
Makani’s time as an “other bet” comes to an end - thanhhaimai
https://medium.com/makani-blog/a-long-and-windy-road-3d83b9b78328
======
1024core
Ever since Sundar, a McKinsey guy, took over, the writing was on the wall for
all of the bets that Sergey and Larry engaged in. He just cares about the
bottom line (as some would argue he should), and doesn't have a "passion" per
se. He's more than happy to just keep the train rolling, and keep the
perception of growth up by showing more ads and using dark patterns[1] to make
users click on what they think are web links but are actually ads. Eventually
the train will run out of steam, and then its on to the next gig.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107823](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107823)

~~~
davidwihl
As a serial entrepreneur now Google employee, I think the bets have received
too much funding. They seem like long term government research projects not
scrappy startups trying to scale. Putting more rationality and business
expectations is a good thing to determine the viability of some of the ideas.

Opinion my own, not Google’s.

~~~
wpietri
I'm sure this is true by the standard MBA tooling. But if everybody is using
those tools, it leaves opportunities for people thinking differently. Amazon,
for example, has been hoisting a giant middle finger to MBA dogma for years
with their overinvestment, and Bezos seems to be doing fine by it.

Another way to think about it is that Google really should be doing long-term
research, because only finding and monetizing a major breakthrough is going to
make it so that they don't have all their eggs in one basket. A basket that
will, like all baskets, eventually break.

A third way is that as long as Google is extracting monopoly rents, they
should probably put some of that money into government-like things that could
have broad societal benefit. Because if they keep trying to maximize quarterly
profit, they'll burn up all the societal goodwill that insulates them from
real regulation.

~~~
thu2111
Google are doing a lot of long term research though. Huge investments in AI,
search tech, big data, networking, the TPU stuff. Self driving cars. Contact
lens screens. Head-mounted displays. Drones. The list goes on and on.

Makani was funded for 14 years! 14 years!! How many companies are willing to
fund speculative research programmes in things unrelated to their core
business for so many years? None, that I'm aware of.

Truth is Makani should have been shut down years ago. Government or corporate
has nothing to do with it (that is, the same assessment would apply if it was
funded by the government too). Their idea clearly wasn't competitive with the
by now highly optimised wind turbine industry. It's not obvious why it ever
was expected to be so.

~~~
wpietri
You seem to be arguing with something I didn't say.

I definitely agree that Google should prune their portfolio using rigorous
standards. I'm just saying that if one judges the whole effort by typical
established-business standards, you're going to get typical results. Some
things need more time to prove viability. Since Google a) will be around a
long time, and b) is currently dependent on a single cash cow, they can (and
should!) take long-term risks with long-term payoffs.

> It's not obvious why it ever was expected to be so.

This is a very bad way to look at long-term research. Or any novel venture,
really. You want to be a pundit with a great track record on startups? Just
say each one will fail. You'll be right 90% of the time with very little
effort.

But it's even easier to wait until something fails and say, "It's not obvious
why it was ever expected to work." Of course! If it were obvious that
something was going to work, it wouldn't need to be done as a startup. And
once it has actually failed, hindsight bias lets us paint it as an inevitable
failure. E.g., if SpaceX had had less money and a couple more explosions, it
could easily have gone under, and then all of its detractors could have done
the "we told you it would never work" routine.

------
jpm_sd
As far as I know, Makani has never successfully demonstrated net positive
power generation. They have designed an incredibly complex tethered-
helicopter-flying-wing, and that is an impressive technological achievement.

But it's also a terrifying controls problem, and suffers from the same
drawback as all the "flying car" startups: What goes up, must come down.
Traditional wind turbines are a bit more predictable. The offshore flight test
in August ended with a crash and the loss of the aircraft. I have to assume
that no net power was generated during this test, or they would have mentioned
it in the press release?

[https://medium.com/makani-blog/makanis-airborne-wind-
power-s...](https://medium.com/makani-blog/makanis-airborne-wind-power-system-
takes-flight-offshore-907fd4c9af86)

Makani's device is able to briefly generate power for a fraction of each
crosswind loop it flies, but it has to draw power from the grid to push itself
the rest of the way around the loop. This is neither useful as an energy
source, nor cost competitive with a traditional wind turbine.

