throwing optimist VC billions to radical approaches" could be a good approach to a number of hard problems that academy and classical corps couldn't solve, but Musk's recent views and radicalisation drives away any serious partner with an inch of foresight.
So many things ill thought out in this. Curious to see which media outlet is the first to refer to "SoAndSo's x'd out earlier today" or "Recent x's suggest a growing interest in..."
Perhaps two weeks until he explains it all away as an "experiment" rather than genuine ignorance.
Looking past the Elon hilarity, I'm all for moonshots, a bold move investing in the next big thing.
Trying to transform Twitter into WeChat for the west seems unlikely, to say the least, but has nothing to do with this announcement. They just both have X in their names because I guess Elon likes the letter.
What do you mean by hijacking? The page changing as you scroll down? I'm on desktop and it looks quite pretty I would say. Does it not work for you or do you just don't like that sort of UI?
Wow this is a great example of bad marketing/naming/fluff. I thought this was X (Elon Musk) and the site looked generic enough (until Google is mentioned) to make me think this was the case.
Then it hit me: Musk is doing the rebrand so he can package 'moonshots' to pump his Twitter stock and eventually save his investment in the company. He'll bundle 'Elon futurism' into Twitter so he can get a better multiple.
Is this another shot at Elon Musk? Not sure where all the hate for him came from. Was it the hardline free speech direction he took Twitter, reinstating conservative accounts? That seemed to be the downward turning point in his popularity.
Not sure what rock you've managed to find (please send me the address, BTW, I could use a break myself), but between being forced to buy the company, firing a vast swath of the staff, not paying his workers, and other terrible decisions on what was otherwise a floundering if beloved company, I think Elon has earned this fresh disdain.
I think Musks turning point was when he randomly accused the Thai boyscout guide of being a pedophile. Since then his image has been continuously circling the toilet.
Surely Google/Alphabet's X subsidiary has been around for a while now? (wikipedia suggests since 2010, albeit only renamed from Google X to just "X" in 2015)
(And I always felt the name made a certain amount of sense for a subsidiary of a company named "Alphabet").
It seems like an anti pattern that some huge, futzy organization launches a “moonshot” to explain why they burn money on something without needing a return because it’s a “moonshot.”
JFK gave his “to the moon” speech in 1962, targeting 1970 [0]. And the USG did it. So 8 years was the first one. It cost a ton of money and was successful and had massive returns culturally, scientifically, and financially.
Google launched its X/moonshot org in 2010 [1]. 14 years later, have any “landed?”
It seems like orgs should stop using this terminology unless they are seriously committed.
The USG launched their “cancer moonshot” [2] for very good reasons, and very sympathetic, but their goal was by 2020 and they didn’t make it. I think we should increase cancer research funding, but draping it in hyperbole is negative when we don’t achieve what we said we targeted.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_choose_to_go_to_the_Moon
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_(company)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_Century_Cures_Act#Medical...