When I was growing up in Silicon Valley traffic was light, places were far, and there was nothing in between.
Silicon Valley was rarely the place you wanted to be, we all wanted out having been here our whole lives. We wanted New York, we wanted Los Angeles, we wanted anywhere but here.
Over the years that has changed.
You ask most people that work at Google the significance of the Googleplex and no one will ever tell you about the prominence, about how it used to the rolling valleys housed the SGI buildings.
But day in, day out, the buses flow. The cars flow. Once you're on campus it's a different world. Everyone's busy, everyone has something important they're insisting on doing.
The whole of Mountain View, and in turn the surrounding suburban sprawl has been turned into the tiny steams coursing into Oak Ridge.
The highways are jammed. The roads are jammed. There are more lines. There are more people. All eager to do something important. Meals are provided, the buses are provided, the interns get their limos to go to the local hotels
Slowly but surely, we got our wish. Los Angeles came to us. New York came to us.
Slowly but surely, we got our wish. Los Angeles came to us. New York came to us.
Los Angeles never struck me as a place to elevate, and I like the real New York better.
Silicon Valley was better when it was a place the MBA-culture carpetbaggers and thugs considered an outpost and avoided as much as they could. The weather and the scenery were just as good or better (due to less buildup) and people were able to focus on building things, not having to listen to endless conversations about Y Combinator and vesting schedules and Mark Pincus.
Bell Labs invented fundamental technology like the transistor and the laser. I wouldn't put Google Maps in that league. They did not invent autonomous vehicles or wearable computers, though they have made strides in commoditizing the technology.
Moreover, Bell Labs' position as part of a state-regulated monopoly meant that the research created at Bell Labs was publically available. For instance, UNIX was given away, since Bell was prohibited from selling it.
I doubt that Google's research will have the same public benefit; it seems much more likely that Google will keep it for themselves.
Actually, Unix was made available only under closed-source license (most notably as "Unix System V" and its commercial derivatives, including AIX and Solaris). This lead to, among other things, a nasty lawsuit against the University of California at Berkeley, who eventually did make their BSD Unix variant publicly available, after carefully excising most of the AT&T-copyrighted code.
Wikipedia has some information on the relevant history. As usual, treat with skepticism, but it will confirm the basics:
Also, the ascendancy of Linux was a direct result of the fight between them. There was already a perfectly decent free UNIX - BSD - when Linux came out. However, the license wars meant that many corporations wouldn't go near it, because they weren't sure whether they'd get in legal trouble for it or if it would still be available once the lawsuits settled. Rather than deal with that uncertainty, people started looking at Linux as a completely free, from-scratch implementation.
To be fair, Google's army of researchers does publish a sizable number of papers and participate in conferences. I don't want to make it sound like they are a vacuum or not contributing to human knowledge. I am just having issues with comparing them to Bell Labs.
My developing theory is that monopolies can be great for innovation. What do ATT, Google, Xerox, and the old HP have on common? They are/were, if not outright monopolies, insulated from competition by virtue of network effects, brand or trademark monopolies, or simply a lack of competent competition. They weren't like the Acers of world, in highly competitive markets, struggling to make 1-2% profits on their revenues. They had steady sources of cash from products that had little market competition.
This allowed them to bankroll things like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC. Freed from living on the margin, they had the security to invest in blue sky projects.
What do ATT, Google, Xerox, and the old HP have on common? - They wer innovative market leaders of there time. They invested further in monetizing their successful business models. ATT&T has managed to continue to be a big player in telecoms and Google, much younger than the others is still incredibly relevant. But being a monopoly does not encourage innovation, although it can provide the financing. being a monopoly instead incentives protectionist behaviour to maintain the status quo 'cash cow'. Eventually however, unless protected by government intervention, monopolies fall or shift to new entrants. The only way to combat that is to look to the future and try and ride the next wave. Google's support of investing in 'moonshots' is really necessary to ensure they stay relevant, otherwise at some point they will become irrelevant.
> They wer innovative market leaders of there time.
