Google's True Moonshot

Good read.

> Google’s collection of moonshots — from Waymo to Google Fiber to Nest to Project Wing to Verily to Project Loon (and the list goes on) — have mostly been science projects ....

...a car service rather far afield from Google’s mission statement “to organize the world’s information

...What if “I’m Feeling Lucky” were not a whimsical button on a spartan home page, but the default way of interacting with all of the world’s information? What if an AI Assistant were so good, and so natural

So... I think we should distinguish between "moonshot" and "silver bullet." One is a big, difficult goal that can be a approached with lots of determination, resources and such. The other is a future breakthrough that just fixes everything.

Google has always struggled making (great) technology and concepts into products, and products into businesses. The biggest miss, IMO, was cloud. Msft & Amzn relative successes highlight where google isn't strategically strong.

Waymo might be the biggest investment (probably >$100bn risked). Cloud is the large business category that actually exists. Google should have been here, considering where everyone was circa 2008. Google had the tech, the concepts, even the products. It wasn't effective at making that a great business.

The "OK Google" assistant story tell objectively, because no one else has done a great job with voice interfaces either. That said I think it demonstrate the difficulty of going "concept to products."

IMO, the problem with voice assistant has been a problem of imagination. Voice is a UI paradigm. What are the key use cases, where this new UI paradigm is powerful? They never invented it.

Anyway... I think the strategic logic is flawed... if that is indeed the strategic logic It's "singularity thinking." An expectation that version N+2 makes version N=1 obsolete. He who attains the GPTn, owns driving, personal computing, etc.

>The potential payoff, though, is astronomical: a world with Pixie everywhere means a world where Google makes real money from selling hardware, in addition to services for enterprises and schools, and cloud services

So this is what I mean. A "moonshot" would be defining these and going after them with real big intent. Not one that considers everything side effects of some big breakthrough that makes all linear approaches irrelevant. Voice UIs, even self driving, whatever wing's mission is.... these aren't impossible ideas even with current science & computing power. They're just hard. Requiring imagination. Risk. Vision. Strategy.

Drones are a method. Delivery is the task. Human-like drivers are a method. Transport is the task. Voice recognition. LLMs. These are methods. Not tasks. If you're doing silver bullet, it's nice to avoid defining the task. If you're doing moonshots, you want to be brutalist in defining the task.

Talking also bothers the people around you, and can tire you out if you do it for hours.

> Their ecosystem of devices, even just sticking to the Google-branded hardware, are inconsistent crap. Take a simple, first part app like Google Calendar and look at how sloppily and poorly it works across Pixel phones, Android Wear devices (including the Pixel Watch) and Home devices. Google sucks at building polished, consumer products.

Uh, I think you're living in another universe. I have all of those products and I have no issues with the Calendar experience. What use case do you think works poorly exactly?

Does anyone remember Google Video? It was a horrible experience. The upload process was a pain, and I think some approval was needed at some point, or you had to be sponsored by someone already on the service.

Then Google bought Youtube.

In the AI space it's unclear what/who they could buy -- OpenAI being obviously out of reach -- but it's possible they could find a good match.

> there's only one model (or company with models) that's actually worth paying for.

Yes. Perhaps. That said "the model currently worth paying for" isn't the only possible business model or approach to "winning AI." It was a pretty incidental business model that unexpectedly got big.

I'm not convinced this is the final state.

AI models need users. There's having the most users. But, there's also having the right users. This isn't a linear race. Image generation. Language generation. Those work now. They'll get better... but it's still not clear what better enables. Best way to find out is by finding out what current models enable.

IMO, there's a lot more room here for bravery and creativity than beating OpenAI at whatever the race appear to be at this particular moment. The budget necessary to build applications is nothing compared to the scale of strategic investment being made.

Make the LLM chat/email client. Make the LLM project management software. CRM. tech support. All the cheap, obvious stuff.

Once upon a time, Google had a let 1000 flowers bloom approach. They did succeed in launching lots of pretty good products. They did not succeed in turning that tactical success into a strategic business success. That said, the tactic worked.

Why take the risk/effort/etc of winning the race to cloud services? Google have already lost one cloud race to google and amazon. Just build the apps yourselves. Find a framework. Do it. Don't want to run them forever? Then sell them off. Shut them down and leave the space open for startups.

Why futz around?