Google is the new Bell Labs
davidlitwak.com
davidlitwak.com
When I was growing up in Silicon Valley traffic was light, places were far, and there was nothing in between.
Silicon Valley was rarely the place you wanted to be, we all wanted out having been here our whole lives. We wanted New York, we wanted Los Angeles, we wanted anywhere but here.
Over the years that has changed.
You ask most people that work at Google the significance of the Googleplex and no one will ever tell you about the prominence, about how it used to the rolling valleys housed the SGI buildings.
But day in, day out, the buses flow. The cars flow. Once you're on campus it's a different world. Everyone's busy, everyone has something important they're insisting on doing.
The whole of Mountain View, and in turn the surrounding suburban sprawl has been turned into the tiny steams coursing into Oak Ridge.
The highways are jammed. The roads are jammed. There are more lines. There are more people. All eager to do something important. Meals are provided, the buses are provided, the interns get their limos to go to the local hotels
Slowly but surely, we got our wish. Los Angeles came to us. New York came to us.
Los Angeles never struck me as a place to elevate, and I like the real New York better.
Silicon Valley was better when it was a place the MBA-culture carpetbaggers and thugs considered an outpost and avoided as much as they could. The weather and the scenery were just as good or better (due to less buildup) and people were able to focus on building things, not having to listen to endless conversations about Y Combinator and vesting schedules and Mark Pincus.
I doubt that Google's research will have the same public benefit; it seems much more likely that Google will keep it for themselves.
This allowed them to bankroll things like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC. Freed from living on the margin, they had the security to invest in blue sky projects.
Explains Google's Internet balloons, and many other investments.
Since adding the "innovative" begs he question, let's rephrase it to "They were market leaders of their time." But lots of companies are market leaders. HP of today and Dell are market leaders of the PC industry, yet show almost no innovation.
My point is that competition, in the sense of the economic force that drives marginal profits towards zero, discourages innovation, at least in the short term, because it forces companies to be preoccupied with immediate survival, instead of allowing them to plan ahead to the future.
Wikipedia has some information on the relevant history. As usual, treat with skepticism, but it will confirm the basics:
on System V: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_V
on BSD: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution
Less than ten years ago remotely controlled vehicles had a hard time driving in a straight line ten miles in the desert. Google's have now driven millions of accident free miles.
Granted they haven't tackled a Michigan snowstorm yet but I think you have to admit they pioneered this technology.
Here's a random list:
Page Rank
Map/Reduce
Statistical Language Translation
Unsupervised image feature extraction[1]
Go
Dart
Large scale software defined networking.
The list could go on..
Most tech companies have google to thank for large scale data processing. Google could have not published anything, but they chose to publish these papers. There are other papers published that other companies haven't even started copying yet, as google is 5 years ahead of the industry in terms of large scale data processing. When these companies get there, they can check out the published papers, saving years of time.
Arguably Bell Labs didn't invent the transistor. To quote Wikipedia:
The first patent for the field-effect transistor principle was filed in Canada by Austrian-Hungarian physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld on October 22, 1925, but Lilienfeld published no research articles about his devices, and his work was ignored by industry. In 1934 German physicist Dr. Oskar Heil patented another field-effect transistor.[2] There is no direct evidence that these devices were built, but later work in the 1990s show that one of Lilienfeld's designs worked as described and gave substantial gain. Legal papers from the Bell Labs patent show that William Shockley and a co-worker at Bell Labs, Gerald Pearson, had built operational versions from Lilienfeld's patents, yet they never referenced this work in any of their later research papers or historical articles
Arguably Bell Labs didn't invent the laser. To quote Wikipedia:
Simultaneously, at Columbia University, graduate student Gordon Gould was working on a doctoral thesis about the energy levels of excited thallium. When Gould and Townes met, they spoke of radiation emission, as a general subject; afterwards, in November 1957, Gould noted his ideas for a "laser", including using an open resonator (later an essential laser-device component). Moreover, in 1958, Prokhorov independently proposed using an open resonator, the first published appearance (the USSR) of this idea. Elsewhere, in the U.S., Schawlow and Townes had agreed to an open-resonator laser design – apparently unaware of Prokhorov's publications and Gould's unpublished laser work.
....
Gould's notes included possible applications for a laser, such as spectrometry, interferometry, radar, and nuclear fusion. He continued developing the idea, and filed a patent application in April 1959. The U.S. Patent Office denied his application, and awarded a patent to Bell Labs, in 1960. That provoked a twenty-eight-year lawsuit, featuring scientific prestige and money as the stakes. Gould won his first minor patent in 1977, yet it was not until 1987 that he won the first significant patent lawsuit victory, when a Federal judge ordered the U.S. Patent Office to issue patents to Gould for the optically pumped and the gas discharge laser devices. The question of just how to assign credit for inventing the laser remains unresolved by historians
Personally, I think the work Bell Labs did was incredibly important - much more important than the work others did. They were very, very good at taking half-assed physics ideas and publications and turning them into something useful.
