Makani’s time as an “other bet” comes to an end(medium.com)
medium.com
Makani’s time as an “other bet” comes to an end
https://medium.com/makani-blog/a-long-and-windy-road-3d83b9b78328
135 comments
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.
Opinion my own, not Google’s.
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.
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.
>Amazon, for example, has been hoisting a giant middle finger to MBA dogma for years with their overinvestment
This is not a great way to think of Amazon. Amazon is basically a VC that only funds internal "start-ups" and "unicorns." You still go to Bezos and the leadership team with a business plan, financial model, path to profitability, market fit, differentiation, competitors, TAM/TAM growth, and "is it a land grab?"
They do not fund "interesting ideas for the sake of interesting ideas" like the Google X projects. Even the most secretive Amazon projects tend to tie pretty closely to their existing businesses and strategies when they are revealed.
Also, not sure if this is still true, but Amazon was the #1 largest hirer of MBAs from top programs for a couple years.
This is not a great way to think of Amazon. Amazon is basically a VC that only funds internal "start-ups" and "unicorns." You still go to Bezos and the leadership team with a business plan, financial model, path to profitability, market fit, differentiation, competitors, TAM/TAM growth, and "is it a land grab?"
They do not fund "interesting ideas for the sake of interesting ideas" like the Google X projects. Even the most secretive Amazon projects tend to tie pretty closely to their existing businesses and strategies when they are revealed.
Also, not sure if this is still true, but Amazon was the #1 largest hirer of MBAs from top programs for a couple years.
As I explained elsewhere, Alphabet's moonshot investments are a different kind of investment than the what Amazon has been making for decades. But Amazon has been investing very heavily in changing the nature of buying stuff. To much grumbling from people who preferred profit.
15 years ago Bezos could have retired rich and turned it over to a standard CEO, who would have milked their then-excellent position commanding a large and growing share of ecommerce. And he would have been applauded by a lot of analysts, etc. But instead he's put titanic sums of money into making what are, at least on paper, pretty modest gains in terms of purchasing friction and latency. Is 2 days really that much better than 3-7 days? Is next-day and same-day really better still? The customers' answer is "fuck yes!" But it wasn't clear up front, at least to a lot of investors and commentators, that it was really worth tens of billions in capex.
In both cases, what I'm talking about here is investments that go beyond the time horizon of most companies. If you measure them by the average company (which has a much shorter exec and CEO tenure), of course they'll look bad.
15 years ago Bezos could have retired rich and turned it over to a standard CEO, who would have milked their then-excellent position commanding a large and growing share of ecommerce. And he would have been applauded by a lot of analysts, etc. But instead he's put titanic sums of money into making what are, at least on paper, pretty modest gains in terms of purchasing friction and latency. Is 2 days really that much better than 3-7 days? Is next-day and same-day really better still? The customers' answer is "fuck yes!" But it wasn't clear up front, at least to a lot of investors and commentators, that it was really worth tens of billions in capex.
In both cases, what I'm talking about here is investments that go beyond the time horizon of most companies. If you measure them by the average company (which has a much shorter exec and CEO tenure), of course they'll look bad.
Amazon is not a good example to cite for going against the MBA grain. No amount of convincing can get Amazon to fund a Makani style kite energy, or other X moonshots that Google funded.
As for ploughing investment to keep growing at the cost of profitability, that's every VCs formula and very well understood by the MBA crowd.
As for ploughing investment to keep growing at the cost of profitability, that's every VCs formula and very well understood by the MBA crowd.
It's the worst example for this kind of investment, sure. But the common theme is that what your average exec sees as needless investment may just have a payoff outside the few-quarters-to-few-years range that they are using to score investments.
I'll note that the US had much higher economic growth during a period where large companies all were, by modern standards, overinvesting in R&D. It could be that we're just much smarter now. But it also could be that since CEO tenure has fallen nearly in half in the last 50 years, execs have stopped investing in things that they won't personally be around to profit from.
I'll note that the US had much higher economic growth during a period where large companies all were, by modern standards, overinvesting in R&D. It could be that we're just much smarter now. But it also could be that since CEO tenure has fallen nearly in half in the last 50 years, execs have stopped investing in things that they won't personally be around to profit from.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's interesting that while these projects don't go forward, Google doesn't open-source the work they already did on them. It may not be viable for a business like Google to pursue such an operation, but it might be a viable solution for other entities that could benefit from it.
