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Loon’s final flight

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Re: Loon’s final flight

#231

Post by rasz »

Mistri wrote: post #4

People often make fun of Google/Alphabet for their graveyard of failed initiatives/products. While some of it might be warranted, projects like this—that strive to solve a large, global issue through somewhat charitable actions—are generous and have only increased my respect for the Google/Alphabet/X team. I hope they don't get flamed for this, and hopefully some of their research and donation funds can live on and s…

>charitable actions

I just choked on my Tea. Did you perhaps miss the fact they stole Loon technology from a company they were in talks of acquiring? got sued, lost, and finally quietly settled?

https://www.wired.com/story/the-lawsuit-that-could-pop-alpha...

https://www.law.com/therecorder/2019/07/29/google-settles-ip...

Re: Loon’s final flight

#232

Post by xirbeosbwo1234 »

tim333 wrote: post #85
xirbeosbwo1234 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Judged by the person who thinks putting cars in tunnels is the solution to urban transit? No thanks. Your average third grader is a more qualified engineer than Elon Musk.

He does better rockets than most third graders.

Elon Musk is not an engineer. He hasn't built a thing is his entire life. His biggest accomplishment is hitching a ride on the success of Paypal before getting fired for trying to move their infrastructure to Windows (lol).

My niece, on the other hand, just built a pretty cool rocket out of a soda bottle!

If SpaceX is less comically incompetent than Tesla, I'd wager it's because Elon Musk hasn't been paying as much attention to it.

Re: Loon’s final flight

#233

Post by rasz »

ptero wrote: post #207
ogre_codes wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the days of Google Moonshots are coming to a close. In general Google hasn't been very good at shooting for the moon. They've lost their leadership and vision and all that's left is a giant advertising behemoth. Did any of their moonshots really hit the mark or even come close?

I think the main problem is they lost the edge on execution. Traditional "vision" is not strictly needed for moonshot projects; the vision for moonshots is provided by a small team working on their idea. But should the technology start panning out, the company needs to focus aggressively on finding a commercial home for this technology. And this is where I think google (and many big companies) fail. Technologically,…

> did not build a commercial case

Selling stolen technology you tried to patent from under the company you suckered into believing into buyout, and then having those patents stripped by the Judge might have something to do with it.

Re: Loon’s final flight

#234

Post by ehsankia »

7thaccount wrote: post #217
ehsankia wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have at least a dozen services that have over a billion users. Others not mentioned in your list: Youtube, Photos, Drive, Maps, Gmail, Docs. And probably slightly more trivial ones like translate, calendar, flights, news, finance, and other stuff that are kinda part of search. Their hardware/home line isn't doing that bad either.

I forgot about YouTube and Gmail (things I use daily), so thank you. Maps is amazing too. My question wasn't to be a jerk. It was a legitimate question asked out if ignorance. I still kind of feel like they could be in a lot of additional areas like logistics where they could put all their capital and software edge into becoming a global leader.

I think Amazon already has mastered logistic, and it's a pretty difficult field to get into. Similarly, Apple has decades of experience in hardware now. It is definitely hard to find a sector that is large enough yet under developed.

One example of a new one they're trying is Stadia. Gaming in general is an already large and growing sector, and while there have been some attempt at game streaming, none of been as serious. You can see it will be big by the fact that Microsoft (xCloud) and Amazon (Luna) both also jumped in a year later also.

As far as actual moonshots/X go, I believe they have (or had) a few around energy tech. They've funded quite a lot of research into various fusion tech [1]. They also have a lot efforts in Biotech, may it be with Verily, or just DeepMind doing interesting research, such as solving Protein Folding recently [2].

So I definitely wouldn't say they are lacking breadth, honestly if anything it's hard to remember everything they do, as you pointed out :)

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/05/29/135179/google-ha...

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03348-4

Re: Loon’s final flight

#235

Post by black3r »

perryizgr8 wrote: post #54
sdenton4 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, look what happened in India: Jio sank $N billion dollars on building out 4G everywhere, and a billion or so people got much better internet access. The answer is clear: we can get there by laying more of the kind of infrastructure we already have in the developed world, and it's just a matter of getting the will to put it in place.