Google is very very good at taking half-assed "computing" ideas and turning them into something useful.
Now what platforms has Google built that is changing the game for everyone else? You have YouTube and thats pretty much it. Android is a me-too product, Chromecase is a me-too product, Chrome is a me-too product. I won't lie Maps, and Translate are amazing services but hardly worth deity status. Plus has been a spectacular flop, and my father (who isn't in tune with tech) is completely confused as to why people by their cloud machines from Amazon.
Lastly, Google isn't putting anything on the line. 95%+ of Google's revenue is advertising. If Ford started work on an autonomous car that would be putting it on the line. What Google is doing is the equivalent of a rich kid buying fancy toys. Google X gets a lot of PR, but thus far it isn't all that much different from Microsoft & IBM Research.
I'm not going to say what Google is doing is wrong, I think its great actually. However we shouldn't get ahead of ourselves by saying Apple is doing nothing. That company is focused on building amazing products on what pretty much amounts to yesterdays technology. Every phone today has a capacitive screen but how long has that been around? Retina displays? How long did we suffer with 1368x768 laptops?
So while Google is not reliving the 80s "household of tomorrow" pipe dream, It doesn't seem wise to say Apple just builds "only phones and tablets." given that those phones and tablets have been the center of current tech industry and are out now rather than "just 5 more years!"
The point isn't necessarily what has come to pass yet, it's the focus on things that don't necessarily have a path to revenue yet. Everything Apple does is product and revenue focused. That is not the case with Google.
You are right that 95% of their revenue comes from Adwords . . . but 95% of their efforts aren't on optimizing Adwords, and that right there is my point: Apple is focused on executing where their revenue is, Google is definitely MORE focused on finding new revenue opportunities, and is more willing to look into unorthodox industries and ideas.
Second, don't take execution lightly. Execution is everything. Again, the last few major tech products in silicon valley aren't moonshots. Most of the them are ideas that could have built 2001. Square could have been released on Windows Mobile 6.
What I'm simply trying to argue is that Google Research isn't inherently better than Apple's workshop. Moonshots are great yes, but its a bit too early to be sounding the bells. Microsoft Research had a similar position in the past and everyone thought they were ushering the new age, but it turned out to simply be PR. "The World of Tomorrow" at Disney Land (which probably hasn't been touched in 5-10 years) is chock full of a Microsoft Research moonshots that never caught on or weren't really practical. I see Google Glass heading a similar direction.
Again, you don't know that because Apple doesn't use Research as a PR platform. Apple tinkered with something like the Glass.[1] It would be naive to think Apple R&D isn't tinkering with similar ideas. However Apple's marketing approach is very different and Apple on recent doesn't try to sell you on ideas that are 5 years away. Which is entirely why I'm hesitant to say "Apple isn't doing anything and Google is flying to the moon." In reality both companies are looking into very interesting products, the difference is while Google is telling the world, Apple would crucify anyone who leaked a blurry photo.
[1]http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/10/4714680/apple-developed-go...
New revenue opportunities? Google's #1 revenue source in 2000 was AdWords and their #1 revenue source in 2013 is AdWords. Apple's #1 revenue source in 2000 was Macintosh, in 2005 it was iPod, in 2010 it was iPhone. AppleTV is a "hobby", but by that standard, everything Google does other than AdWords is also a "hobby".
You don't know that. It's widely reported that the iPad (tablet) project was started even before the iPhone project then shelved a few years. Of course the iPad is the past but it should serve as an example of what was developed in the early-mid 00' you only discovered its existence in the late 00' therefore it is not unreasonable to extrapolate that you will only able to tell the story of the current projects in a few years from now. Sorry to break your narrative. It's not because you don't see any press release that there is nothing going on in Cupertino.
I'd say that makes all the difference.
Or all those patents we see coming out of Cupertino that frequently have nothing to do with products currently being produced. Definitely no research there.
Apple is great and all and probably everyone will agree they have far and away the best hardware and products, but Google pushes technology in ways just to get the world thinking of what is possible.
Um, no?
> Now what platforms has Google built that is changing the game for everyone else?
We have to get out of our heads that for Google to win Apple has to loose.
They make phones and tablets <i>NOW</i>. They didn't five years ago and who nows what they'll be making 5 years from now. What did Google have five years ago? Search, Maps, Gmail and Youtube. What do they have today? Search, Maps, Youtube, Gmail and thanks in part to Apple, Chrome and Android. Everything else is a research project.