This is a source of great frustration to me as someone who previously worked at Google X. So many promising projects thrown in the trash, when all of society would have benefitted if Google had open sourced their defunct projects. You know how some economists joked that you could stimulate the economy by paying people to dig holes and fill them back up again? Doing a bunch of development and then abandoning it seems just as wasteful to me. They trashed a lot of valuable off the shelf hardware that could have been donated to schools too. It’s all such a waste to me.
I was hoping that especially non-project specific hardware would end up to either a hardware reseller or donated. Such a pity.
I tried. They were throwing away thousands of dollars worth of brushless motors. I asked in writing if I could donate them to schools and hobbyists. I was told no by a mid level manager. That rubbed me the wrong way, so I went to Astro Teller’s office hours. He said “this is our trash? We obviously don’t need it then.” He gave me tentative approval, and asked me to email him to check with legal. I did, and ultimately got approval from the head of intellectual property at X. I saved the motors from the trash, but apparently going to Astro was seen as “going over somebody’s head” so I pissed off upper management (the head of the team did not respond to my email and was on vacation while all this happened). So I parked the motors under my desk for a while while things calmed down, eventually got a few more approvals, and took the motors home. I’ve been donating them to hacker spaces and local robotics groups.
But the thing is, schools can’t use brushless motors by themselves. They need power supplies and motor controllers too. So when my team was throwing away fifty 600 watt power supplies, I wanted those too.
The whole time, I was not just asking for one item from the scrap bin, I was asking for an approval process. We threw away perhaps tens of thousands of dollars of valuable off the shelf parts a year. I couldn’t be talking to the head of X every time I needed approval. But management in my team didn’t care. Instead of responding to my request, they complained about my methods, saying I need to go through “proper channels”. I drafted a document describing a process for saving items from scrap that had documentation and oversight without requiring much bandwidth from the higher ups. It went nowhere.
So Google X still scraps thousands of dollars of stuff on the regular. Many people inside X want to help donate that stuff to schools. But the management on my team didn’t care one bit. I guess when you’re paid a million bucks a year, you just can’t relate to the local school kids who can’t afford motors for their robot. But I was once that kid, and to see these people dismiss what help we could give them was too much for me.
It’s still upsetting. Google X talks about changing the world and moonshots but you know what would change the world? Giving valuable supplies to local schools. I offered to do all the work on my own time, but they couldn’t be bothered to give me the time of day.
But the thing is, schools can’t use brushless motors by themselves. They need power supplies and motor controllers too. So when my team was throwing away fifty 600 watt power supplies, I wanted those too.
The whole time, I was not just asking for one item from the scrap bin, I was asking for an approval process. We threw away perhaps tens of thousands of dollars of valuable off the shelf parts a year. I couldn’t be talking to the head of X every time I needed approval. But management in my team didn’t care. Instead of responding to my request, they complained about my methods, saying I need to go through “proper channels”. I drafted a document describing a process for saving items from scrap that had documentation and oversight without requiring much bandwidth from the higher ups. It went nowhere.
So Google X still scraps thousands of dollars of stuff on the regular. Many people inside X want to help donate that stuff to schools. But the management on my team didn’t care one bit. I guess when you’re paid a million bucks a year, you just can’t relate to the local school kids who can’t afford motors for their robot. But I was once that kid, and to see these people dismiss what help we could give them was too much for me.
It’s still upsetting. Google X talks about changing the world and moonshots but you know what would change the world? Giving valuable supplies to local schools. I offered to do all the work on my own time, but they couldn’t be bothered to give me the time of day.
I understand your feelings about taking things that are waste for a corporation (R&D is a very wasteful process) and giving them to local schools.
As a contrast, the team I was on (Making and Science) purchased an enormous number of safety glasses, which we gave away at Maker Faire. We often gave whole boxes to teachers who asked (like, 144 glasses). You see them all over the place, and the teachers were always thrilled to get them.
As a contrast, the team I was on (Making and Science) purchased an enormous number of safety glasses, which we gave away at Maker Faire. We often gave whole boxes to teachers who asked (like, 144 glasses). You see them all over the place, and the teachers were always thrilled to get them.
We still have a few of these Google branded safety glasses in our local hackerspace after going to World Maker Faire in 2015.
Last time I've put them on was testing our open-hardware pico-satellite deployer.
Thanks for saving my eyes.
Last time I've put them on was testing our open-hardware pico-satellite deployer.
Thanks for saving my eyes.
I have a pair!
But throwing away valuable stuff is still waste. If you can help someone a great deal for next to nothing, that’s worth doing. Forgoing that help and then making donations elsewhere is nice I guess, but it’s still wasteful.
