Google Will Become an AI Company

That sounds an awful lot like the refrain from naive entrepreneurs to investors: "the market is 100 billion dollars; if we capture 1%, we're a billion dollar company!" In fact, I think we could describe it as a basic entrepreneurial fallacy.

OTOH, Chrome went from 1.5% market share in Jan 2009 to 9.9% at the end of 2010. So I'm not going to say they can't do it, but I think Matt's piece is weakened by the presence of the 2% fallacy.

I do agree with the overall gist, however.

You forgot Android, which in the long run will probably prove to be their only really big hit other than search, at least that they've released so far. The others just don't matter that much.

An airliner is a vehicle with federally-mandated maintenance and inspection periods, operating in a tightly controlled space in which new vehicles entering and exiting are known and managed by controllers and in which the transport medium (air) by and large doesn't change characteristics much for the duration of the flight.

Versus an automobile with a robot driver that has to handle crazy pedestrians, dogs, motorcycles, cyclists and other cars randomly entering its area of travel, wide variations in road widths, speed limits, road surface texture (dry, sandy, wet, ice covered can all be encountered in less than 1/4 mile of travel), random road construction and other non-robotic drivers.

This doesn't mean that a solution is impossible, but to point to airliners to say "see, it can happen" is a bit of a stretch.

Simply go to maps.google.com and search for Chicago, IL to New York, NY. Ok, 14 hours trip currently. Now, let's take a premise of 200 miles per hour. Now, tell me, can you travel 200mph anywhere in Chicago? Can you travel 200mph in Manhattan or anywhere close to it? No. Does your car contain enough gas to go 800 miles w/o stopping. Doubtful, especially at those speeds where your mpg is going to drop off drastically. Even assuming you could achieve 200mph sustained on the interstate you still have toll booths, traffic, weather, construction, curves, exits, onramps, and other real-world traffic scenarios to deal with. This is not a flying car, this car travels on the ground like the rest of them. At the absolute very best scenarios you are still looking at 5 hours to make the trip. I would argue a detailed scientific study on the feasibility of it would put the actual travel time closer to 7 hours even with a car that had a potential of 200mph.

Compare this to flying. The trip takes approximately 2 hours (please check any airline site so you can see for yourself). Let's be generous and add 1.5 hours on the before side and .5 hours on the after side to give us a rough approximation of total travel time from home to destination. That is a total of 4 hours.

The airplane wins hands down. Try thinking about the problem instead of going with assumptions.