Now, don't get me wrong, I love Google. I use Gmail, Youtube and Maps religiously. Google Glass <i>IS</i> the future. Every one of their research projects is a vector for change in the world, but let's not pretend that they work in isolation. Technologies feed on each other, ideas spring new ideas, companies inspire other companies, to create and to compete. To reinvent.
I am glad to live in the time of Apple and Google. Don't ruin it with hate.
That comes from the same guy who, in private, said:
I'm going to destroy Android [...] I will spend my
last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every
penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this
wrongGoogle researches what makes Google money - period. If this is the current generations "hero", then we're doomed.
At present, PARC (no longer under Xerox) operates on something of an agency model and Google runs research projects like startups. This appears to result in a higher rate of short-term commercial success, but at the cost of fundamental research. That said, I think we've done a tremendous amount of fundamental research since World War II and now that the conditions for producing more no longer exist, there's plenty of low-hanging fruit – new configurations of things that already exist – hence the prevalence of startups and the perceived excellence of hybrid research models.
I only hope that the next wave of technological innovation will be far more decentralized than the last one. We haven't had a Bell Labs like organization in a long time. Maybe one day we won't need one.
Is that cynical? Probably, don't mind me. It's just reading these comments you'd think self-driving cars, say, were a done deal, and yet when I read things like this they seem an awfully long way away:
>The Google car has now driven more than half a million miles without causing an accident—about twice as far as the average American driver goes before crashing. Of course, the computer has always had a human driver to take over in tight spots. Left to its own devices, Thrun says, it could go only about fifty thousand miles on freeways without a major mistake. Google calls this the dog-food stage: not quite fit for human consumption. “The risk is too high,” Thrun says. “You would never accept it.” The car has trouble in the rain, for instance, when its lasers bounce off shiny surfaces. (The first drops call forth a small icon of a cloud onscreen and a voice warning that auto-drive will soon disengage.) It can’t tell wet concrete from dry or fresh asphalt from firm. It can’t hear a traffic cop’s whistle or follow hand signals.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/11/25/131125fa_fact_...
Xerox PARC is the Bell Labs of the computing industry, and its spectacular failure to do anything to help Xerox hangs heavy over commercial research labs in computing.
Google is determined not to let its lab projects be another Xerox PARC. For better or worse that means there does tend to be a profit goal at the end of most of their research.
Perhaps, perhaps not.
The "spectacular failure" here was not in the goal of the lab -- the problem was how Xerox management dealt with its results.
Yes, I agree 100%.
Google provides an interesting foil to AT&T. They both have/had effective monopolies over a telecommunication sector and large research operations. However, the differences are quite large. Google has not funded basic research on the same level as Bell Labs. It also is more keen to productize the research it does. Additionally, its monopoly is part of an ecosystem of services on the internet and is not as complete as Bells dominance over telephone lines.
Read Tim Wu's "The Master Switch" for a much more complete history of Radio, Television, Film, Phone and Internet communication companies in the USA. It's a fantastic read and provides the background for intelligent conversations about the telecommunications industry.
http://io9.com/5691604/how-ma-bell-shelved-the-future-for-60...
Google does cool stuff, but saying no one else is seems pretty ignorant
interesting conclusion. i must be hallucinating my macbook air, mac pro, os x + apps, and airport network then.
Both are important and needed.
So:
1. A smaller, lighter, computer in an industry where every generation of devices is smaller and lighter. A trend that existed before Apple even made laptops.
2. Mac Pro. A faster, more powerful, computer in an industry where every generation of devices is faster and more powerful. A trend that existed before the Macintosh existed.
3. OS X + Apps. I consider the app store a step backward for humanity, as it centralizes something that had been decentralizing and democratizing over decades of hard fought battles between open and closed. The best things about OS X are the best things about UNIX. And, I consider Linux a better UNIX (but, I'm willing to admit that the Macintosh experience for most users is superior, due to it being a unified hardware+software product, wherein Apple can make it all work together flawlessly). I don't consider it revolutionary, however.
4. Airport? WTF? Expensive WiFi is revolutionary?
I'm not really an Apple hater (aside from my strong preference for Open Source over proprietary, especially in important platform choices), but it's absurd to compare Apple's innovation to self-driving cars (or the kinds of innovation Bell Labs used to lead the way on).
I don't want to take any credit away from Google. But there is a thin line between a gimmick and something earth shattering. Unless, I practically see, the practical use of these products (by google) I am more inclined to think, they are merely cheap gimmicks.
Google at best, can replicate a feature. But sadly that trick is no longer working. read: G+ and all they have resorted to gimmicks like this.
Oh yea, I am an Apple asshole but that does not make my above point invalid.
Also, the majority of Google R&D (at least that I am aware of) is much more applied than fundamental. The Google Car and Google Glasses are cool, but they will never win Nobel Prizes.
I'm also not sure which industry Google is supposed to have created?