But throwing away valuable stuff is still waste. If you can help someone a great deal for next to nothing, that’s worth doing. Forgoing that help and then making donations elsewhere is nice I guess, but it’s still wasteful.
Sometimes the projects are "open sourced." For example, the findings of "Project Foghorn," which aimed to produce a synthetic fuel from seawater, were published in two academic papers, one explaining the economics and the other the chemistry. https://x.company/projects/foghorn/
Another, "Project Malta," which aims to store energy in molten salt, was spun out into an independent company. https://www.maltainc.com/our-story
Another, "Project Malta," which aims to store energy in molten salt, was spun out into an independent company. https://www.maltainc.com/our-story
Do you happen to have links to the papers?
Edit: Looks like https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S17505... and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S17505...
Edit: Looks like https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S17505... and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S17505...
Hope on way or another Makani while keep on exploring new interesting ways to evolve.
ITT:
Google should focus on something else than ads.
also: They are wasting resources with their side projects.
No one see the irony in that. I like their wacky projects. Obviously they to profit off of them at some point. But they are also kind of ground breaking if they actually turn out to work.
Alphabet also has the luxury problem of having discovered the most profitable business in the history of human kind. Now they struggle culturally to find something else to grow. They are user to basically make money for free and to so at insane scales.
Cloud is getting there but it‘s still nowhere near as easy. That‘s where Amazon in particular is very much in the advantage. They are already dominating the lowest margin business ever (online retail at scale). And they have a good foothold in cloud. Now they are getting into ads more and more. Much more comfortable direction to go.
In that sense the moonshots might make more business sense as well.
If Waymo works out globally. Add half a trillion to the valuation.
Wing: This could help them compete with Amazon.
GV/CapitalG: Very successful.
Sidewalk labs: could one day power cities.
Loon: not sure. Their better bet seems the heavy spacex investment with Starlink now. Though there are some pilots.
Verily: The health sector is fucked with leeches and inefficiencies. Especially entrenched players like epic who only want to protect their cozy position. Big opportunities there.
Calico: who knows. In a decade they could discover something insane. No idea.
Deepmind/brain: this is it. If only one project can succeed it should be this one in their view. If they succeed with AGI/ASI anything else doesn‘t matter. This is of course a big if and likely decades away.
The only thing they‘re currently not funding is fusion research. But that might be too long term even for them.
Google should focus on something else than ads.
also: They are wasting resources with their side projects.
No one see the irony in that. I like their wacky projects. Obviously they to profit off of them at some point. But they are also kind of ground breaking if they actually turn out to work.
Alphabet also has the luxury problem of having discovered the most profitable business in the history of human kind. Now they struggle culturally to find something else to grow. They are user to basically make money for free and to so at insane scales.
Cloud is getting there but it‘s still nowhere near as easy. That‘s where Amazon in particular is very much in the advantage. They are already dominating the lowest margin business ever (online retail at scale). And they have a good foothold in cloud. Now they are getting into ads more and more. Much more comfortable direction to go.
In that sense the moonshots might make more business sense as well.
If Waymo works out globally. Add half a trillion to the valuation.
Wing: This could help them compete with Amazon.
GV/CapitalG: Very successful.
Sidewalk labs: could one day power cities.
Loon: not sure. Their better bet seems the heavy spacex investment with Starlink now. Though there are some pilots.
Verily: The health sector is fucked with leeches and inefficiencies. Especially entrenched players like epic who only want to protect their cozy position. Big opportunities there.
Calico: who knows. In a decade they could discover something insane. No idea.
Deepmind/brain: this is it. If only one project can succeed it should be this one in their view. If they succeed with AGI/ASI anything else doesn‘t matter. This is of course a big if and likely decades away.
The only thing they‘re currently not funding is fusion research. But that might be too long term even for them.
Google's fusion research: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01683-9
They are funding fusion, and not just the cold fusion research listed in the sibling comment: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/25/google-e...
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What about Bell Labs? Xerox PARC?
I think those examples show that R&D without an immediate return can be a rational decision for a corporation.
I think those examples show that R&D without an immediate return can be a rational decision for a corporation.
But Xerox PARC mainly made a ton of successes for other companies. Wasn't such a great decision for Xerox itself.
It is said that the laser printer in itself paid off multiple times for PARC (I think I read it said by Alan Kay)
But of course they could have own the personal computer space and the local network space too.
Companies as profitable as Google probably ought to be thinking of other companies/society rather than themselves. The idea that companies should optimise purely for profit is the worst part of capitalism.
