Very interesting article I think. But I think that says Google is the new Bell Labs is a bit exaggeration. While Bell Labs did most of its inventions from scratch and with a lot of search, what Google do in most part of its products is improvement of existing ones. And no, I'm not a Google hater.
Google is the new Bell Labs
91–100 of 106 posts
Re: Google is the new Bell Labs
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google is probably one of the biggest single contributors to pushing the web platform over and has been the largest contributor to the webkit project until they recently forked it into Blink. Apple is great and all and probably everyone will agree they have far and away the best hardware and products, but Google pushes technology in ways just to get the world thinking of what is possible.
Let's not minimize Apple's contributions to WebKit. Google may have been the top contributor in terms of commits to WebKit in the months leading up to the fork, but Apple did enormous work to bring KHTML up to speed long before Chrome existed.
Don't forget to Clang.
Re: Google is the new Bell Labs
#93I don't get the Apple hate. And at the risk of getting downvoted, I'm gonna paraphrase Steve Jobs, We have to get out of our heads that for Google to win Apple has to loose. This idea that Apple only got right the timing, and that without them smartphones would be the same, computers would be the same and tablets would be the same seems crazy to me. Timing IS everything, and they made theirs by creating a lot of the…
> I don't get the Apple hate. And at the risk of getting downvoted, I'm gonna paraphrase Steve Jobs, That comes from the same guy who, in private, said: I'm going to destroy Android [...] I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong
He said something very similar about Bill Gates/Microsoft. But I can't recall exactly what.
Re: Google is the new Bell Labs
#94I don't see Google working on detecting cosmic background radiation from the origins of the universe any time soon.
Re: Google is the new Bell Labs
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
My developing theory is that monopolies can be great for innovation. What do ATT, Google, Xerox, and the old HP have on common? They are/were, if not outright monopolies, insulated from competition by virtue of network effects, brand or trademark monopolies, or simply a lack of competent competition. They weren't like the Acers of world, in highly competitive markets, struggling to make 1-2% profits on their revenues…
What do ATT, Google, Xerox, and the old HP have on common? - They wer innovative market leaders of there time. They invested further in monetizing their successful business models. ATT&T has managed to continue to be a big player in telecoms and Google, much younger than the others is still incredibly relevant. But being a monopoly does not encourage innovation, although it can provide the financing. being a monopoly…
> They wer innovative market leaders of there time.
Since adding the "innovative" begs he question, let's rephrase it to "They were market leaders of their time." But lots of companies are market leaders. HP of today and Dell are market leaders of the PC industry, yet show almost no innovation.
My point is that competition, in the sense of the economic force that drives marginal profits towards zero, discourages innovation, at least in the short term, because it forces companies to be preoccupied with immediate survival, instead of allowing them to plan ahead to the future.
Re: Google is the new Bell Labs
#96Somehow related: Has Apple Really Ever Invented Anything? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFeC25BM9E0
not really. they make some nice hardware. wozniak was the first to realize the potential of the microprocessor.
Re: Google is the new Bell Labs
#97Bell Labs invented fundamental technology like the transistor and the laser. I wouldn't put Google Maps in that league. They did not invent autonomous vehicles or wearable computers, though they have made strides in commoditizing the technology.
But Google is (historically) a software company, so we should compare its contributions in the software field at the moment. Here's a random list: Page Rank Map/Reduce Statistical Language Translation Unsupervised image feature extraction[1] Go Dart Large scale software defined networking. The list could go on.. [1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.6209
dremel(where facebook's presto comes from)
bigtable(where amazon's dyanamoDB comes from)
Most tech companies have google to thank for large scale data processing. Google could have not published anything, but they chose to publish these papers. There are other papers published that other companies haven't even started copying yet, as google is 5 years ahead of the industry in terms of large scale data processing. When these companies get there, they can check out the published papers, saving years of time.
Re: Google is the new Bell Labs
#98I really don't understand the Apple hate boner. Apple may have single handedly jump started the mobile industry, and is the godfather of huge apps like Facebook, Twitter, Vine, Instagram , Snapchat, Uber, Square, Candy Crush, the last few that have been causing major problems for major incumbents. Now what platforms has Google built that is changing the game for everyone else? You have YouTube and thats pretty much i…
> Now what platforms has Google built that is changing the game for everyone else?
Re: Google is the new Bell Labs
#99"Only Google is investing in truly groundbreaking research." guess author hasn't seen http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/
Re: Google is the new Bell Labs
#100Uh, Apple created the Macintosh, the iPhone, and the iPad. I would give them a bit more credit for creating new industries if we're going to start comparing them to Google on that front.
true, but its not that there weren't personal computers, smartphones or tablets before. Apple knows when the market and tech is ready for new products and executes extremely well, but they hardly ever invent anything risky like self-driving cars or Google Glass.
The products I listed above were all written off as being doomed to fail by many when they launched. They were incredibly risky products.