Larry Page is making huge bets on new technology
fortune.com
fortune.com
Maybe I am being pedantic but aren't revenues from Youtube also based on advertising?
To the broader point though, why aren't more investors also putting money toward these "moonshots?" Is it because they don't have the liquidity to do it? Do they cost too much for the risk? If that were true then the Google's investments would be widely panned rather than held up as "making the right bets" as this article mentions.
It seems like these "singularity" technologies are the types of things that valley investors would be all over.
YouTube has content producer lock-in, which is tremendously helpful. And it may be that there's just no room for improvement massive enough to pull people away, that video delivery is close enough to its peak to not leave any room for real competition.
But if content was elsewhere, YouTube revenue would vanish very quickly indeed.
Search, on the other hand, still has massive room for improvement. Someone, somewhere will eventually do it. And there's nothing that would keep users on Google search when they do.
It's not like Facebook where's there's a huge network effect. Once there's a notably better search option, it wins very very quickly.
This is true, but it's also a really hard problem and most likely any improvements will require enormous scale to implement (because they'll be based on statistical analysis of prior search queries), which only Google and a handful of others have. So no network effects, but huge economies of scale.
Plus, having used some other search engines (DuckDuckGo, Yandex, Bing, etc.), I feel that Google still has a comfortable lead than the competition.
25% of google searches are unique. I bet another 25% would be so rare and numerous you couldn't possibly have time to tune them. In fact, when you think about how much revenue a single search brings, a search is going to have to happen on the order of 1,000 times (at least?) before you can have a human hand tuning them.
Broadly agree.
For what Google does in search, say, first-cut, keywords/phrases and results sorted by a measure of gross popularity, page rank, and date (but, for a second-cut, clearly now with a lot of refining tweaks), it seems to me that they are doing a terrific job.
But as far as I can tell, Bing is doing about the same.
So, if are looking for something, have a few keywords/phrases that fairly accurately characterize what want, then Google/Bing can work well. They can be just terrific. But that scenario does at best poorly on a significant fraction of ("safe for work") search.
For this fraction, there are a lot of approaches, Web sites, etc. but nothing very good.
For this fraction, I worked out some new techniques and wrote the corresponding software.
For where Google/Bing work well, and often they are just terrific, my work will usually not be as good and only occasionally better.
But for nearly all of the fraction of "at best poorly", my work should be quite good and much better than anything else. My work is different, very different, and I believe that being so different is necessary (clearly not sufficient) for success in the fraction I am attacking.
Currently I'm loading some initial data. Then ..., maybe people will like it.
Of course, with all the usual start-up advice, my work is doomed to fail because I'm a solo founder if don't count my kitty cats! And, I'm not a college dropout. I didn't even drop out of grad school and did get my Ph.D. And I'm past 30. So, right, doomed!
But being successful at what I'm attempting would be exceptional; so we have to expect that much of my project is not the usual. So be it. I have some fairly good reasons to believe that my work should be successful; no way am I doing this just "on a wing and a prayer".
What do you think? Announce a private beta test here on HN? Get feedback? Get it working well. Polish the UI/UX. Go live, get more publicity, run ads, grow?
To compete with Google search you need... perhaps billions in funding to build the scale, speed, accuracy, redundancy, distribution, etc.
To compete with YouTube, you need to spend incredible sums of money to host and stream 720 or 1080 videos; the volume of content uploads; and then to be able to afford all the lawsuits that come with the business regarding content. That's a billion dollars in financing just to get up to proper YouTube punching weight.
The same is true of Facebook. One of its best shields, is the immense cost and scaling challenge to handle a billion users, regardless of if it's gradual. It's incredibly difficult to do well, and with the reliability that Facebook has always had.
Thinking further into this question you've posed...there has been a lot of discussion here on HN about how hardware is harder to work with than software. Whether this is true in anything other than for psychological or cultural reasons, who knows. But certainly there is more 'entropy' with your invested failures along the road to success and it's not as simple as deleting or cutting and pasting LOC in a computer file. Hardware is material.
Just because an idea is inspiring, amazing, even culturally transformative, that doesn't mean it can be a business. And generally speaking, investors are only interested in ideas that can be businesses. (That's what makes them investors instead of philanthropists...or politicians.)
Here's another reason--new technologies don't always win, because older technologies improve too. When I was editing a tech e-newsletter over a decade ago, a major hot new technology was called organic light-emitting diodes (OLED). This display technology had a huge viewing angle, did not need a backlight, and was super power efficient. It could be printed onto plastic substrates that were flexible and even translucent. It was going to kill the LCD.
Except, it didn't. LCDs improved fast enough to hold onto the market--they got LED backlights, power efficiency, higher and higher resolutions, better viewing angles, better colors, and (maybe most importantly) cheaper and cheaper and cheaper because the volumes were so huge. And it turned out that OLED's had some problems that were not so easily solved. So while OLED is used commercially today, the volumes are small. LCDs, so far, have kept on winning.
Because only ultra-large, incredibly-rich companies can afford to have seriously large investments fail quite this often. Which is not to say they're a bad idea! This is how blue-sky research works.
Can you think of what the board of Disney said to Walt when he decided to open a brick and mortar theme park when their only product to date had been a few animated films? Or how what they said when he unveiled the original vision of EPCOT as a real city with a theme park bolted on.
I don't have a strong opinion in Google doing their moonshots but it's happened before.
I read an article on Walt once that covered this.. he went to all his friends and family and told them his plan. Every single person told him he was nuts and it would never work.
That was how he knew he was on to something - the fact it had never been attempted before only made him more certain it was going to work.
> the fact it had never been attempted before only made him more certain it was going to work.