Since adding the "innovative" begs he question, let's rephrase it to "They were market leaders of their time." But lots of companies are market leaders. HP of today and Dell are market leaders of the PC industry, yet show almost no innovation.
My point is that competition, in the sense of the economic force that drives marginal profits towards zero, discourages innovation, at least in the short term, because it forces companies to be preoccupied with immediate survival, instead of allowing them to plan ahead to the future.
I thought it's part of established economic theory that monopolies have an incentive to invest in infrastructure, as they are best positioned to reap the results.
Explains Google's Internet balloons, and many other investments.
Agreed. Bell Labs pioneered lots of essential breakthroughs in computing that we now take for granted. Google has thus far refined previously existing technologies.
dremel(where facebook's presto comes from)
bigtable(where amazon's dyanamoDB comes from)
Most tech companies have google to thank for large scale data processing. Google could have not published anything, but they chose to publish these papers. There are other papers published that other companies haven't even started copying yet, as google is 5 years ahead of the industry in terms of large scale data processing. When these companies get there, they can check out the published papers, saving years of time.
Whether or not the original comparison yields any actual insight, your comment is taking a nuanced view of the present (all inventions are incremental and end up sourced from many places) while taking a simplified view of history. Materials research was happening at many places beyond Bell Labs.
Commodotized it? Google's remote driving apparatus costs a quarter of a million dollars per car.
Less than ten years ago remotely controlled vehicles had a hard time driving in a straight line ten miles in the desert. Google's have now driven millions of accident free miles.
Granted they haven't tackled a Michigan snowstorm yet but I think you have to admit they pioneered this technology.
Much of the driverless car tech is from CMU and other universities who have been working on it for 30 years. Google hired several people from CMU and Berkeley. Are they putting resources into it and improving it? Absolutely. I just don't see them as being like Bell Labs here.
Nobody works in a vacuum (there's a bad joke about vacuum tubes there..)
Arguably Bell Labs didn't invent the transistor. To quote Wikipedia:
The first patent for the field-effect transistor principle was filed in Canada by Austrian-Hungarian physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld on October 22, 1925, but Lilienfeld published no research articles about his devices, and his work was ignored by industry. In 1934 German physicist Dr. Oskar Heil patented another field-effect transistor.[2] There is no direct evidence that these devices were built, but later work in the 1990s show that one of Lilienfeld's designs worked as described and gave substantial gain. Legal papers from the Bell Labs patent show that William Shockley and a co-worker at Bell Labs, Gerald Pearson, had built operational versions from Lilienfeld's patents, yet they never referenced this work in any of their later research papers or historical articles
Arguably Bell Labs didn't invent the laser. To quote Wikipedia:
Simultaneously, at Columbia University, graduate student Gordon Gould was working on a doctoral thesis about the energy levels of excited thallium. When Gould and Townes met, they spoke of radiation emission, as a general subject; afterwards, in November 1957, Gould noted his ideas for a "laser", including using an open resonator (later an essential laser-device component). Moreover, in 1958, Prokhorov independently proposed using an open resonator, the first published appearance (the USSR) of this idea. Elsewhere, in the U.S., Schawlow and Townes had agreed to an open-resonator laser design – apparently unaware of Prokhorov's publications and Gould's unpublished laser work.
....
Gould's notes included possible applications for a laser, such as spectrometry, interferometry, radar, and nuclear fusion. He continued developing the idea, and filed a patent application in April 1959. The U.S. Patent Office denied his application, and awarded a patent to Bell Labs, in 1960. That provoked a twenty-eight-year lawsuit, featuring scientific prestige and money as the stakes. Gould won his first minor patent in 1977, yet it was not until 1987 that he won the first significant patent lawsuit victory, when a Federal judge ordered the U.S. Patent Office to issue patents to Gould for the optically pumped and the gas discharge laser devices. The question of just how to assign credit for inventing the laser remains unresolved by historians
Personally, I think the work Bell Labs did was incredibly important - much more important than the work others did. They were very, very good at taking half-assed physics ideas and publications and turning them into something useful.
Google is very very good at taking half-assed "computing" ideas and turning them into something useful.
