Starlink is a futurist project which is really what Elon Musk wants to be. For something like Google they wouldn't do this typically because as a company and their leadership they aren't futurists.
Google has typically invested in existing viable technologies and forced them into a lower price point to make them more available. Google fiber was introduced 14 years ago when that kind of speed was unheard of. At the time most ISPs wanted to have bandwidth caps and rate limits because they were afraid of people abusing the network. Google came in and showed that it was viable to do at a price point for the residential consumer. This forced the market to adapt. Google also had a similar program with cellular service as well.
your comments remind me of some related, potential factors. I was at Google in the early aughts... definitely had some mega futuristics visions (including later with moonshot).
But their CFO (excellent, loved by everyone) had major traditional telco background, so GoogleFi was natural idea, despite it's limited market traction. And you are right -- Google dominant mindset was "ad supported" everything.
Separately, Musk of course was physics major. Google 99% CS. So mindsets and ideas vary (with plenty of overlap too)
I think you are referring to Nikesh Arora, who runs Palo Alto Networks, the telco guy. He was the business guy, not the CFO.
I don't think Look etc was seen as competitive to Google Fi at all. If anything, that would have been a distribution channel. It was entirely execution-related. Musk is much more serious at shipping than Google where X was mostly Sergey's playground of hobby projects.
Nikesh was a telco guy, too.
But I was referring to Patrick Pichette, Goog CFO. Before Google, Patrick was at Bell Canada, as President of Operations and CFO.
It's great to be uber ambitious and futuristic, but not everyone needs to be. Some companies should excel at solving smaller problems. Like search, smaller AI etc.
Ambitious, it was. Successful less so, but still, Waymo came out of X, so not sure that is a fair characterization, but yes, overal, it could have been soooo much more under a Musk-like leadership.
disagree. it’s only recently that google dropped X and moonshots. loon and the wing thing come to mind. sure, now, google isn’t very futurist (look how they botched AI execution), but in the time that starlink was developed, google was very much still futurist.
speed was unheard of.
lol. only in the usa.
At the time most ISPs wanted to have bandwidth caps and rate limits because they were afraid of people abusing the network.
lol again. it was all about monopoly incentives.
do you even analyze, bro?
sorry if this comes off too snarky, i have good intentions. i just find your insights very far off base.
Considering that I've worked at ISPs since the early '90s when they were dial-ups and watched them grow up into something more, Yes I would say that I've analyzed.
You offer no evidence of any futurist thing that Google has done. At least nothing to the scale of what Elon Musk has done. Everything Google is done has been a calculated safe risk taking a small step forward in technology that was safe. It was absolutely intended to embed their position as a global leader in search and nothing else.
So you can be snarky all you want but it's more important to be correct and back up your statements with evidence. Even Google coming out with Chrome was not a futurist moonshot it was simply taking advantage of the fact that all other browsers sucked and they wanted to cement their position as a search leader and tracking what people do.
According to you balloons with radio transmitters are futuristic technology. It didn't achieve scale because the benefits that it offered were too small, and it was too impractical. There was literally nothing futuristic about it at all.
You have to understand that starlink itself is only quasi-futuristic and it's the idea of SpaceX that is futuristic. Starlink is just a spin-off. Bringing faster satellite internet around the world is certainly a benefit and a step up from iridium and other satellite providers but SpaceX wasn't founded to make starlink happen. Starlink happened because SpaceX was a thing. SpaceX is a thing because Elon Musk's future vision is for the human species to become multi-planetary.
Show me anything that Google has done approaching that scale of future vision. Till we understand I don't know if Musk will actually achieve these visions but that is what is driving the offerings that he has.
Lofting up balloons, an technology from the 3rd century, carrying radios, a technology developed a century ago, and having the whole thing fail because it was a stupid idea, that's some real futuristic stuff right there.
I've worked at ISPs (on and off) since mid-90s, including starting one from scratch (ISDN and T1 bank) and building out a national colo/hosting offering for a mega telco you've heard of. I also worked at Google, not in Google Fiber but I worked with that org deeply during the post-POC (ie post-Nigeria) initial and then subsequent locations. So I reject your appeal to authority both as a matter of principle (logical fallacy) and personal experience.
I don't need to offer evidence, it is visible if you merely look for it. X (not twitter, google X) was a big money loser because it was too futurist, and Ruth killed it. Google took very large risks back then. They weren't even risks, they were known to have limited or no commerical value and they were experimenting with simply what might be possible. Not completely in a Bell Labs sense, but not all that far from it.
I mean even Waymo should be clear evidence.
I didn't mention Chrome, or "even Chrome", so not sure why you mention that. Chrome was not futurist. It was less about other browsers' sucking, and more about controlling HTML so that MSFT wouldn't, because MSFT was too narrow-minded. Google didn't have a desktop OS (even now, ChromeOS isn't viable outside of niche use cases) so they were highly depending on the browser functioning in a way they could asset control over it. At that time it was definitely not about tracking people. They just lost their way.
I thought you were just off base before, but here you are just plain wrong.
Comments
Starlink is a futurist project which is really what Elon Musk wants to be. For something like Google they wouldn't do this typically because as a company and their leadership they aren't futurists.