Those are interesting reasons for being certain it will work. The combination of all the people you cherish the most telling you it's a bad idea and the fact that no one had tried it before. I mean, sure, I understand the romance of it and these reasons giving someone the drive to try it and succeed. But making you certain it's going to work? That I don't understand.
If you decide that the problem is they lack some specific insight that you possess (and you're really sure about that fact), then in combination with their universal negative position, I believe you can be confident that you're on to something. There's a tendency for strikingly new things to be laughed at, or otherwise denounced as absurd; once you notice that effect at play by people, and you can reasonably confirm your own thesis that you know something they don't, it's a great indicator.
I am one of the folks who doesn't believe that Search Advertising is "continuing to thrive", rather I think if you look at the steady erosion of CPC and the growing cost of paid distribution you will see that Google's search advertising business is dying (or at least no longer organically growing). Google can pump those tires with additional inventory, cutting off partners to keep more of the revenue, and buying more traffic, but the bottom line is that if you just ran the business as usual search advertising revenues would be flat to down over the last 8 quarters. In that context their only choice is to find another Golden Goose quickly before the momentum flips.
That said, I've been saying this for several years and they keep pumping and boosting the top line revenue. So it is entirely possible they consider this the normal evolution of their business. Maybe its just advertisers who are pickier or want a better return on their advertising dollar. I don't know, but I do know search advertising is losing profit margin faster than the market is growing.
Why does anyone ever continue reading an article after a headline like that? Nothing can follow except a thoughtless a puff piece.
Some people like puff pieces, or don't spend much time worrying about whether Glorblax got his fair recognition. (Personally, I agree with you)
First glance, the article seems to be to provide information to the readers, say, as in "this is what this really successful guy does that you, the reader, might learn from and find useful in your work in business". But my view is that this first glance is nearly totally wrong.
Instead the formula for the articles is not to provide useful, or even very solid, information at all. Instead, the formula is a manipulation of the reader: The reader is made to feel good about themselves.
How? The article makes the subject's work look simple, definitely like the reader can easily see themselves doing the same. Then the reader feels like they are on the right track, that is, already doing as well as the subject of the article. So, the article passes out a lot of simplistic insights, cliches, trivialities, etc. that any reader can agree that they could have done.
Really it is best for the formula if the reader comes away learning nothing at all; that is, part of the formula is to make the reader conclude that they are already on the right track, already know as much as the subject in the article, could easily do just what the subject does, and, thus, are on the way also to being worth billions. So, a main goal is that the reader learn nothing!
So, are making the reader feel good by confirming that the simplistic thoughts that they can easily already have really are the right stuff.
Or, such an article is vicarious, escapist, fantasy, emotional experience entertainment (VEFEEE).
And that's the article. The formula is to manipulate the reader into coming back for more, thinking that, "I'm reading Fortune and, thus, learning from the best Captains of Business; oh, oh, oh, I'm learning so much; and, since these guys are worth billions, I can be, too.".
I concluded all this long ago. I am surprised to see Fortune still following the same old formula. Heck, I kept reading to the end just to see if they had any significant content beyond their old formula -- they didn't.
So, net, I gave up on Fortune for years, and now I'll give up on the Web version for more years! What a big pile of nutten, deliberately, very carefully crafted, total nutten!
"Thoughtless" you say! How kind you are!
Actually we must let people make progress where ever they are interested.
After all the guy who built the first brick didn't know someday they would used to build pyramids.
It’s a tall tale that is repeated affectionately by the whizzes inside the futuristic lab because it captures the urgency and aspiration of their boss to move technology forward."
Is this really repeated affectionately? (If at all.) That sounds like a bug, not a feature.
Unrealistically, it can only travel couple of years into the future/past. Socket present.
Unbelievably realistically, it can travel hundreds or decades of years into the future/past. ???
Google is trying to diversify, but they haven't been successful at turning a profit on non-advertising products, at least not yet.
They are protecting that business well, by seeing and acting on mobile early, by acquiring Android and developing it.
I think heads-up displays (eventually) will be the next big thing, because they remove hardware size-limitation (cf. watches), and Google is at least ready for that, with Glass.
But nanoparticles for drug deliver is interesting but they've been doing something similar with bio-engineered antibodies since the early 2000s. (in fact, if you're rich enough you can get a tailored cancer treatment with antibodies specific to your own specific cancer - this has been around for awhile)
I've long hoped that self-aware AI would come out of Google, but perhaps not.
In comparison, Elon Musk seems like the true visionary.
> Even the nanoparticles are mundane and not much more of an extension of the work that's been going on since the 90s on bio-chips for detection.
Using antibodies and tailored cancer treatment is still a reactive treatment. As the article states, the Google X Labs is aiming for "constant monitoring" of your body with these nanoparticles - hence creating a "proactive" ability to constantly monitor your body of potential issues. If achievable, that's pretty remarkable.
> In comparison, Elon Musk seems like the true visionary.
Both Page and Musk are visionaries. The logic you use to criticize Page's "mundane" ideas can be equally applied to Musk - serious attempts at modern electric cars have been around since the 90s [1][2], and space travel has been around since the 60s. Your logic would dictate that Musk is merely extending the work in those fields.
Your criticism of Page's "moon shot" ideas not being world-changing/interesting greatly misses the point.
Page and Musk have different areas of strengths, but I don't think you can call one of them a "true visionary" compared to the other. They've already both proven to be incredibly prescient on more than occasion.
As for self-aware AI, we're a long ways away from that. Neither Page nor Musk nor anyone else is remotely close to self-aware AI.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AC_Propulsion_tzero
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F
No, that one's coming out of MIT. Gosh, don't you read journals ;-)?