I really don't understand the Apple hate boner. Apple may have single handedly jump started the mobile industry, and is the godfather of huge apps like Facebook, Twitter, Vine, Instagram , Snapchat, Uber, Square, Candy Crush, the last few that have been causing major problems for major incumbents.
Now what platforms has Google built that is changing the game for everyone else? You have YouTube and thats pretty much it. Android is a me-too product, Chromecase is a me-too product, Chrome is a me-too product. I won't lie Maps, and Translate are amazing services but hardly worth deity status. Plus has been a spectacular flop, and my father (who isn't in tune with tech) is completely confused as to why people by their cloud machines from Amazon.
Lastly, Google isn't putting anything on the line. 95%+ of Google's revenue is advertising. If Ford started work on an autonomous car that would be putting it on the line. What Google is doing is the equivalent of a rich kid buying fancy toys. Google X gets a lot of PR, but thus far it isn't all that much different from Microsoft & IBM Research.
I'm not going to say what Google is doing is wrong, I think its great actually. However we shouldn't get ahead of ourselves by saying Apple is doing nothing. That company is focused on building amazing products on what pretty much amounts to yesterdays technology. Every phone today has a capacitive screen but how long has that been around? Retina displays? How long did we suffer with 1368x768 laptops?
So while Google is not reliving the 80s "household of tomorrow" pipe dream, It doesn't seem wise to say Apple just builds "only phones and tablets." given that those phones and tablets have been the center of current tech industry and are out now rather than "just 5 more years!"
Candy Crush, we're holding that up as a development that Apple is responsible that we want to be proud of, seriously? Regardless, an app store wasn't groundbreaking. They executed much better on what Blackberry was already doing with smartphones.
The point isn't necessarily what has come to pass yet, it's the focus on things that don't necessarily have a path to revenue yet. Everything Apple does is product and revenue focused. That is not the case with Google.
You are right that 95% of their revenue comes from Adwords . . . but 95% of their efforts aren't on optimizing Adwords, and that right there is my point: Apple is focused on executing where their revenue is, Google is definitely MORE focused on finding new revenue opportunities, and is more willing to look into unorthodox industries and ideas.
Yes, Candy Crush, especially when King is apply major pressure to Nintendo, a 30 year incumbent, on their home court[1]. I understand most people don't understand the video games industry.
Second, don't take execution lightly. Execution is everything. Again, the last few major tech products in silicon valley aren't moonshots. Most of the them are ideas that could have built 2001. Square could have been released on Windows Mobile 6.
What I'm simply trying to argue is that Google Research isn't inherently better than Apple's workshop. Moonshots are great yes, but its a bit too early to be sounding the bells. Microsoft Research had a similar position in the past and everyone thought they were ushering the new age, but it turned out to simply be PR. "The World of Tomorrow" at Disney Land (which probably hasn't been touched in 5-10 years) is chock full of a Microsoft Research moonshots that never caught on or weren't really practical. I see Google Glass heading a similar direction.
But thats the point. MS and Google are trying, Apple is more or less only making safe bets, combining existing technologies and executing extremely well on improving those. Thats great, i love my Apple products, but its still a different philosophy.
Again, you don't know that because Apple doesn't use Research as a PR platform. Apple tinkered with something like the Glass.[1] It would be naive to think Apple R&D isn't tinkering with similar ideas. However Apple's marketing approach is very different and Apple on recent doesn't try to sell you on ideas that are 5 years away. Which is entirely why I'm hesitant to say "Apple isn't doing anything and Google is flying to the moon." In reality both companies are looking into very interesting products, the difference is while Google is telling the world, Apple would crucify anyone who leaked a blurry photo.
Candy Crush is fundamentally built on Facebook's platform. If you want to say Apple are great for providing APIs that Candy Crush could use to produce its app (if it's native), why aren't Google great for providing APIs to allow the same for many more devices (if it's also native)?
> it's the focus on things that don't necessarily have a path to revenue yet. Everything Apple does is product and revenue focused.
