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What? This article makes absolutely no sense. How is buying a company that clearly was not doing well financially (acquisition price at $150m, ~$200m raised with the last $40m being a debt financing, so it is a bail out), in what is clearly messaged as an acqui-hire for talent, in any way comparable to Amazon using its investment arm to acquire confidential information and replicate company products? Respectfully, th…
(Hypothetical Alpha Centuarians observing and pirating the tech would have no ethical issues at all, there is no social contract, they aren't even accessible and couldn't pay even if they wanted to being lightyears away but that is a silly tangent.)
In the article it says this move by Google is worse than Amazon investing in businesses and stealing info. How is this worse? Google bought the whole company, didn't make partial investment. They can do whatever they want with the company.
"Worse" doesn't just mean "worse for the companies involved", it can also mean "worse for society". The net result of Google continually buying startups and shutting down the projects is that fewer products receive long-term support, receive any iterative improvements, or can be relied upon to exist later.
In the same way, I would also be very interested in any further info on Ellsworth's Tilt Five projectors, bottom right-right of [1] (full text of interview [2]). Interesting video with info on the (retroreflective) optics system here [3].
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200722042213im_/https://i0.wp.... presumably shows three generations of the product. From left to right board, camera and projector.
[2] https://skarredghost.com/2019/09/24/interview-jeri-ellsworth...
This article seems to completely miss the point. Google paid the founders a lot of money to acquire their IP and know how which they will integrate into Glass. Why would google run two identical products? Nonsense article.
In the article it says this move by Google is worse than Amazon investing in businesses and stealing info. How is this worse? Google bought the whole company, didn't make partial investment. They can do whatever they want with the company.
It’s a terrible article, but I wasn’t aware that they were bought. This is very expensive R&D, and being bought out by the FAANG is one of the very few positive outcomes for a hardware startup. Hopefully they did it for the money.
