Google's Tough Alphabet Transition
wired.com
wired.com
Having said that, this might make the funding of true moon shots less likely. The self driving car business isn't close to profitability, but clearly has a successful business model ahead of it. Obviously it won't just be a direct measure of revenue, but it should be interesting to see how this affects how much time Google gives the rest of the Alphabet companies
On the other hand this will likely lead to more stable products,and products will disappear less often.
On the other hand I am happy to see Amazon's Echo being successful and take that as a sign that at least voice/dialogue systems are going to improve by a lot in the near future, or at least that there are tons of funds to be invested in research.
Search isn't a multi-billion dollar industry.
Advertising is.
If you don't believe me, name a company making billions of dollars from search engine fees alone.
But if we make the definition too generic then folk will start naming Bloomberg and LexisNexis and you and I, being two guys called Jacques who remember the late 90s, will wonder how these companies wound up in the same category as Alta Vista, Lycos or Excite.
Nobody knows their current revenue/profit figures, but most public estimates seem to indicate under a billion/year.
Their primary sales appear to be consulting and integration services with their software as a minor concern.
This is the difference between FB and GOOG: one sells an audience that, demographically, is likely to want your product (similar to how TV ads are sold), the other, one that wants to buy it, likely right f*ing now.
I don't think so. Amazon has been run a lot like that. It hasn't been doing badly on the innovation front.
It's not clear and it's not guaranteed. There's now a lot of competition in that space, and it might take another decade or before there's even revenue.
Won't/can't read the article because Wired adwall, but what is this business model? Whenever self driving cars came up, I see they need a miracle. Solution looking for a problem. Points being: have better or on par alternatives for transportation already, don't have the necessary legal framework to operate in, people actually like to drive, road safety could be improved way better with other improvements (better education, harsher fines, lowering and enforcing speed limits), environmental impact decreased by moving away from motorized transportation etc.
This does not appear to be true, do you have any research?
> road safety could be improved way better with other improvements (better education, harsher fines, lowering and enforcing speed limits)
This also does not appear to be true. It's like saying humans can get better than computers at Go if you push them hard enough. And we know that's false.
> environmental impact decreased by moving away from motorized transportation etc.
While i agree, i can point out that a self-driving car will mean less cars (as it can be shared), so it will be more environmental efficient than private ownership of cars.
2. I'm not arguing humans are better at following rules, I'm arguing we could have safer roads tomorrow if we were interested and would actually enforcing traffic laws. I think driving is a much harder problem than go, so saying we can solve a simpler problem does not imply we can solve the hard one.
3. Car pooling and shuttle services are nothing new and it is not an alternative to ownership, it is more part of the on demand transportation toolchain. Parallelism still remains a problem with self driving cars.
2- Your point was that other improvements were way better. I don't disagree that we can make roads safer without it.
3- Self-driving car will certainly diminish the need for ownership. But I was just arguing on the environmental point of yours, that even if it does not solve, it will help alleviate.
1) Replacing taxi drivers.
2) Replacing commuters who don't want to drive.
Both of those problems exist on the scale of hundreds of thousands / millions of people. Solving them with good margins is a business model.
Good assistive systems (probably leading in the nearish term to a level of full autonomy under some conditions) has already started to arrive from a variety of auto makers--but Google doesn't seem to be interested in participating there. So there's a definite business model for assistive/autopilot systems and there will be, some day, for fully autonomous systems. However, it's unclear whether the latter, taken by itself, will be profitable in any reasonable commercial timeframe.
If you can replace a driver you are paying ~$20,800 [$10/hr] every year, that is ~$100k of savings [I'm assuming the more complex car also costs ~$100k to service over 10 years, so it may be more than that if I'm being overly conservative].
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/12/0...
Right now, its ~$100k to produce a self driving car. If they can get it down to $50k and maintenance costs of ~$5k/year ... it is much, much cheaper than any human driver.
I actually think that your human driver costs are quite conservative. And I expect that the incremental costs associated with autonomy--once the technology exists--will be quite modest.
1) The human driver. 2) The fuel. 3) Maintenance.
Even at a minimum wage, what really breaks bus routes is the human driver. You could send a smaller (more fuel efficient for low loads) vehicle on less profitable routes, but that doesn't modulate the biggest cost at all.
Google, Ubur, Lyft, all seem to see a future where (to borrow from the older Total Recall movie) Johnny Cab is able to eliminate a lot of public transit and ride-sharing issues.
I believe that the technical challenge is within our grasp (it'll be difficult but possible).
It might, with sufficient volume, be cost effective and when factoring in the difference in accident rates surely will be.
The hardest sell will be the truly glacial speed of modifying laws to get these vehicles on the road without drivers.
I disagree with this. Yes, autonomous vehicles will be held to a very high standard--both in terms of statistical safety and in not doing "dumb things." A higher standard than humans almost certainly. But that is not an unreasonable bar to set.
When vehicles can indeed go door-to-door reliably across a wide spectrum of roads and road conditions, I don't really expect laws to be the limiting factor. But I expect that to be pretty far out.
IOW: people tend to acquire multiple vehicles out of necessity, not poor planning.
To me, at least, that seems like a use case where you'd need drones.
There was some noise about it rivaling the search business in terms of growth and capacity to be self-sustaining.
Surely it's prudent to at least mention it in the same breath as search.
From the earning's report [1] it seems like total revenue was $21 billion for quarter ending in December. Around $19 billion "Google advertising revenues" and $2 billion "Google other revenues". There seems to be no more break up of beyond that point.
[1] https://abc.xyz/investor/news/earnings/2015/Q4_google_earnin...