You don't know that. It's widely reported that the iPad (tablet) project was started even before the iPhone project then shelved a few years. Of course the iPad is the past but it should serve as an example of what was developed in the early-mid 00' you only discovered its existence in the late 00' therefore it is not unreasonable to extrapolate that you will only able to tell the story of the current projects in a few years from now. Sorry to break your narrative. It's not because you don't see any press release that there is nothing going on in Cupertino.
Blackberry was going to do away with hardware keyboards and ship something with capacitive multitouch in 2007? They were going to use their massive economy of scale to rush out ultra-high-resolution displays in 2010?
New revenue opportunities? Google's #1 revenue source in 2000 was AdWords and their #1 revenue source in 2013 is AdWords. Apple's #1 revenue source in 2000 was Macintosh, in 2005 it was iPod, in 2010 it was iPhone. AppleTV is a "hobby", but by that standard, everything Google does other than AdWords is also a "hobby".
Apple has extreme market influence and has been able to accelerate some developments (smartphones, retina displays, tablets, really small form factors etc) but those things would have been there anyway, maybe a couple of years later.
They won't risk a flop product like Google Glass which is ahead of its time and dont really have a research program.
> Now what platforms has Google built that is changing the game for everyone else?
I don't know, maybe search? The Web as we know it functions because we have Google providing a reliable search function for all of it. I wouldn't be the person I am without Google. In that sense, Google's meant far more to me than the advent of a popular device or another medium of entertainment like Facebook.
Google is probably one of the biggest single contributors to pushing the web platform over and has been the largest contributor to the webkit project until they recently forked it into Blink.
Apple is great and all and probably everyone will agree they have far and away the best hardware and products, but Google pushes technology in ways just to get the world thinking of what is possible.
Let's not minimize Apple's contributions to WebKit. Google may have been the top contributor in terms of commits to WebKit in the months leading up to the fork, but Apple did enormous work to bring KHTML up to speed long before Chrome existed.
How many researchers are working at Apple Research? Like zero? Because there's no Apple Research? How many researchers are working at Google Research? Like a thousand?
Don't you think its little hard to believe that a 500B publicly traded company doesn't have an R&D team? I think you should rethink your post. Just because Apple doesn't advertise their research division doesn't mean they don't have one.
Apple shuttered the Advanced Technology Group, its research division, as a part of Jobs' consolidation and refocusing in the late '90s, and, as I understand it, research as an activity separate from product development hasn't really been part of the corporate culture since then. This does not mean lots of product-focused R&D doesn't go on throughout Apple, of course.
As far as I know Apple Research department was closed by Steve Jobs at some point, around ten years back. And have not been reopened. I have not seen any Apple employees recently presenting at academic conferences or collaborating with other researchers. Nor have I seen any publications.
Yeah, all that custom silicon Apple produces just gets magically pulled out of thin air. No research there at all. Nope.
Or all those patents we see coming out of Cupertino that frequently have nothing to do with products currently being produced. Definitely no research there.
I don't get the Apple hate. And at the risk of getting downvoted, I'm gonna paraphrase Steve Jobs,
We have to get out of our heads that for Google to win Apple has to loose.
This idea that Apple only got right the timing, and that without them smartphones would be the same, computers would be the same and tablets would be the same seems crazy to me. Timing <i>IS</i> everything, and they made theirs by creating a lot of the technology we take for granted now. They drove the industry here, almost entirely by willpower. AT&T helped them reluctantly, Verizon didn't want anything to do with the iPhone (and I suspect they still don't) and the music industry did't even saw it coming; once they realized what was happening, they tried their best to stop it.
They make phones and tablets <i>NOW</i>. They didn't five years ago and who nows what they'll be making 5 years from now. What did Google have five years ago? Search, Maps, Gmail and Youtube. What do they have today? Search, Maps, Youtube, Gmail and thanks in part to Apple, Chrome and Android. Everything else is a research project.
Now, don't get me wrong, I love Google. I use Gmail, Youtube and Maps religiously. Google Glass <i>IS</i> the future. Every one of their research projects is a vector for change in the world, but let's not pretend that they work in isolation. Technologies feed on each other, ideas spring new ideas, companies inspire other companies, to create and to compete. To reinvent.
