
Google X: Waiting for a Moonshot - ehudla
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/24/technology/they-promised-us-jet-packs-they-promised-the-bosses-profit.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=mini-moth&region=top-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below
======
elgoog1212
Y'all misunderstand why Google X exists. It exists for three reasons:

1\. To obscure the fact that Google is an advertising company, first and
foremost, by creating dazzling PR. The more insane the project, the better.
Self-flying balloon shooting lasers from the sky? Here's 10 million dollars,
go ahead and do it. Over time people lose interest, and those projects
disappear into the void.

2\. To draw the "best and brightest" in with the promise that they'll work on
self driving cars, only to have them repair some obscure dilapidated ad
serving backend, where they'll spend years nurturing futile hope that they'll
get to work on the cool stuff at some point, and wiping their tears with
hundred dollar bills.

3\. To keep very senior employees from jumping ship to competitors.

If those three goals are met, actually producing a moonshot every 5 years or
so would be gravy, GoogleX will exist even without producing anything at all,
indefinitely.

~~~
pjmlp
> 3\. To keep very senior employees from jumping ship to competitors.

If I am not mistaken Bill Gates once mentioned in an interview that in the old
days, Microsoft would rather pay someone to sit around than letting them work
elsewhere.

~~~
dschiptsov
And the second part of the joke is that these people usually are not real
techies who produce, like Wozniak, Ritchie, Thompson, etc. but socially
skilled, manipulative talking heads, who inevitable raise to topmost positions
if an organization is old enough - the useless ballast of pointy haired
managers. There is no better example of that kind than Balmer himself.

~~~
carterehsmith
Excellent. Keep those characters around, then unleash them when a competitor
is looking for a CEO or something. Sit back, get popcorn, watch a competitor
crumble. Laugh maniacally?

It's just like that time when Marissa... nah, I was just kidding :)

~~~
pjmlp
If you are referring to the whole Nokia episode, don't forget it was the Nokia
board itself that placed a big sum of money on Elop's contract if he managed
to get someone to buy the company.

~~~
carterehsmith
I was not thinking Elop, wasn't he more of a Trojan Horse, a smart guy planted
to do evil stuff?

And anyways, I was just joking... I even mentioned that :]

------
iainmerrick
What always irritated me about Google X was exactly that rhetoric around
"moonshots", as if Google had discovered this completely new technique for
getting stuff done.

Not only have quite a few companies and organisations successfully completed
huge, ambitious, forward-looking projects; but Google _haven 't_, at least
nothing remotely comparable to the actual moonshot they happily co-opt. Google
has done lots of amazing stuff, but usually in a remorselessly incremental
way.

Gmail and Google Maps (especially Street View) are the closest I can think of
to "moonshots" in that they were big and bold improvements over what had come
before. But neither one would be called a "moonshot" by Google X standards. In
each case a back of the envelope estimate would be enough to show that it
would work out (in technical terms, if not business terms).

So why does Google act like they're uniquely qualified to make moonshots work?

~~~
nostrademons
GMail and Google Maps were also both ruthlessly incremental. They seemed like
big improvements over what had come before because they had incubated inside
the Googleplex for a couple years before they were released, and because the
competition hadn't improved in nearly a decade.

It's more that _Search_ was a non-incremental leap forwards, and that Google
was basically the only company of the dot-com era that had attempted an
ambitious technological goal and succeeded. Google Search really was
fundamentally different from previous technologies; its main rival Alta Vista,
for example, ran on a single box and used very standard text-ranking
techniques, while Google thought very much out-of-the-box in terms of ranking,
scale, and architecture.

Google X is very much a Larry & Sergey project, and Larry (while Eric was CEO)
was often very critical of how incremental employee projects were and how they
weren't taking enough risks on fundamentally different approaches.

~~~
iainmerrick
Amazon is a much better example of a moonshot than Google search. The key idea
is easy to state: an easy-to-use online store for almost anything, with fast
and cheap delivery. But how on earth do you make that work in practice? You
need a ton of business deals with various manufacturers and brands, you need
warehouses everywhere, you need a massive delivery network... the investment
required is just staggering. And indeed, for many years they were criticised
for not making a profit, but the investment is clearly paying off.

