181–190 of 294 posts
I look at this with great anticipation. This will be an enormous reducer of congestion. Driverless cars will remove many of the headaches and hassles of high-density commutes. Imagine being able to pop a beer in the backseat as an automated car drives you home.
Anyway, I'm sure Google has enough money to support any failures (this point was made in a previous article about the multi-tool card). But, in the long run, how will Google prevent itself from appearing to look like a monopoly (such as Apple's iPhones in the earlier days)?
If Google competes directly with a company they are invested in via GV they're going to really damage the reputation of GV. Why would you accept investment from them if they're going to get access to your private info and then turn around and screw you.
If Google wins at ridesharing, it will be worth billions more than anything GV itself could produce.
"@business We think you'll find Uber and Lyft work quite well. We use them all the time."
Google is the only company with a potential edge over Uber right now. The point in time at which self-driving cars are usable by the the public is the only visible inflection point where Uber's hegemony is truly threatened. (edit) The article suggest self driving cars, and by extension Google's ridesharing service won't be ready for 2-5 more years.
The article states 2-5 years for Google's driverless cars
Oh well; there goes Uber's 50 billion dollars valuation...
My inner paranoid finds this interesting from the perspective of Google entering yet another domain where they have high accuracy data on the present/future whereabouts and private concerns of a large number of people.. add it to the hundred other properties they maintain that appear to have no direct business value other than capturing masses of sensitive data that was previously nicely decentralized and private. Ca…
Excessive. You can call an airline, hotel or taxi company directly, text your friends or pay for dinner with cash. Your inner paranoid is drawn to the convenience of the services that google offers. If you don't want one company to have a lot of information about you, then don't use that company for everything. Google loves data. But generally in the aggregate, not the personal. I've yet to see anything even remotely…
Google has knowledge of routes which you take to work everyday. Friends you are close with. Online services you are using. And you want them to have it. You don't want (atleast intentionally) MC/Visa to have that kind of knowledge about you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
so when any other company does something like this, we cry anti-trust. But when Google does it, it's good business? I'm not sure where all of this Google love comes from on HN (besides all of the engineers that work there). Google is just as evil as any large corporation. They may surgar-coat everything with a "do no evil" mantra, but it's just good PR. When you peel back these layers, it's business as usual.
>> Google is just as evil as any large corporation. Let's not exaggerate. Google might not be perfect; nobody is, but their actions are great magnitudes in distance from the evil some other companies have done. I'd rather work for Google than any of the companies below: - http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/10/10/1141724/-Walmart-fu... - http://www.alternet.org/story/52526/rural_communities_exploi... - http://thinkpro…
Most Android phones push you to put everything into the cloud. Do you know why? Oh yeah, that's right, so they can sell your data to advertisers.
Recently, they stopped putting organic search terms in referral traffic from the Google search engine to a website, effectively making it impossible to use any other applications except Google Adsense. Great company, right?
They have had a monopoly as bad and far reaching as Microsoft..yet I rarely hear the hatred that I used to hear about Microsoft in the late 90s.
It seems like all you need to do is support the developer community by giving out lots of free software/open source and the tech community will forgive you for pretty much anything (employing you at $100,000+/year also helps in this forgiveness).