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Comment by sna1l | Hacker News Reader

This doesn't seem very unexpected. Companies who haven't been expected to make revenue/profit are being forced to rethink their business strategies with that in mind. It is a tough process and a lot of people don't like it. I think in the long term it will become beneficial for alphabet as they will funnel money into the successful businesses.

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

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I'm picturing it killing a lot of innovation at Google. Many projects, such as the self-driving car or search for that matter have no initial profitable means for years if ever. With that, I feel it will also stop the evolution of many products, e.g. Why risk investing in a long term project, when they know we can make money this quarter doing X.

On the other hand this will likely lead to more stable products,and products will disappear less often.

I am saddened by Google's decision to cut off Boston Dynamics because it sends a negative message about the progress of robotics in the near term. I was hoping they would apply reinforcement learning algorithms from DeepMind to solve robot locomotion and various other robotic tasks.

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.

I think it will slow down innovation and Google, and I also think it will make the surviving products better in the long term, with lower chances of being killed. Right now it seems Google employees want to jump to exciting new products all the time, and nobody is left to maintain the older ones. This would happen a lot less often if those "exciting new products" had a high chance of getting bankrupt and then for them to lose those jobs.

Just FYI, search is ridiculously profitable [see "search ads"]

I agree search is ridiculously profitable, but if you showed up to a meeting in 1998 and said: "Search is going to be a multi-billion dollar industry" the business exec would laugh you out of the office.

In 1998 there was a enough online commerce (in fact, there was a crazy boom of it, the original internet boom) for a good exec to see the potential of the ad market for it. Searching is precisely the moment when an ad can be well-targeted.

I was alive back then. It was not common belief that search would be a huge money maker. No one thought Google would be bigger than Microsoft until they started doing the ad auctions and people could start to see how the money could actually flow. That Google won the Internet money pot was a bit of a surprise to most.

I think that started with overture. At least I recall overture's business prop being paid search results.

I was also a user of google.stanford.edu back then. Nobody then thought that Apple would be bigger than MS either.

That's because they'd be right to laugh.

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.

Would palantir qualify?

You know what? Maybe they do, in the larger sense of "search engine".

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.

Probably not:

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.

"search ads" == "lead generation"

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'm not sure which is which in your example- I'm guessing that you mean the person searching GOOG is more likely to buy, but nevertheless I think the only one that applies to entirely is Amazon. The percent of searches in which I am trying to buy something is quite small on Google. Even if I am in the market, I am doing background research on the web. When I'm ready to buy I most often go to Amazon (even if I don't buy from them I still check). On Amazon, when I search I have my wallet out.

> I'm picturing it killing a lot of innovation at Google.

I don't think so. Amazon has been run a lot like that. It hasn't been doing badly on the innovation front.

In all honesty ARA was far closer to consumer-ready and thus profitability, but the whole modular phone project seems dead now

How do you figure? Having done some product development work, it seemed to me like a highly speculative project, unlikely ever to ship as a consumer device.

"The self driving car business isn't close to profitability, but clearly has a successful business model ahead of it"

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.

Still, it matters how that process happens and who drives it. There have been stories for weeks about what a shitty boss Tony Fadell is. There's nothing about businesses making money that necessitates that sort of thing.

>The self driving car business isn't close to profitability, but clearly has a successful business model ahead of it.

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.

> people actually like to drive

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.

1. Why do you think it is controversial? People like to drive fast cars, people even like to watch others drive fast cars. Some like manual transmissions. I do think recreational driving is thing, not necessarily commuting.

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.

1- I don't think it is controversial that some people like to drive, but I think this is such a tiny fraction of the market as to not matter. This point - that people like to drive - contradicts your "transportation alternatives" more than self-driving cars, as self-driving cars are closer to "driving a car" than public transportation.

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.

> Won't/can't read the article because Wired adwall, but what is this business model?

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.

The million (billion) dollar question is the timeframe. Alphabet/Google has apparently decided to go down the full autonomy or bust route and many researchers in the space think that's decades out for commercial availability.

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.

> 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.

My assumption is that the "replace a driver" is multiple decades away--which isn't an interesting commercial timeframe for most companies. It's not a question of competitiveness with human driver costs (in developed economies).

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.

Offhand, my educated guess based on how much it costs /me/ to drive, is that for any form of transport the order of costs from greatest to least is:

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.

>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.

Fair enough, but I still think the underlying problem of on demand transportation is already solved by friends/taxis/uber/planning, it is merely a different breakdown, you take out the human component and replace it with a machine. As someone who had problem with Google Services and was not able to contact anyone (no, the help pages did not work) it seems as a pipe dream, but maybe I am wrong and people will embrace it. Or you need an actual operator who can be called and you are back to square one. For that money I feel a fundamentally different solution should emerge than a mere augmentation - if at all. For 2, it is the same. Public transportation is a more efficient solution already. I'm from Europe, so I might have a different view on this, but it works really well here.

3) Drive between owners to reduce the number of cars a family has to have.

This would be huge. Half or less of the cars equal mobility. If a single family car could drive home so my daughter could drive to school and then drive back to work so I could drive home it would be awesome. You still get near full autonomy for a family with a single car. No-human driving is probably a tougher policy hurdle than human-ready-to-take-the-wheel driving, but it would be amazing.

It's not very likely though. If a single car would suffice, then most families would already have just one car. The reason they tend to have two or more is because multiple people need to get to different places, in different directions, at roughly the same time. If my wife and I need to be at work by 9AM and we work in opposite directions, it doesn't matter if the car is self driving or not. Either one of us is going to be late, or we both have to leave exceptionally early. Likewise for going home.

IOW: people tend to acquire multiple vehicles out of necessity, not poor planning.

Not to mention shipping/delivery drivers.

I think the delivery drivers will still be needed as they need to physically exit the vehicle and handle the packages.

To me, at least, that seems like a use case where you'd need drones.

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