Google's Waymo Risks Repeating Silicon Valley's Most Famous Blunder (arstechnica.com) 116
An anonymous reader shares a report: Everyone in Silicon Valley knows the story of Xerox inventing the modern personal computer in the 1970s and then failing to commercialize it effectively. Yet one of Silicon Valley's most successful companies, Google's Alphabet, appears to be repeating Xerox's mistake with its self-driving car program. Xerox launched its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1970. By 1975, its researchers had invented a personal computer with a graphical user interface that was almost a decade ahead of its time. Unfortunately, the commercial version of this technology wasn't released until 1981 and proved to be an expensive flop. Two much younger companies -- Apple and Microsoft -- co-opted many of Xerox's ideas and wound up dominating the industry.
Google's self-driving car program, created in 2009, appears to be on a similar trajectory. By October 2015, Google was confident enough in its technology to put a blind man into one of its cars for a solo ride in Austin, Texas. But much like Xerox 40 years earlier, Google has struggled to bring its technology to market. The project was rechristened Waymo in 2016, and Waymo was supposed to launch a commercial driverless service by the end of 2018. But the service Waymo launched in December was not driverless and barely commercial. It had a safety driver in every vehicle, and it has only been made available to a few hundred customers.
Google's self-driving car program, created in 2009, appears to be on a similar trajectory. By October 2015, Google was confident enough in its technology to put a blind man into one of its cars for a solo ride in Austin, Texas. But much like Xerox 40 years earlier, Google has struggled to bring its technology to market. The project was rechristened Waymo in 2016, and Waymo was supposed to launch a commercial driverless service by the end of 2018. But the service Waymo launched in December was not driverless and barely commercial. It had a safety driver in every vehicle, and it has only been made available to a few hundred customers.
Re:It sounds like... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It sounds like... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent and grandparent comments: Excellent. (Score:2)
Wow! Amazing examples of management failure because of managers not understanding technology.
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I thought it was ignoring Bitcoin for the first several years.
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...and then paying attention to it for the next several years.
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Refusing to sell off all control of your flagship product or to agree to a one-directional NDA preventing you from ever discussing the deal is a far stretch from saying Kildall blew off IBM. Seems like a carefully-considered decision to not cash out on his life's work and end his company overnight. If the only thing that should have factored into his thoughts was the pay-out, then maybe. The real mistake was letting IBM decide the price for CP/M and letting them price it several hundred dolla
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Blunder? (Score:2, Funny)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Just a blunder, not one of the classic blunders.
It doesn't always work that way. (Score:5, Insightful)
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You could design the most perfect self driving car, but it might not be the right time in the market for it, or it could be too expensive at the time. Kodak designed the first digital camera, but it was also at least 5 years too early.
They could have sold it to someone then, Hollywood maybe. But they didn't. Then they let others (like Casio) beat them to the market with digital cameras — lots of people bought those shitty cameras even though they had seriously low resolution sensors, including me. When Kodak finally did bring out digital cameras, they had literally the worst interfaces, so nobody wanted to use them. Therefore the situation with Kodak is really not at all as you portrayed it.
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Yes, the way i said it was super simplistic, just like the article above.
The way you said it was completely wrong, which to be fair, is just like the article above.
tee hee, overrated (Score:2)
Mod this comment as overrated, too. I can afford the karma, I make more every day. You've only got so many modpoints. Mod away!
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Well that, and the fact that Kodak had one hell of a tidy business in selling and developing film; a digital camera would eliminate that (most profitable) bit of the business. So, Kodak decided to stuff it under a metaphorical rug.
It would be like Gillette making and selling a razor with eternally-sharp blades.
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In a lot of cases, it's failure to market the thing correctly. Kodak had a digital camera about 20 years too early (1975) but with very low quality and high price and nothing like the camera's we're used to today, they simply saw no market and didn't continue developing it.
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They saw no market because in 1975 there was no market. Digital photography had to wait on the microprocessor and memory revolutions of the 80's to become practical. Even so, it had to wait for home computers to become practically ubiqu
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But Kodak never drove it and when the time came, they were too worried about protecting their film business.
Re:It doesn't always work that way. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not necessarily the timing but a life safety issue. This needs government regulation and the governments are wary as are the insurance providers. Until someone can demonstrate that they cars won't cause accidents there is likely to be a requirement to have a driver in the car as a safety measure. In addition it's highly likely that insurance providers would require the same thing.
Keep in mind the whole liability of self driving cars is NOT decided. What happens when one kills someone like the Uber in Arizona? Is it the driver's fault? The Owners? The Software provider? The Car company? The Sensor company? Absolutely none of this has been decided.
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It's not necessarily the timing but a life safety issue. This needs government regulation and the governments are wary as are the insurance providers. Until someone can demonstrate that they cars won't cause accidents...
Well, until someone can demonstrate that self-driving cars operate accident-free at the same or better rate than human drivers. That's going to take a bit of time to gather data on and prove.
What happens when one kills someone like the Uber in Arizona? Is it the driver's fault? The Owners? The Software provider? The Car company? The Sensor company? Absolutely none of this has been decided.
What happens when a car you let your girlfriend borrow gets in a hit-and-run thanks to her actions? The cops chase the plate and as the owner, you're on-deck for liability first and foremost. Even if they arrest her (after you sufficiently prove that you weren't in the car at the time), the victim is still going to chas
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The big problem is that there is, despite the variance in circumstances, someone dead or injured. There is property damaged.