For offshore applications, there are much simpler competing projects to put
traditional wind turbines on spar buoys or semi-submersible platforms, e.g.
[http://www.principlepowerinc.com/en/windfloat](http://www.principlepowerinc.com/en/windfloat)

------
jacquesm
Everybody that is involved in the wind power scene that I know was _super_
skeptical about Makani. Those are people that have been building wind power
installations for decades. Criticisms ranged from complexity to zoning, land
use, safety and efficiency compared to more traditional designs. Moonshots are
great if you have an actual goal that is achievable and will give you an
advantage if it succeeds. Keep in mind that the original 'moonshot' (going to
the moon!) was a PR effort, not something that was meant to be sold, turn a
profit or done on a large scale. It was simply a massive PR job to try to
recover from the double hit of first satellite and first man in space
victories the USSR scored over the USA. This whole project to me looked like a
Google level version of Armadillo space, interesting but ultimately going
nowhere. Shell may keep it alive as a PR item, they will need all the help
they can get on that front but I really doubt it will ever be used in
production anywhere in volumes that matter.

The easiest way to compare Makani to stationary wind installations out there
generating power today is to look at the effective cross section of the rotors
and to realize that a moving rotor consumes exactly the same amount of power
in lift that it uses going forward. So that will cancel out across the loop
leaving you with a bunch of small rotors vs a _much_ larger rotor sweeping an
enormous surface. And launching it is one thing, bringing it back in in a
storm is a completely different proposition.

A 12MW Makani installation would use much more land and would be much more
fragile than a comparable regular HAWT.

------
strangeloops85
X seems a strange blend of overly ambitious and overly critical/ constraining
(which is partly related to conception of what is "big" enough). It's also
unnecessarily secretive and would benefit from being more open, especially in
the energy and climate space.

A lot of interesting ideas get shot down quickly, which is not necessarily a
bad thing.. but I'm not sure what the false positive vs. false negative rate
is in this process. But for those ideas that develop, it seems like perfectly
solid technologies that could form the premise of an interesting startup don't
get out the door because they don't meet an internal bar of "worthiness".
Maybe let the market and external funders decide that?

Their internal process is not intrinsically good or bad, but what's
unfortunate is that they don't really publish. I know they're not looking to
be Bell Labs, but if they think a lot of these ideas aren't going to pan out,
but many person-years of research effort goes in, they really should share the
learnings and lessons as opposed to locking it up internally. When these
projects don't pass their internal bar for being commercially viable (which
seems rather disconnected from what that bar would be if the idea/ tech stood
on its own outside), it's basically like academic research. Truly is a shame
that a lot of smart people working on interesting non-commercializable ideas
don't get to share that. Others might pick up on it, if not now.. maybe a
decade or two down the road.

~~~
g2020
Unpopular opinion from a former Googler (who never worked in X, but knew a lot
of people who transfered over there):

In general, people in X get paid too much to make it "worth it" to innovate.
Obviously there are exceptions, but I'd say there is a perverse incentive to
string the funders (Google) along as long as possible. Line engineers are
making $250K+ / year, managers are making $500K / year.

Innovation is kind of a "swing big and go home if you miss". But there's no
incentive to "go home" if you have a comfortable lifestyle. You want to keep
going and you can convince the management of that because you inherently know
more about the tech than they do. It's an information assymetry problem.

I see a similar effect in non-X moonshots funded by Larry Page.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeremybogaisky/2019/12/01/insid...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeremybogaisky/2019/12/01/inside-
larry-pages-kitty-hawk-returned-deposits-battery-fires-boeing-
cora/#1c2b5ea58ab4)

Basically there's an incentive for "demo-ware" and not real innovation.

I'm glad I worked at Google rather than say Tesla, because I was doing "non-
moonshot" engineering work. Tesla is notoriously chaotic. I think Chris
Lattner said Tesla had the highest turnover rate he'd ever seen.

But I actually think the idea of firing a lot of people makes sense if you're
innovating. It should be chaotic and messy because the whole goal is
inherently risky.

I used to work in video games and they also fired people all the time and paid
them like crap. I made 3-4x at Google what I did in the video game industry.
But honestly it makes sense because of the financial profile of the industry
vs. Google's industry. Put bluntly: you're filtering for people who really
love it and are doing something irrational to innovate hard tech or create a
blockbuster game.

I'm sure a lot of people will bristle at this from the employee perspective,
but having worked in both environments for many years, I can see how the
compensation changes people's behavior. You might not realize it but it does.