Those were basic research, not 'we have a bunch of cool tech, let's glue it all together and go do crazy stuff'. If Google would pump money into materials science that would be Bell Labs, if they worked on next level interaction models that should count too, in that sense I think their general AI/ML work; speech recognition; synthesis and image classification work is more in line with what Bell & Xerox were all about than Makani, which is most re-using existing technology in ways that do not make much sense.
He was at McKinsey for like 2 years, and Google for 16, but the management consulting after the MBA is the all-important indoctrination period.
What does it mean that Sundar is a McKinsey guy?
He literally worked for McKinsey & Co.
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It doesn't mean anything. It's just the standard HN psychoanalysis combined with nerdrage against the MBA machine that's been par for the course since the 1990s.
There's no basis for this claim - well before Sundar, Makani and many other moonshot bets were spun out. Ruth Porat was brought in specifically to account for the wild-west type haphazard spending, resulting in the Google --> Alphabet restructuring.
Most of all, investors wanted clarity on spending, and Google reacted with the restructuring.
Let's take a moment to fairly summarize what's happened: extremely risky ideas that no sane investor would fund, received disproportionate funding, and as far as I can tell, they all failed even after a decade+ of not expecting profitability. There's no reason to pin this on Sundar - the ideas failed on merit
Also, speaking honestly, he's been rather generous with many projects (Chrome OS and related hardware, Stadia, even horribly performing pixel phone sales), despite decades of losing billions for Google.
Most of all, investors wanted clarity on spending, and Google reacted with the restructuring.
Let's take a moment to fairly summarize what's happened: extremely risky ideas that no sane investor would fund, received disproportionate funding, and as far as I can tell, they all failed even after a decade+ of not expecting profitability. There's no reason to pin this on Sundar - the ideas failed on merit
Also, speaking honestly, he's been rather generous with many projects (Chrome OS and related hardware, Stadia, even horribly performing pixel phone sales), despite decades of losing billions for Google.
That's how it happened, but it's also a display of tragic lack of creativity: the way to fund something like Makani is not to pretend that they would be rational bets. If they were rational everyone would be doing them. I think they could and should be "sold" to shareholders more honestly and sustainably as a brand maintenance efforts like the Oracle boats. On the slim chance that they end up turning a profit nonetheless nobody will complain. Perhaps the failure to put smaller projects like Makani on that track is a consequence of the old Google exceptionalism attitude.
(Smaller projects, because Waymo certainly wouldn't fit that framework. But Waymo is sitting right at the ad business core: "ok car, take me to an Italian restaurant" would be 100% directory ad business)
(Smaller projects, because Waymo certainly wouldn't fit that framework. But Waymo is sitting right at the ad business core: "ok car, take me to an Italian restaurant" would be 100% directory ad business)
Those projects you mention him being generous about, are purely commercial moves. I don’t understand why you think they should reflect well on anyone.
Does anyone really expect Chrome OS to ever make a dent against Mac or windows in the PC market? Continuing to lose billions with no hope of moving the market is - generous.
At least Microsoft knew when to cut their losses with Windows phone
At least Microsoft knew when to cut their losses with Windows phone
Educational market is 60% on chromebooks. They are clearly playing the long game.
Instead of overfunding these they could have funded 100's of 'regular' start-ups and then play Darwin with the winners. That would have moved the needle a lot further than this.
Google has no leaders, only managers.
Realistically, very few companies has inspiring c-level people.
Bezos is inspiring, maybe thats about it for me.
Bezos is inspiring, maybe thats about it for me.
> Bezos is inspiring, maybe thats about it for me.
(Not an Amazon.com employee or ex-employee. I have no inside information.) I was excited to learn about the culture at Amazon.com but I'm personally very disappointed (perhaps because of the high bar I imagined). The story of buying a door and using as a desk probably gets repeated a lot but that and the touted base salary cap gets lost in the sky high executive compensation.
Salary.com https://archive.md/oIQ67 pegs both Jeffrey A. Wilke, CEO Worldwide Consumer and Andrew R. Jassy, CEO Amazon Web Services at over seventeen million dollars per year and Jeffrey M. Blackburn, SVP, Business Development at over ten million dollars per year. Even Jeff Bezos took in over a million and half dollars. I don't find it inspiring at all. I would find it inspiring if the leaders made closer to the salary cap (definitely under a million dollars a year).
(Not an Amazon.com employee or ex-employee. I have no inside information.) I was excited to learn about the culture at Amazon.com but I'm personally very disappointed (perhaps because of the high bar I imagined). The story of buying a door and using as a desk probably gets repeated a lot but that and the touted base salary cap gets lost in the sky high executive compensation.