~~~
qihqi
At the beginning, Jeff have only thought of an online book company, instead
becoming the 'Everything Store'. This legacy still exists as ASIN (Amazon
Stock Indentification Number) is extended on ISBN to work on legacy systems.

------
dharmon
This:

> “I’m an optimist: I believe that there is an endless supply of huge problems
> affecting humanity.”

combined with this:

> “I think we could meet it, but it would be more like 15 to 20 years.” That
> was too far away, which was why she recommended killing it.

...seem to be fundamentally at odds. Or, at the least, leave an extremely
narrow sliver of projects: big problems that can be solved in under 10 years.
And how many projects started out in the engineer's mind as a short task but
turned into a decade-long struggle?

Also, I can't look at a picture of that guy in rollerblades without thinking
of this:

[http://www.businessinsider.com/google-x-astro-teller-hbo-
sil...](http://www.businessinsider.com/google-x-astro-teller-hbo-silicon-
valley-2016-6)

~~~
tashi
I agree. Think about the Manhattan Project: six years from concrete idea to
working prototype. For three of those years, they had a significant chunk of
Earth's smartest people living and working together with few distractions or
outside responsibilities, an almost unlimited budget, supported by satellite
sites all over the U.S. (plus Canada and Britain), logistic support supplied
by the military with high priority, and, oh yeah, the motivation that if they
didn't win the race Germany could rule the world.

For today's most important "moonshots," like fusion and large scale water
purification and pulling lots and lots of carbon out of the atmosphere and
colonizing the solar system, we might not even have the kind of clear starting
point they had, where the fundamental science had been done and the rest was
mostly engineering. It doesn't seem like solving these problems is compatible
with any kind of near-term profit motive.

It feels like the corporate version of a lottery: if enough people buy lottery
tickets, someone will win. It just probably won't be you. If enough
organizations with gigantic piles of cash spend them on long-term research,
life on this planet could get way better for all of us. But each organization
would have to individually decide to do something whose most likely effect is
just throwing money away.

So how do you convince a corporation to start buying lottery tickets?

~~~
visarga
You're better off funding research and startups directly. We need more DARPA
and similar research investment funds.

~~~
lawless123
how could i do that?

------
goatsi
>Mr. Teller appears to be always on Rollerblades.

The article seems to confirm the rollerblades anecdote from the New Yorker
Silicon Valley story [0]

>Teller ended the meeting by standing up in a huff, but his attempt at a
dramatic exit was marred by the fact that he was wearing Rollerblades. He
wobbled to the door in silence. “Then there was this awkward moment of him
fumbling with his I.D. badge, trying to get the door to open,” Kemper said.
“It felt like it lasted an hour. We were all trying not to laugh. Even while
it was happening, I knew we were all thinking the same thing: Can we use
this?” In the end, the joke was deemed “too hacky to use on the show.”

[0] [http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-
va...](http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-valley-nails-
silicon-valley)

------
doctorpangloss
Research divisions exist for recruitment purposes. Sometimes it's just a bait
and switch, being promised "R&D" and then getting interviewed for Google Play
Store once someone realizes you're not qualified enough. Other times, you work
on research for six months, and then there's this team at the company that
needs work from you for two years.

Ask the former MSR executive, who fixed the accounting of their losses by
pointing out how people at MSR were working on regular MS commercial products
too.

~~~
honkhonkpants
Eh, you've got it all backwards. You cannot get a job at X by going into the
ordinary Google hiring pipeline, and in any case the Google hiring system does
not hire people for specific products like Google Play Store. Furthermore, one
does not freely transfer between X and Google, in either direction.

~~~
Redoubts
How does one get hired at X? Their jobs page just leads you to
google.com/about/careers

~~~
eru
Perhaps if you have to go to the jobs page, you are not qualified?