~~~
lmm
> Put bluntly: you're filtering for people who really love it and are doing
> something irrational to innovate hard tech or create a blockbuster game.

The irrational thing being working way below the market rate for someone with
their skills/talents, right?

~~~
g2020
Yes, it should be a conscious choice. This dynamic exists in games, academia,
Hollywood, stand-up comedy, the minor leagues hoping of most professional
sports, etc. The great thing is that software people have a nice choice of
fallback jobs, whereas it seems like people get trapped in academia and are
prone to being abused because of their vulnerable situation.

When the employees no longer believe in the goal, they can quit, "cash in" and
go work a more traditional job. But X removes that natural dynamic, hence the
questionable results being achieved IMO.

------
PeterisP
They somehow managed to spend a bunch of pages and a lot of words, and still
did not say what _exactly_ are they announcing and what will the outcome be.

Are they shutting down? Are they getting acquired by Shell? Something else?

~~~
asdfasgasdgasdg
My read is that Alphabet is selling the assets to Shell, and Shell is thinking
about what to do with them.

~~~
jacquesm
It would be interesting to know how much it sold for. I'm guessing not a whole
lot, is there a public filing where Google / Alphabet will have to disclose
this?

~~~
asdfasgasdgasdg
Google would only have to disclose it if the loss is material, IIUC. I doubt
it is on Google's scale.

------
davidivadavid
This sounds like one of the typical Google X "problems" that's more or less a
fun experiment with no real concrete sensible applications.

Can you make electricity with kites? Maybe. Probably. Should you? Probably
not.

If you look at the Goole X website ([https://x.company/](https://x.company/)),
the problem is stated thusly: "How can kites be used to generate electricity
in unexpected places?"

Any sensible person's first reaction to that should be: Why would you want to
do that in the first place?

You want to generate energy in "unexpected places"? Why? I think you want to
generate energy in places that need energy, no?

And why would you want to constrain the problem to use kites? What about all
other energy sources? Is kites the best one? The most economical? Or is it
just some engineering porn stuff?

Other problems seem to suffer from the same nonsensical approach:

"How can beams of light support the rapidly growing global demand for data?"
Uh, what?

"How can balloons deliver the Internet to rural and unconnected places?" Who
cares? How can paper airplanes deliver the internet to urban places? That's
just a thought experiment with no motivation.

Etc. etc.

~~~
ggm
You went too Far. Loon (the balloon project) has done real work which people
are benefitting from, in rural and remote areas which cover 5b people. Also,
their design ideas for inter-device communication are popping up in spaceX and
other places.

The space-X inter-satellite communication is photonics: beams of light.

So thats two things you pontificated on, you don't actually understand.

Loon is not 'blah, who cares' -Loon is 'wow: this is working, lets get this
deployed' joined to 'we can re-purpose your model in LEO sats'

Do you seriously think "rural and unconnected places" is a who cares response?
Here's a hint: go read the iridium story. People (with money) care a LOT about
these spaces.

~~~
davidivadavid
I think you're missing the point.

The point isn't that they're not doing "real work" or that what they're
building doesn't work at all.

The point is about the approach which consists in engineering a "hard problem"
by adding unnecessary constraints/hypotheses to a real (although often ill-
defined) problem, and then claiming it's a marvel of engineering when a half-
functional, non-viable solution is completed.