Salary.com https://archive.md/oIQ67 pegs both Jeffrey A. Wilke, CEO Worldwide Consumer and Andrew R. Jassy, CEO Amazon Web Services at over seventeen million dollars per year and Jeffrey M. Blackburn, SVP, Business Development at over ten million dollars per year. Even Jeff Bezos took in over a million and half dollars. I don't find it inspiring at all. I would find it inspiring if the leaders made closer to the salary cap (definitely under a million dollars a year).
I agree, Steve Jobs is the most inspiring person to ever live. Not only did he take $1 as his salary, but he personally gave us revolutionary tech products.
/s
I like Apple and Steve Jobs, it's not the same without him but in the age where we are building the capacity to colonize another planet that far exceeds "one small step for man, and one giant leap for mankind", it's baffling to see people inspired by the frugality of one's personal income.
Some of the greatest achievements in the history of humankind are on the verge of happening and most people on HN can't see past their neighbor's pocketbook.
I like Apple and Steve Jobs, it's not the same without him but in the age where we are building the capacity to colonize another planet that far exceeds "one small step for man, and one giant leap for mankind", it's baffling to see people inspired by the frugality of one's personal income.
Some of the greatest achievements in the history of humankind are on the verge of happening and most people on HN can't see past their neighbor's pocketbook.
It seems like we're closer to a self inflicted mass extinction event than it does the miraculous innovation of galactic migration considering how drastically underfunded the efforts for the latter are compared to the former.
Or are we just hoping Bezos takes us all in his rocketships?
Or are we just hoping Bezos takes us all in his rocketships?
Maybe neither will happen and the few dollars we scraped from the each other's hearts will be our only comfort as humanity descends into an indifference about the natural world and world changing ideas. Maybe we will measure status in how much someone can accumulate for themselves and their tribe instead of the improvements they make for humanity.
That simply will not happen in us corporations.
That said, my inspiration is independent of their compensation package
You can find engineers in faang companies making over a million, so that seems like a very restrictivr compensation package you are suggesting.
That said, my inspiration is independent of their compensation package
You can find engineers in faang companies making over a million, so that seems like a very restrictivr compensation package you are suggesting.
Ballmer's salary was $260K IIRC. Many of his underlings made more than that. He's still an un-inspiring billionaire (and a very talented businessman, which few people give him credit for).
He is underrated, thats true.
He helped make the Microsoft Surface line. At the time it had some trouble starting out but now Microsoft has a portfolio of Surface products that can actually go head to head with Apple products while Google's hardware strategy just keeps on being more and more confusing and weird.
Ballmers main success was enterprise contracts with big corps.
Plus "Developers, developers, developers", right? Hilarious antics aside, doesn't he get some credit for pointing in that direction? FFWD a few years to VSC, Github, MS as arguably world's leading contrib to OSS... I came of professional age being pretty anti-M$ (and w good reason), but things do, sometimes, eventually, change.
"Developers, developers, developers" was in 2000, around the same time Ballmer was saying "Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. That's the way that the license works."[1]
The context of the "Developers, developers, developers" thing was that MS was fighting against open source to try to attract developers to the Windows platform instead.
Visual Studio Code, Github etc only came after Ballmer left.
[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/24/top_10_steve_ballme...
The context of the "Developers, developers, developers" thing was that MS was fighting against open source to try to attract developers to the Windows platform instead.
Visual Studio Code, Github etc only came after Ballmer left.
[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/24/top_10_steve_ballme...
Thanks @nl, quite right -- and I do recall, having been there -- but my point was not that Ballmer had all the right ideas(!), rather that his emphasis on developers led eventually to the org (under Satya) embracing OSS which IMHO represents a logical (tho far from inevitable) progression or evolution.
Also: Azure and Office 365. Both started by Ballmer.
This was true even when Larry was in charge. Google is not an energy company. It has no use whatsoever for weak sauce kite generators. Nor is it a car company, so expect Waymo to be spun off or sold in the foreseeable future. Nor is it a medical company or an ISP.
Prediction: all "other bets" not related to Ads, Search, and Cloud will be gone and forgotten within 5 years. Deepmind will probably remain, but will refocus on stuff that has more than just PR value.
Prediction: all "other bets" not related to Ads, Search, and Cloud will be gone and forgotten within 5 years. Deepmind will probably remain, but will refocus on stuff that has more than just PR value.
Google is not an energy company, but the (supposed claim, ymmv) is that Alphabet is a conglomerate, not just Google.