I am glad to live in the time of Apple and Google. Don't ruin it with hate.
> I don't get the Apple hate. And at the risk of getting downvoted, I'm gonna paraphrase Steve Jobs,
That comes from the same guy who, in private, said:
I'm going to destroy Android [...] I will spend my
last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every
penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this
wrong
And what actions did he take? Unless Apple is willing to sell cheaper phones, they're giving up a large segment of the market, and Android will thrive. And I'm sure they know this.
Don't be silly, all research done by companies has an ROI counter tied to it . . . the point is that some do much more forward thinking research into technologies that might not yet have a specific application quite yet, and others are focused 2-3 years in advance and that's it.
This is simply not true except perhaps in that any research center will have an aggregate ROI counter that some bureaucrats glance at annually. As somebody pointed out elsewhere, Bell Labs' ROI was capped. Much, and I would argue the best, corporate research is done with almost no consequential oversight from the host corporation. This was certainly the case with Bell Labs, XEROX Parc, and other great research centers of yore just as it is still the case to some extent at Microsoft, AT&T, IBM, and Intel today (between re-orgs).
At present, PARC (no longer under Xerox) operates on something of an agency model and Google runs research projects like startups. This appears to result in a higher rate of short-term commercial success, but at the cost of fundamental research. That said, I think we've done a tremendous amount of fundamental research since World War II and now that the conditions for producing more no longer exist, there's plenty of low-hanging fruit – new configurations of things that already exist – hence the prevalence of startups and the perceived excellence of hybrid research models.
Bell Labs was not setup like that, though. They were researching new materials to make their existing Monopoly run more efficiently. If ROI was the focus, IP would not have entered the public domain & people like Shannon & Shockley would have been shown the door before they changed the world.
I've been reading The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner recently and I feel like the parallels between the two are really striking. The advent of Google X projects, the Motorola acquisition, and all of the recent robotics acquisitions make it feel like Google is actually building the future that I've been dreaming of since I was in elementary school.
I only hope that the next wave of technological innovation will be far more decentralized than the last one. We haven't had a Bell Labs like organization in a long time. Maybe one day we won't need one.
I was amazed after finishing The Idea Factory and realizing how much we (as humans and as the tech industry specifically) owe to Bell Labs. The invention of UNIX gets literally one sentence in the book and I think that's the scale it deserves given their work in every other piece of communication and electronic technology.
Take a drive around the googleplex. Go by the LinkedIn offices to the south. See those buildings off on the end there? Look at your google maps. Do you see them online? Will you ever? Google has it's secrets too, ones it doesn't want advertised.
It's fascinating how successful Google has been at marketing itself to geeks - it doesn't matter that none of the really cool stuff has actually shipped (and perhaps will never ship). The dream is there, and that's enough to get the kids in to work on improving advertising (while dreaming of changing the world).
Is that cynical? Probably, don't mind me. It's just reading these comments you'd think self-driving cars, say, were a done deal, and yet when I read things like this they seem an awfully long way away:
>The Google car has now driven more than half a million miles without causing an accident—about twice as far as the average American driver goes before crashing. Of course, the computer has always had a human driver to take over in tight spots. Left to its own devices, Thrun says, it could go only about fifty thousand miles on freeways without a major mistake. Google calls this the dog-food stage: not quite fit for human consumption. “The risk is too high,” Thrun says. “You would never accept it.” The car has trouble in the rain, for instance, when its lasers bounce off shiny surfaces. (The first drops call forth a small icon of a cloud onscreen and a voice warning that auto-drive will soon disengage.) It can’t tell wet concrete from dry or fresh asphalt from firm. It can’t hear a traffic cop’s whistle or follow hand signals.
Right, Microsoft Research, IBM Research.. they really have nothing to show for. Google also has what an advertising system and a site to search things for, send/receive email and watch videos, some phones.. that's it. Everything else has been videos and PR.