It's the XY problem applied to startups. Instead of trying to solve the
problem (energy, connectivity, etc.), they start from a given technology, and
try to shoehorn it into a problem. That's bad design, and probably bad
engineering in most cases.

~~~
starpilot
Numerous companies in the airborne wind turbine market, Makani, Joby:
[https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/a-beginners-
gui...](https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/a-beginners-guide-to-the-
airborne-wind-turbine-market)

Numerous proposals, including from Lockheed, for balloon satellites:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
altitude_balloon#Geostati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
altitude_balloon#Geostationary_balloon_satellite)

These aren't just "because we can" frivolous projects, these approaches have
serious advantages over others, such that many are racing to commercialize it.

~~~
jacquesm
I'll bet that plenty of these exist as copycat clubs that would have never
been funded if Google had _not_ funded Makani. At least some of them seem to
sidestep some of the most obvious problems.

------
melling
I submitted the ft story a couple hours ago.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22361216](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22361216)

In case you pay for ft and not Medium, like myself.

Direct link:

[https://www.ft.com/content/56582032-528e-11ea-8841-482eed003...](https://www.ft.com/content/56582032-528e-11ea-8841-482eed0038b1)

~~~
CaliforniaKarl
The FT story was much more readable and direct than the Medium post. Thanks!

------
chrisco255
Nuclear is the only feasible way to scale electricity to the globe at an
affordable price, over the next few centuries. Wind and solar are great
supplemental sources but they can't run a modern economy.

~~~
trimbo
I agree with you, but it will never happen. I lamented with a few reasons why
in this comment:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19167207](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19167207)

The best we can do is get behind solar and wind and pray for a fusion
breakthrough.

~~~
chrisco255
Good post. I don't share your pessimism but I get why you feel that way. I
think people just need to be told by a good leader that there are real trade-
offs with taking "the nuclear option" but we have to embrace it.

People accept trade-offs all the time. We understand some jets crash but we
still don't give up air travel. We understand cars crash but we don't give up
automobiles. I just think nuclear meltdown risk is overblown. If it happens
four times a century, is that acceptable? I think it is. All things
considered, how many people have died from nuclear meltdowns versus coal
extraction?

------
musicale
Does that mean they are shutting down? Too bad, it was an interesting company
developing an interesting kite-based alternative to traditional wind turbines.

Although Alphabet apparently wasn't a great match, is Shell any better - are
they really going to be an effective advocate for developing wind power as an
effective competitor against their primary fossil fuel business?

~~~
lovemenot
Speculation: Perhaps they will eventually adorn offshore oil rigs. 600kw is
not large, but could help supplement power systems offshore.

It looks good for their image and seems a good fit for local conditions. In
particular rigs stand-alone, so less concern with tether coming down on
someone else.

~~~
taneq
I’d imagine an oil rig is the least likely place on the planet to need
complicated wind power. They flare off natural gas constantly, sticking a
turbine (or indeed just a thermoelectric stack ) in there would be trivial.

------
KKKKkkkk1
Google X aka the moonshot factory has existed for longer than the original
Apollo program. Has it launched any successful products for Alphabet?

~~~
mdonahoe
The Apollo program didn’t exactly reach product-market fit either. It too got
shutdown by price-conscious Congress.

Moonshots are inspirational, but sadly do not seem sustainable.

On the other hand, I wonder how many successful startups ex-X employees will
have launched.

~~~
jacquesm
They worked just fine, they delivered the product that was required: a PR
victory over the USSR which had stolen America's thunder in the space race.

~~~
mdonahoe
So taking that analogy backward: who was Google's USSR that motivated them to
start X?

Facebook?

~~~
jacquesm
No, more that they don't want to be seen as 'just' a monopolistic
search/advertising company, plus diversification if done successfully can lead
to risk reduction.

------
smooc
Interesting how people measure these endeavours always in the context of their
perceived end goal. Remember "shoot for the moon and if you come half way you
still got pretty far"? This is exactly that.

Learning what you can't do is as important as to know what you can do. I'm
happy that Alphabet is doing these long term research projects and bets. >5
years I think, apart from government, only oil & gas companies project that
long term, but they know much better what they will 'find'. What Alphabet does
it moves the academic needle cause we learn so much on the way.

Maybe they can do better in publishing the results, cause that is an
alternative to just shareholder value: society value.