>alphabet is a conglomerate
Some may claim that. But there is little support for it besides the fact that they simply structured it that way for strategic purposes and possibly to try to de-emphasize their search dominance for the monopoly hawks.
The 'Google' portion of Alphabet is the only net income producer and almost the only revenue producer. All other Alphabet business are big time money losers right now.
Some may claim that. But there is little support for it besides the fact that they simply structured it that way for strategic purposes and possibly to try to de-emphasize their search dominance for the monopoly hawks.
The 'Google' portion of Alphabet is the only net income producer and almost the only revenue producer. All other Alphabet business are big time money losers right now.
That's the point Peter Thiel made to Eric Schmidt's face before Alphabet even existed.
Google doesn't want people/regulators to think they're a monopolistic search engine, so they build that phony shell company to host a bunch of nonsense sideshows to divert attention.
Google doesn't want people/regulators to think they're a monopolistic search engine, so they build that phony shell company to host a bunch of nonsense sideshows to divert attention.
Google is not a conglomerate either. Yamaha, that's a conglomerate. Real products, from musical instruments to motorcycles, supported and a relatively strong brand in every market they operate in on merit.
Follow the money. Whoever pays (Google), defines the rules. Alphabet is a fiction, especially now under Sundar.
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Waymo might be part data company though.
Weak? That's a bit harsh...
It's also possible that the idea is not competitive. The article is not quite clear. If it were the case, then it would be irresponsible to continue to finance what amounts to a rather exotic hobby.
At Makani we believe that the technology is not only viable, but would confer a significant competitive advantage in the deepwater offshore scenario.
You are free to believe whatever you want. But your competitors are meanwhile out there shipping 8 MW installations (and bigger ones are in test) and I really don't see how Makani will ever compete with that in a way that offsets all of its drawbacks. Flying the mass of the generators, tethers, complex launch and recovery system, power transmission over exposed cables, frequent maintenance, lightning sensitive, hard to keep mechanically safe in a storm, puny little rotors, what's not to like?
Some of these are reasonable concerns. Regarding sizing, however - there's no reason our system couldn't scale to match conventional wind turbines.
I sincerely doubt that. It fails the KISS test on a lot of fronts required for scaling. Scaling it up would require kites the size of 747's, the single points of failure (the tether and the hinge) would become exponentially heavier as the strength of the cable would need to increase. By the time those two lines cross you will need unobtanium to stay aloft. It's a neat idea but it is - with present day tech - not deployable at scale with the degree of reliability expected from windpower installations.
Keep in mind that the nacelle of a regular windmill is already quite a complex beast, it has one degree of freedom less and can adopt to gusty winds by simply changing its pitch, there is no need to bring the whole contraption back down to the ground before the wind fails to keep it aloft. The only way you can keep the Makani kite aloft if the wind drops rapidly is by controlled descent and that in turn you can do only about as long as your cables are. Typical generators for 'serious' windmills weigh on the order of 30-100 tons, that's roughly the take off weight of a 737-800 on the high end.
Props for actually building it though, that part - even at the limited scale of the prototypes - is quite an achievement.
Keep in mind that the nacelle of a regular windmill is already quite a complex beast, it has one degree of freedom less and can adopt to gusty winds by simply changing its pitch, there is no need to bring the whole contraption back down to the ground before the wind fails to keep it aloft. The only way you can keep the Makani kite aloft if the wind drops rapidly is by controlled descent and that in turn you can do only about as long as your cables are. Typical generators for 'serious' windmills weigh on the order of 30-100 tons, that's roughly the take off weight of a 737-800 on the high end.
Props for actually building it though, that part - even at the limited scale of the prototypes - is quite an achievement.
Plan B could be large vertical shafts drilled into tall mountains. Let the high altitude winds create the venturi effect (low pressure) to suck air up the shaft and have turbines in the shaft to generate electric power. Similar to hydro power the construction costs are significant but after that it's almost trouble free energy.
Large scale drilling operations at altitude are not even remotely economically viable. Not to mention we can hardly build telescopes on mountains, let alone power stations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Meter_Telescope_protest...
How's transmission handled?
I'm assuming "the deepwater scenario" means tethered kites supplying power back to land somehow.
Transmission is always the tricky part, and I'd imagine it is even more so in a deepwater scenario where laying cables is even more expensive.
I'm assuming "the deepwater scenario" means tethered kites supplying power back to land somehow.
Transmission is always the tricky part, and I'd imagine it is even more so in a deepwater scenario where laying cables is even more expensive.