Google has typically invested in existing viable technologies and forced them into a lower price point to make them more available. Google fiber was introduced 14 years ago when that kind of speed was unheard of. At the time most ISPs wanted to have bandwidth caps and rate limits because they were afraid of people abusing the network. Google came in and showed that it was viable to do at a price point for the residential consumer. This forced the market to adapt. Google also had a similar program with cellular service as well.
your comments remind me of some related, potential factors. I was at Google in the early aughts... definitely had some mega futuristics visions (including later with moonshot).
But their CFO (excellent, loved by everyone) had major traditional telco background, so GoogleFi was natural idea, despite it's limited market traction. And you are right -- Google dominant mindset was "ad supported" everything.
Separately, Musk of course was physics major. Google 99% CS. So mindsets and ideas vary (with plenty of overlap too)
I think you are referring to Nikesh Arora, who runs Palo Alto Networks, the telco guy. He was the business guy, not the CFO.
I don't think Look etc was seen as competitive to Google Fi at all. If anything, that would have been a distribution channel. It was entirely execution-related. Musk is much more serious at shipping than Google where X was mostly Sergey's playground of hobby projects.
Nikesh was a telco guy, too. But I was referring to Patrick Pichette, Goog CFO. Before Google, Patrick was at Bell Canada, as President of Operations and CFO.
Agree with your sentiment about Musk shipping.
It's great to be uber ambitious and futuristic, but not everyone needs to be. Some companies should excel at solving smaller problems. Like search, smaller AI etc.
Google invested in SpaceX specifically for Starlink. I hope the OP sees this.
I didn’t know that. Thanks for the info.
Have you heard of google X? I think they call it the moonshot factory.
What they’re doing tends to be neither ambitious nor successful when you cut through the PR
Ambitious, it was. Successful less so, but still, Waymo came out of X, so not sure that is a fair characterization, but yes, overal, it could have been soooo much more under a Musk-like leadership.
disagree. it’s only recently that google dropped X and moonshots. loon and the wing thing come to mind. sure, now, google isn’t very futurist (look how they botched AI execution), but in the time that starlink was developed, google was very much still futurist.
lol. only in the usa.
lol again. it was all about monopoly incentives.
do you even analyze, bro?
sorry if this comes off too snarky, i have good intentions. i just find your insights very far off base.
Considering that I've worked at ISPs since the early '90s when they were dial-ups and watched them grow up into something more, Yes I would say that I've analyzed.
You offer no evidence of any futurist thing that Google has done. At least nothing to the scale of what Elon Musk has done. Everything Google is done has been a calculated safe risk taking a small step forward in technology that was safe. It was absolutely intended to embed their position as a global leader in search and nothing else.
So you can be snarky all you want but it's more important to be correct and back up your statements with evidence. Even Google coming out with Chrome was not a futurist moonshot it was simply taking advantage of the fact that all other browsers sucked and they wanted to cement their position as a search leader and tracking what people do.
Project Loon was futuristic. It did not achieve the scale of Starlink because it failed, not because it wasn’t futuristic.
Google also invested early into self-driving cars and remains well ahead of Musk in that area.
According to you balloons with radio transmitters are futuristic technology. It didn't achieve scale because the benefits that it offered were too small, and it was too impractical. There was literally nothing futuristic about it at all.
You have to understand that starlink itself is only quasi-futuristic and it's the idea of SpaceX that is futuristic. Starlink is just a spin-off. Bringing faster satellite internet around the world is certainly a benefit and a step up from iridium and other satellite providers but SpaceX wasn't founded to make starlink happen. Starlink happened because SpaceX was a thing. SpaceX is a thing because Elon Musk's future vision is for the human species to become multi-planetary.
Show me anything that Google has done approaching that scale of future vision. Till we understand I don't know if Musk will actually achieve these visions but that is what is driving the offerings that he has.
Agreed.
Lofting up balloons, an technology from the 3rd century, carrying radios, a technology developed a century ago, and having the whole thing fail because it was a stupid idea, that's some real futuristic stuff right there.
I've worked at ISPs (on and off) since mid-90s, including starting one from scratch (ISDN and T1 bank) and building out a national colo/hosting offering for a mega telco you've heard of. I also worked at Google, not in Google Fiber but I worked with that org deeply during the post-POC (ie post-Nigeria) initial and then subsequent locations. So I reject your appeal to authority both as a matter of principle (logical fallacy) and personal experience.
I don't need to offer evidence, it is visible if you merely look for it. X (not twitter, google X) was a big money loser because it was too futurist, and Ruth killed it. Google took very large risks back then. They weren't even risks, they were known to have limited or no commerical value and they were experimenting with simply what might be possible. Not completely in a Bell Labs sense, but not all that far from it.
I mean even Waymo should be clear evidence.
I didn't mention Chrome, or "even Chrome", so not sure why you mention that. Chrome was not futurist. It was less about other browsers' sucking, and more about controlling HTML so that MSFT wouldn't, because MSFT was too narrow-minded. Google didn't have a desktop OS (even now, ChromeOS isn't viable outside of niche use cases) so they were highly depending on the browser functioning in a way they could asset control over it. At that time it was definitely not about tracking people. They just lost their way.
I thought you were just off base before, but here you are just plain wrong.