(It's like, if you have to ask for the price, you can't afford it?)

------
eitally
Here's the thing -- well, two things, really:

1) The article mentions Obi Felton's Foundry team. This was explicitly added
to solve one of the deficiencies at X: X is staffed by hardcore engineers &
research scientists, not businesspeople. The Foundry team was created to add a
commercialization path & process for X research, which never previously
existed (except in special cases like self-driving car). That should, in
theory, help bring more things to market.

2) Google is averse to investing in anything that isn't a moonshot (where I
liberally define moonshot as "at least $1b or 1b users"). So many great ideas
and products get shot down because they just aren't "Google scale" even though
they'd be perfectly viable, and sometimes wildly profitable, businesses on
their own. Because the bar for business viability is so high, lots of things
aren't even tried, which is a shame.

------
Animats
I'm impressed that Google/X has been willing to give the self-driving car
group enough time and money to do it right. They have about 60 self-driving
cars, being driven by paid employees. They have their own proving ground. All
that can't be cheap.

I'm disappointed that Google bought all those robotics companies and ran them
into the ground.

~~~
grinich
> bought all those robotics companies and ran them into the ground

Did this actually happen? I know there have been cultural issues with Boston
Dynamics, but the other acquisitions seem to have gone fine. Folks from
Redwood, Meka, Bot & Dolly, and Holomni are still working at Google and many
of the founders are director-level in the robotics groups.

~~~
Animats
Bot and Dolly had customers, yet they seem to have dropped out of the market
they were serving.

------
ars
Reading this I'm starting to wonder if they are failing too early.

I've often reached a point in fixing some object, or some code, or whatever,
when I'm certain I can't do it. I'm ready to just shut it down.

But I have no choice - I have to make it work. So I keep plugging away.

And so far I've managed almost every time - despite being certain I couldn't.
Now I'm smarter and no longer so certain :)

But if I got a bonus for failing - well. In each case I could easily, and
convincingly, and truthfully! demonstrate it couldn't be done.

------
zatkin
I think one of the biggest problems with Google X is that they give their
employees a false sense of what I consider "full freedom" which is a big
component in making moonshots possible. All of the biggest tech companies in
the last 20 years were not conceived within a larger corporation - they
evolved out of a garage or a university. What makes Alphabet think that by
fueling employees under a new division of their company is going to spin off
more cash cows for them?

Also, what happens if an employee manages to produce something that does
become a huge success? Will they be able to enjoy the same success as if they
had spun up that idea on their own?

------
a3n
> Waiting for a Moonshot

It sounds like they're doing interesting work.

But you don't "wait" for a moonshot, hoping something of that magnitude comes
out of all but random motivation from individual team members.

You produce a moonshot by deciding to do that exact thing. Which is exactly
how the actual moonshot happened.

If you have random inputs, you'll have random outputs of unknown magnitude.

------
zimbatm
> Xerox pioneered the graphical interface for computers — the idea that people
> could navigate with a mouse rather than typing obscure commands on a screen.
> But it was a young company named Apple that turned that idea into a giant
> business.

It's weird how the article fails to mentions past successes for other R&D
labs. Xerox Parc also invented the laser printer which certainly made a lot of
money for the company.

~~~
tmzt
As a standalone device, powered by Adobe Postscript and HP PCL/JCL.

Where did the embedded version in the Star end up?

------
pgodzin
The self-driving car project that came from Google X sparked the huge
investment in autonomous vehicles, and gave Google a huge head start. In
addition, they positioned themselves well with a large investment in Uber. The
moonshot has succeeded/will succeed from a technological sense. Now they just
need the right go-to-market approach.