The transmission to the shore is a 'minor' problem compared to transmitting the power from the kites to the base station. Also, every other off-shore power generation installation shares that same first problem, there are good solutions in place already (HVDC / offshore grid extension).
Maybe you can extract and reduce lithium and uranium from sea water with that energy.
The system doesn't even need to be anchored.
The system doesn't even need to be anchored.
Why isn’t this view shared by Alphabet?
Astro Teller is quoted in the FT article as saying: “Our estimate of the rewards for the world, the reward to Alphabet, and the risks and costs to get there . . . they change over time. It’s part of my job to assess that and make sure that we’re picking the best ones we can for Alphabet to spend its money on.”
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...
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
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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...
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.
> 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?
The irrational thing being working way below the market rate for someone with their skills/talents, right?
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.
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.
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?
Are they shutting down? Are they getting acquired by Shell? Something else?
No longer part of Alphabet
>Shell is exploring options to continue developing Makani’s technology.
Vague enough to be shopping around perhaps
>Shell is exploring options to continue developing Makani’s technology.
Vague enough to be shopping around perhaps
My read is that Alphabet is selling the assets to Shell, and Shell is thinking about what to do with them.
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?
Google would only have to disclose it if the loss is material, IIUC. I doubt it is on Google's scale.
FTA:
so from today Makani’s time at Alphabet is coming to an end. This doesn’t mean the end of the road for the technology Makani developed, but it does mean that Makani will no longer be an Alphabet company. Shell is exploring options to continue developing Makani’s technology.
so from today Makani’s time at Alphabet is coming to an end. This doesn’t mean the end of the road for the technology Makani developed, but it does mean that Makani will no longer be an Alphabet company. Shell is exploring options to continue developing Makani’s technology.
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/), 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.
Can you make electricity with kites? Maybe. Probably. Should you? Probably not.
If you look at the Goole X website (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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, they started from a problem "how do you get internet into rural/low infra areas" and settled on balloons after iteration. You just didn't see the rapid prototype part, because at that point the company was "5 people fucking around in X" and not "Loon".
Numerous companies in the airborne wind turbine market, Makani, Joby: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/a-beginners-gui...
Numerous proposals, including from Lockheed, for balloon satellites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_balloon#Geostati...
These aren't just "because we can" frivolous projects, these approaches have serious advantages over others, such that many are racing to commercialize it.
Numerous proposals, including from Lockheed, for balloon satellites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_balloon#Geostati...
These aren't just "because we can" frivolous projects, these approaches have serious advantages over others, such that many are racing to commercialize it.
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.
This exchange reminds me of the Illuminatus! trilogy[0] in which the Discordians at some point introduce the idea of dividing humans into "neophobes" (who dislike new things and the exploration of random unknowns) and "neophiles" (who dislike sticking to established, stable paradigms and want to do new things instead).
The former end up in a stable equilibrium with slow (if any) progress, the latter fail often but are important for fast-paced progress.
In other words, whenever you (the reader generally, not davidivadavid in particular) write "probably", imagine a Wikipedia editor adding [citation needed] after it.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illuminatus!_Trilogy
The former end up in a stable equilibrium with slow (if any) progress, the latter fail often but are important for fast-paced progress.
In other words, whenever you (the reader generally, not davidivadavid in particular) write "probably", imagine a Wikipedia editor adding [citation needed] after it.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illuminatus!_Trilogy
On the exploration/exploitation spectrum, I'm definitely on the exploration side. I'm just highly skeptical of those particular Google projects.
Do you mean that Loon is operation in areas that cover 5 billion people?
Or that 5 billion people live in rural and remote areas?
Or that 5 billion people live in rural and remote areas?
The latter. Loon won't solve the 5b problem. They help some of it.
This is a fun sort of Madlibs game to play:
* How can stem cells fight climate change?
* How can we use waste heat from nuclear reactors to promote gender equality?
* How can echidnas cure cancer?
The challenge is that many revolutionary products sound equally nonsensical at the time.
* How can we generate power homes using giant propellers?
* How can monkey viruses cure blindness?
* How can adding impurities to a conductor let it perform mathematics?
We don't seem to have a way to tell which crazy sentences will pan out until we try and see.
* How can stem cells fight climate change?
* How can we use waste heat from nuclear reactors to promote gender equality?
* How can echidnas cure cancer?
The challenge is that many revolutionary products sound equally nonsensical at the time.
* How can we generate power homes using giant propellers?
* How can monkey viruses cure blindness?
* How can adding impurities to a conductor let it perform mathematics?
We don't seem to have a way to tell which crazy sentences will pan out until we try and see.