True. I'll admit that there is probably a fair amount of bias because Google has a better PR department. But I doubt it's that much better than these other guys . . . I think much of the research being done is around incremental improvements, and the point is that Google seems to be dreaming much bigger and thinking much more long term.
I got what the main thought was, but I'm not sure about much longer term or greater plans. Maybe broader appeal? Again, related to PR. IBM seems to be doing fine long term with their research, but not very PR active, and when they are you notice that - Watson?
Watson is actually sort of boring stock-in-trade stuff for IBM when looked at through a certain lens. (Not that it isn't noteworthy or anything.) The phrase "IBM researchers have..." used to be attached to things like atom-by-atom manipulation (the atomic IBM logo was the PR piece), superconductivity (Bednorz and Müller)... things that might one day mean a whole heck of a lot, but in the meantime amounted to allowing some very smart people to piddle around trying interesting stuff. There was always hope that some technology might fall sideways out of the work, but the IBM of the day was significantly less attached to success. Pre-PC Revolution, they were in a position to afford it; Gerstner's IBM could not.
For all those that are arguing that Google isn't Bell Labs because Bell Labs invented more stuff and gave it away: there is a reason for that: Xerox PARC.
Xerox PARC is the Bell Labs of the computing industry, and its spectacular failure to do anything to help Xerox hangs heavy over commercial research labs in computing.
Google is determined not to let its lab projects be another Xerox PARC. For better or worse that means there does tend to be a profit goal at the end of most of their research.
Xerox PARC may never have produced the modern computer if there had been an explicit profit goal. The "spectacular failure" here was not in the goal of the lab -- the problem was how Xerox management dealt with its results.
Being the next Bell Labs is both an honour and a disgrace. Bell Labs funded basic sciences which provided much of the technology you see before you today. Certainly this was a great example of corporate research. However, Bell Labs was funded by a government sanctioned monopoly over the telecommunications sector in the US. AT&T repeatedly stifled innovation (see MCI) and abused its monopoly and neglected to implement the research coming outs of its labs (parallel with Xerox).
Google provides an interesting foil to AT&T. They both have/had effective monopolies over a telecommunication sector and large research operations. However, the differences are quite large. Google has not funded basic research on the same level as Bell Labs. It also is more keen to productize the research it does. Additionally, its monopoly is part of an ecosystem of services on the internet and is not as complete as Bells dominance over telephone lines.
Read Tim Wu's "The Master Switch" for a much more complete history of Radio, Television, Film, Phone and Internet communication companies in the USA. It's a fantastic read and provides the background for intelligent conversations about the telecommunications industry.
Yes. I read "The Master Switch" and being crowned "The New Bell Labs" to me was synonymous with incredible innovation, which is the buried for decades to protect and entrenched position, which I don't think is google's play. For example, see the history of the answering machine and magnetic tape.
You cannot mention Microsoft in the article like this and completely dismiss their Research arm. Even Amazon's PR stunt with "drone delivery" gets mentioned, but not a real-deal research, seriously?
"macbook air, mac pro, os x + apps, and airport network"
So:
1. A smaller, lighter, computer in an industry where every generation of devices is smaller and lighter. A trend that existed before Apple even made laptops.
2. Mac Pro. A faster, more powerful, computer in an industry where every generation of devices is faster and more powerful. A trend that existed before the Macintosh existed.
3. OS X + Apps. I consider the app store a step backward for humanity, as it centralizes something that had been decentralizing and democratizing over decades of hard fought battles between open and closed. The best things about OS X are the best things about UNIX. And, I consider Linux a better UNIX (but, I'm willing to admit that the Macintosh experience for most users is superior, due to it being a unified hardware+software product, wherein Apple can make it all work together flawlessly). I don't consider it revolutionary, however.
4. Airport? WTF? Expensive WiFi is revolutionary?
I'm not really an Apple hater (aside from my strong preference for Open Source over proprietary, especially in important platform choices), but it's absurd to compare Apple's innovation to self-driving cars (or the kinds of innovation Bell Labs used to lead the way on).
