Sebastian Thrun Has Left His Role as Google VP and Fellow
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Re: Sebastian Thrun Has Left His Role as Google VP and Fellow
#2Is Google X anything more than a PR heavy version of Xerox PARC or any other R&D lab that tech companies have had?
Re: Sebastian Thrun Has Left His Role as Google VP and Fellow
#3Is Google X anything more than a PR heavy version of Xerox PARC or any other R&D lab that tech companies have had?
Google Brain apparently came out of there, so I'd say definitely not. The other projects have always been longer term, and it seems silly to ask why self-driving cars aren't done yet when it was never expected for them to be done yet.
Re: Sebastian Thrun Has Left His Role as Google VP and Fellow
#4Is Google X anything more than a PR heavy version of Xerox PARC or any other R&D lab that tech companies have had?
Well, at least three of its products are being used in the real world (Glass, Loon, Self-driving cars) and at least one is actually being sold (Glass), so yes.
Re: Sebastian Thrun Has Left His Role as Google VP and Fellow
#5Is Google X anything more than a PR heavy version of Xerox PARC or any other R&D lab that tech companies have had?
Do you mean PARC circa 1970s?
Re: Sebastian Thrun Has Left His Role as Google VP and Fellow
#6Is Google X anything more than a PR heavy version of Xerox PARC or any other R&D lab that tech companies have had?
You say that like it is a bad thing.
Re: Sebastian Thrun Has Left His Role as Google VP and Fellow
#7Is Google X anything more than a PR heavy version of Xerox PARC or any other R&D lab that tech companies have had?
Probably not, but isn't that enough these days when so few companies do any sort of long-term bluesky R&D?
Re: Sebastian Thrun Has Left His Role as Google VP and Fellow
#8Is Google X anything more than a PR heavy version of Xerox PARC or any other R&D lab that tech companies have had?
Well, at least three of its products are being used in the real world (Glass, Loon, Self-driving cars) and at least one is actually being sold (Glass), so yes.
So you are saying it share's PARC's affinity for inventing things that were both difficult to manufacture and not economically viable? (Only half joking there)
I think it interesting that Sebastian left, he's a smart guy and I think he understood what he could do wielding Google X as a tool, that he left means he figured he could do get more of what he wanted to do outside the confines of Google X than he could with it. That makes for a really interesting thought exercise. And that brings us back to PARC, which discovered that the people who left PARC had a bigger impact outside of the lab than in it. The reasons for that were many but mostly they consisted of Xerox not actually being a 'research' company so much as it was a 'copier' company. What does that say about Google X?
Re: Sebastian Thrun Has Left His Role as Google VP and Fellow
#9Is Google X anything more than a PR heavy version of Xerox PARC or any other R&D lab that tech companies have had?
My former boss (CTO of Panasonic) once told me that the only way to do real R&D is to have a monopoly that allows you to hide the margins in cutting edge R&D. Everyone else was doing just product development.
Google X is amazing in that it is about the only one left doing true bluesky R&D. Everyone else is just doing product development.
Re: Sebastian Thrun Has Left His Role as Google VP and Fellow
#10Is Google X anything more than a PR heavy version of Xerox PARC or any other R&D lab that tech companies have had?
Well, at least three of its products are being used in the real world (Glass, Loon, Self-driving cars) and at least one is actually being sold (Glass), so yes.
Glass is a botched PR stunt, not world-changing research. So this underscores the GP's point.