I was curious how much Jio spent on creating their network and the answer seems to be approximately ₹1T or $14B.

Which is approximately their parent company's yearly operating income. And then they sold 33% of Jio for $21B. (e.g. Google owns 7.7% of Jio for $4.7B).

I'd say it was a really good investment for them.

Re: Loon’s final flight

#236

Post by rasz »

supermatt wrote: post #92

IMHO, this is NO different from google closing down any other product. If, however, this news came with a grant of all the patents into the public domain, then it would be another story. Could a startup set up a commercial balloon based mesh network without running into patents now held by google? Probably not. THIS is the problem with these "skunkworks" type projects from megacorps. They suck all the air out of the…

>If, however, this news came with a grant of all the patents into the public domain

They dont own any patents, they stole the tech from a startup, got sued, lost (patents) and finally had to settle.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-lawsuit-that-could-pop-alpha...

https://www.law.com/therecorder/2019/07/29/google-settles-ip...

Re: Loon’s final flight

#237

Post by knorker »

sixti60 wrote: post #183
knorker wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or maybe ask "the owner" before you start, i.e. the citizens of the world. Are you under the impression that the sky and satellite space is unregulated, by the people's representatives? Huh.

Do you find the questions about sky and sattelite space are often addressed by people's representatives? I don't think I heard it addressed even once on public media during major elections. You'll probably say: "then change your representatives or do some lobying or choose representatives who care about this". This is a little more complicated than this: people are busy with hundreds of other things when they vote, a…

I think your problem is with representative democracy. Most issues are not taken all the way to the public floor.

> these questions are never addressed in public debates should not give an 'implicit consent'

In a western society whatever is not forbidden is allowed. In more oppresive regimes whatever is not allowed is forbidden.

There has been some press about e.g. SpaceX affecting astronomers, but by and large people don't care. And without the people pressuring them to not do it, the people's representatives, or people appointed by them, make their best judgement.

Regulators have the authority to grant launch and orbit permission just like the DMV (presumably) has authority on a whole bunch of driving license issuance rules and decisions. And how there aren't town halls to get input about the number of fire exits a building has to have.

Re: Loon’s final flight

#238

Post by nickff »

losvedir wrote: post #224
nickff wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kennedy was looking to either cancel Apollo (due to skyrocketing costs), or try to get USSR onboard for it (which probably would have caused it to stall). In addition to that, Apollo was extremely unpopular for the entirety of its existence, save for a brief period in the middle of 1969. The space program's history is very different from what most people imagine it to have been.

I don't think this is a fair characterization of the situation, but my knowledge is mostly based on one book, Reaching for the Moon, a Short History of the Space Race[0], that I recently read. You're right that Kennedy was ambivalent about it, and that working with the USSR was floated, but ultimately he did decide to go ahead with it. And there were people opposed, but "extremely unpopular" doesn't sound right. Like…

Take a look at this article: https://www.space.com/10601-apollo-moon-program-public-suppo...

Re: Loon’s final flight

#239

Post by rasz »

solarkraft wrote: post #79
omarforgotpwd wrote: post #35

Starlink made this obsolete before it launched

But Loon launched in 2013 and Starlink in 2018 (?). In a world in which satellites stayed very expensive I could imagine it being a bit more successful.

Technology was already in use in 2004 (Space Data), and Loon started in 2008 when Google decided to "borrow" it.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-lawsuit-that-could-pop-alpha...

Re: Loon’s final flight

#240

Post by supermatt »

rasz wrote: post #236
supermatt wrote: post #92

IMHO, this is NO different from google closing down any other product. If, however, this news came with a grant of all the patents into the public domain, then it would be another story. Could a startup set up a commercial balloon based mesh network without running into patents now held by google? Probably not. THIS is the problem with these "skunkworks" type projects from megacorps. They suck all the air out of the…

>If, however, this news came with a grant of all the patents into the public domain They dont own any patents, they stole the tech from a startup, got sued, lost (patents) and finally had to settle. https://www.wired.com/story/the-lawsuit-that-could-pop-alpha... https://www.law.com/therecorder/2019/07/29/google-settles-ip...

They have about 100 listed here: https://loon.com/legal/patents/
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