> We don't seem to have a way to tell which crazy sentences will pan out
I think you're missing the OP's point: the point is that the sentence should read:
"How can we cure blindness?"
If it happens to be via monkey viruses, so be it. But you shouldn't start from "How can monkey viruses cure blindness" — it's not monkey viruses that are the reason to do research, it's blindness that's the reason.
I think you're missing the OP's point: the point is that the sentence should read:
"How can we cure blindness?"
If it happens to be via monkey viruses, so be it. But you shouldn't start from "How can monkey viruses cure blindness" — it's not monkey viruses that are the reason to do research, it's blindness that's the reason.
"How can we provide clean energy as cheaply as possible" seems like a pretty big problem we need to solve. Maybe kite power isn't the answer, but it certainly looked like it could be at one point. It wasn't unreasonable to investigate it.
And I wouldn't have made that comment had they stated it that way. The problem with those phony problems is that the success criteria are binary, and not tied to metrics that allow for comparisons with alternatives.
If you problem is to generate power with kites, and you have built power-generating kites, then you won. But how good a power source is it in the grander scheme of things? Is it going to move the needle when it comes to CO2 emissions? Again, I don't mind the high school science fair stuff, but I don't think this has a high chance of being the ticket based on fundamentals.
If you problem is to generate power with kites, and you have built power-generating kites, then you won. But how good a power source is it in the grander scheme of things? Is it going to move the needle when it comes to CO2 emissions? Again, I don't mind the high school science fair stuff, but I don't think this has a high chance of being the ticket based on fundamentals.
These also sound a little like the AT&T "You Will" ads from 1993.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Will
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Will
[deleted]
I submitted the ft story a couple hours ago.
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://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...
The FT story was much more readable and direct than the Medium post. Thanks!
Medium is free except for some premium articles although you may get a scary popup.
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.
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
The best we can do is get behind solar and wind and pray for a fusion breakthrough.
The best we can do is get behind solar and wind and pray for a fusion breakthrough.
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?
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?
My amateur opinion is we need to get fusion before fossil runs out or we‘re fucked. Then it also needs to be shared among all humans (for free hopefully). Or we are fucked as well.
Either energy collapse or war or both might result otherwise.
If we manage to avoid either (seems unlikely so far), then we just need to solve climate change and we’re almost at type 1 civ.
/speculation
Either energy collapse or war or both might result otherwise.
If we manage to avoid either (seems unlikely so far), then we just need to solve climate change and we’re almost at type 1 civ.
/speculation
Another way to meet energy demand is to reduce population. Which already started to happen by itself in many developed countries. As standard of living raised globally, it’s probable that population will plato or decline. (With this said, I still think nuclear energy is the best option until fusion comes through).
Power plants need to be built, maintained, and rebuilt in proportion to the amount used. Which is proportional to population. So the per-capita effort spent on power plants is roughly constant, whether you have 1 billion people or 10 billion people.
Reducing population doesn't make it all that much easier to meet energy demand. The efficiency of power use and the types of plants we choose to build are much more important.
Reducing population doesn't make it all that much easier to meet energy demand. The efficiency of power use and the types of plants we choose to build are much more important.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
That's probably a corp speak, to be honest. They'll almost certainly shut it down after few months/quarters.
Fossil companies are trying to diversify against both short and long term oil price drops: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-04/shell-lea...
Re: Shell, I think there's something similar playing out with automobile manufacturers and "mobility". They will honestly give it an effort, but perhaps without the clarity, expertise, or strategy that's actually needed to make it succeed in the long run. And then once it doesn't grow huge, they'll sell it, spin it off, or shut it down, because it was only ever a diversification bet, not their ambition at heart.
See: GM with Maven, Ford with Chariot, BMW with Parkmobile.
See: GM with Maven, Ford with Chariot, BMW with Parkmobile.
The FT article makes it much more clear:
"But Alphabet decided the opportunity to greatly disrupt to energy sector had begun to dwindle. While Makani at first felt it could provide a competitive advantage by using its technology on land and in shallow water — as well as deep water — advancements in competing technologies meant that was likely no longer the case.
“That’s very sad for Makani,” Mr Teller said. “But it’s really great for the world.”
An EU report published in 2018 concurred with Alphabet’s assessment. “The technology still has a long way to go before it can reach commercialisation,” it read, noting that challenges remained in demonstrating the reliable, autonomous operation that would make the concept viable."
Google X aka the moonshot factory has existed for longer than the original Apollo program. Has it launched any successful products for Alphabet?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107823