Ok they have a computer and an operating system as well as a nice way to transfer files . . . big whoop. I think we can all agree that this isn't groundbreaking.
I think your premise is kind of flawed. That's not because you don't see what Apple is working on right now that there's nothing, that may just be their usual policy not to communicate about future products. Moreover I think a lot of people forget to credit Apple of their on-going effort on semi-conductors I think it's forward thinking, but hey that's less shiny than robots.
I think we can all agree that it's very important for some people/companies to focus on the short term, and for other people/companies on the long term.
Just because Google doesn't put as much work into keeping their future ideas secret, you can't assume Apple doesn't have equally ambitious ideas. You just won't find out about then until Apple thinks it is worthy of your attention.
I judge what I see . . . can't speculate about other companies. The robotics acquisitions were kept secret for a long time as well. As were autonomous cars. Eventually they came out. I don't think there is some super secret lab at apple that is working on groundbreaking inventions, and not one thing has come out of it yet, bit of a tall tale in my eyes. . .
thats true, but Apple would not release projects like Google Glass which are ahead of its time. Apple nowadays is a consumer company and they will only release products when they think the mainstream market is ready for it. They also dont have a real Research program like Google/MS have.
Just because everyone is not making alpha releases of their products, does not mean they are not working on ground-breaking technology (which works) either. If you understand Apple, you will get my point.
I don't want to take any credit away from Google. But there is a thin line between a gimmick and something earth shattering. Unless, I practically see, the practical use of these products (by google) I am more inclined to think, they are merely cheap gimmicks.
Google at best, can replicate a feature. But sadly that trick is no longer working. read: G+ and all they have resorted to gimmicks like this.
Oh yea, I am an Apple asshole but that does not make my above point invalid.
Also, the majority of Google R&D (at least that I am aware of) is much more applied than fundamental. The Google Car and Google Glasses are cool, but they will never win Nobel Prizes.
This is a pretty broad generalization. Not to mention, just because Google has better advertising and promotion of its new ideas and research, I'd not discount Apple, IBM or Microsoft. If anyone, IBM has consecutively stood the test of time with new innovations and inventions. World changing.
Uh, Apple created the Macintosh, the iPhone, and the iPad. I would give them a bit more credit for creating new industries if we're going to start comparing them to Google on that front.
true, but its not that there weren't personal computers, smartphones or tablets before. Apple knows when the market and tech is ready for new products and executes extremely well, but they hardly ever invent anything risky like self-driving cars or Google Glass.
I think credit is given . . . that's the past though, only so long you can rest on your laurels, and creating a snazzier phone and an app store doesn't really measure up to autonomous cars and robots in my opinion . . . its very nice don't get me wrong, but not in the same category of hard research into technologies where there isn't an obvious usecase yet, and thinking ahead 15 years.
The difference is that Apple doesn't advertise what they're working on until it's nearly ready to ship. They don't do vaporware. So they're always going to lose out on that comparison.
Very interesting article I think. But I think that says Google is the new Bell Labs is a bit exaggeration. While Bell Labs did most of its inventions from scratch and with a lot of search, what Google do in most part of its products is improvement of existing ones. And no, I'm not a Google hater.
When I was growing up in Silicon Valley traffic was light, places were far, and there was nothing in between.
Silicon Valley was rarely the place you wanted to be, we all wanted out having been here our whole lives. We wanted New York, we wanted Los Angeles, we wanted anywhere but here.
Over the years that has changed.
You ask most people that work at Google the significance of the Googleplex and no one will ever tell you about the prominence, about how it used to the rolling valleys housed the SGI buildings.
But day in, day out, the buses flow. The cars flow. Once you're on campus it's a different world. Everyone's busy, everyone has something important they're insisting on doing.
The whole of Mountain View, and in turn the surrounding suburban sprawl has been turned into the tiny steams coursing into Oak Ridge.
The highways are jammed. The roads are jammed. There are more lines. There are more people. All eager to do something important. Meals are provided, the buses are provided, the interns get their limos to go to the local hotels
Slowly but surely, we got our wish. Los Angeles came to us. New York came to us.