~~~
jayjay71
While I don't disagree with you, I think the real credit goes to Dr. Tony
Tether who was the director of DARPA for the duration of the self-driving car
competitions. He set aside money for the races and helped design them. After
the last race in 2007 Google acquired most of their talent from various teams.

~~~
pgodzin
Definitely, but to me it seems like Google was responsible for jumping on it
and taking it from university research projects to a viable "moonshot." So
it's much less waiting for a moonshot - they already have it - more just
waiting for the launch

------
spc476
I wonder if they make available the research they've done on dead projects,
like the vertical farming, failed because they couldn't get staple crops to
grow well enough.

------
iamleppert
If you have a great idea and are actually talented, why would you want to go
to Google X, rather than start a company yourself and have far more control
and freedom in the open market? You could always get Google to invest later,
and if you're right and successful you probably have a lot more options for
investment than just limiting yourself to Google in the first place. That is,
if you're really serious about your idea. Or are you just there to play with
Google's money?

You don't see Elon Musk or Richard Branson clamoring to join Google X, or just
about any other startup founder.

The entire premise behind Google X (save other than a hype machine) is flawed
on basic principle. Seriously, what actual real thing has come out of Google X
in all these years?

~~~
ktta
fallback. I assume they like doing what they do and they prefer having job
security. I'd rather try moonshot projects thinking about how to develop it
rather than constantly wondering about the business model and if it will be
successful (read: stress). They have other people to think about that (the
foundry). And they will have much more resources. While I agree that VC
funding might be an analogue in a startup situation, it's just not the same.
You'll still have the steady paycheck at the end of the month, no matter what

Of course, if someone is confident of their idea and wants to start their own
company, they will. Just google 'ex-googler startup'

------
dredmorbius
Astro Teller. Grandson of Edward Teller.

~~~
throweso
This is only tangentially-esoterically related, but due to your comment I ran
across some online book called Unsong about a Kabbalistic sweatshop in Silicon
Valley. [0] It sounded like a novel humoristic idea. Apparently by coincidence
the lead character is named Aaron Smith-Teller, and worked on AI at some
point. And Astro Teller wrote a book about AI and also sold a movie pitch to
Paramount called Golem (a Kabbalistic reference).

And Gwern posted an interesting thing on Edward Teller's Atomic Alphabet. [1]

[0]
[http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28589297-unsong](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28589297-unsong)

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/unsong/comments/4pzyvq/edward_telle...](https://www.reddit.com/r/unsong/comments/4pzyvq/edward_tellers_atom_alphabet_1946/)

~~~
tene
It's not a coincidence; it's discussed in chapter 6 that Aaron Smith-Teller's
grandfather was Edward Teller.

[http://unsongbook.com/chapter-6-till-we-have-built-
jerusalem...](http://unsongbook.com/chapter-6-till-we-have-built-jerusalem/)

~~~
throweso
Sorry I wasn't clear. This is the part I was referring to:

>I recently learned that Astro Teller, the real-life grandson of Edward
Teller, is the head of Google X Labs. And has a degree from Stanford in
“symbolic computation”. And has written a fiction book about a man who creates
a self-aware AI. I knew none of this when I wrote the first few chapters of
this book. Needless to say, nothing is ever a coincidence.

[http://unsongbook.com/authors-note-2-podcast-llull-
meetups/](http://unsongbook.com/authors-note-2-podcast-llull-meetups/)

------
hartator
Shouldn't we say Marsshot now? :)

------
dang
Anybody want to take a shot at a less baity, accurate, neutral title?
Preferably using representative language from the article.

~~~
ars
Google X research lab: Waiting for a Moonshot

or

Waiting for a Moonshot at the Google X research lab

("Waiting for a Moonshot" is a prominent sub-heading in the article.)

Incorporating another subheading, perhaps:

Google X research lab: Waiting for a Moonshot after 'Failing to Fail'

or

Waiting for a Moonshot after 'Failing to Fail' at the Google X research lab

~~~
dang
Ok, we'll use that suggestion; incorporating a subheading is a good idea.
Thanks!