I don't think this is lost opportunity; I think this is Alphabet/Google/Waymo looking at their corporate assets when something goes fiendishly wrong for whatever reasons. The litigators in this country would look for blood, and much of the public would be behind them.
It will take years for data, and for acceptance, and for technology to make driverless-whatever happen. All of the hype
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What happens when one kills someone like the Uber in Arizona? Is it the driver's fault? The Owners? The Software provider? The Car company? The Sensor company? Absolutely none of this has been decided.
Google said years ago that they would accept liability for damages caused by their self-driving system. Nothing else makes sense; the maker of the system making the decision has to be liable.
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You could design the most perfect self driving car, but it might not be the right time in the market for it, or it could be too expensive at the time. Kodak designed the first digital camera, but it was also at least 5 years too early. Just because someone can do something doesn't mean it's the right time to do it.
If the solution was strictly technological, like somebody just needs to come up with a better sensor or a computer with enough GFLOPs I might agree. But every indication is that learning to drive is full of unspoken rules and subtleties, where the only way is to iron out poor behavior bit by bit. Google is still massively in the lead [caradvice.com.au] on disengagements and they keep simulating and tweaking it, I don't think a competitor can just come in from the sidelines and overtake that. Yes Tesla can pretend they can do
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This I think makes the point perfectly to just about anyone. Would you let your 12 year old drive? Why not? Many 12 year olds can demonstrate their incredible control in a video game; certainly that would translate to being able to control the vehicle. So, then why not? Judgement of course. A 12 year old does not have the judgement to drive. So, how long will it be before a computer has the judgement of a 12 year old? We will not have self driving vehicles on generic access roads any time soon. When we get
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Judgement is the wrong term. A computer program will never develop judgement. It will always just process. That is it will select from a group of possible actions based upon the instructions that it has been given.
The real answer is that self-driving vehicles will first be deployed on the interstates, where there is a much more limited set of decisions that have to be made, because there are no bicycles, pedestrians, cross streets, etc.
Ultimately a human may have to be in the vehicle, but not alert, so you
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This is kind of a different problem than most etch anyway. With most new tech, the goal is to rush to market to dominate mindshare before your compeitiors copy what you did. Then, even if they do it better, everyone thinks of them as knock-offs and imitations.
Self-driving cars are a different world. The pace of adapotion is a regulatory problem, not a market problem. No one is going to dominate the market by being slightly earlier than the competition, because everyone is going to be waiting on regulato
Kodak picked the wrong end of the market (Score:2)
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Kodak designed the first digital camera, but it was also at least 5 years too early.
Actually it was because Kodak was afraid that it would cut into their film business. At that time Kodak sold film, developing chemicals, paper and had their own processing labs. They also had cameras and flash cubes. So they shelved digital.
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To be fair, it was probably Kodak's safest decision. If they went digital earlier, they may have turned the industry into an electronics-centric battle, which was not their area of expertise. It's hard to just change your spots. I suspect they'd be doomed either way. Their number was simply up.
Near-monopolies have a hard time competing on merit alone when the market changes. They get slow and bloated and there's no sure-shot recipe to debloat a behemoth. Microsoft keeps losing on new products that don't/can
and price is a big factor (Score:2)
Aside from the myth that Lisa and Mac were derived from the PARC visit being thoroughly debunked, there is and was the significant issue of *price* . . .
Yes, the Xerox machine could do amazing things in its time (some of which were derived from the masters thesis of ma c designer Jeff Raskin . . .).
It was also built without a budget.
Selling it at a consumer price was *never* in the cards.
Just look at how few $10k Lisas and NeXTs sold--and the Xerox would have been a multiple of that.
Waymo's situation isn't
That's because Self-Driving Software Sucks (Score:1)
The technology isn't remotely close to being street-ready [blogspot.com], and it will be a while before it is.
Right now it's less a technology than a nice, juicy, billion dollar class action suit waiting to happen...
To paraphrase Ian Malcolm... (Score:2)
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It's Alphabet's 7th company, to be exact.
Change the name "Alphabet". (Score:2)
Editing failure (Score:2)
I should have said: 'Other, similarly bad names for a company: "Spelling" or "Country".'
Who can invent the worst corporate name? (Score:2)
you cant compare (Score:5, Insightful)
The invention of the GUI and mouse to the extreme liability of putting a driverless car on the streets.
It's dangerous enough out there driving sober, or being a pedestrian.
Just too chaotic to toss a machine into the mix.
Re:you cant compare (Score:5, Interesting)
I read the article a few days ago on Ars and couldn't really agree with the author either. Google may or may not fail, but I just don't see many parallels with Xerox.
There is also a lot of talk about building a minimum viable product, with the implication that what Waymo is doing isn't it. But I think it's absolutely one (of many possible MVPs): operating in a limited geofenced area with pre-scanned environments that are very simple in the first place, and don't suffer from various weather events the way other places do. Compare this to driving in downtown Paris or Rome at night in winter.
This is the better starting point than making a delivery cart that crawls on the pavement IMO. Yeah they're behind schedule because it's a really difficult problem that 10 years ago everyone thought was struggling to make work at all. Remember the DARPA challenge where the vehicles couldn't drive in the middle of the desert?
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Sounds like that'd be a lot of fun. Have a fleet of one's own self-driving cars run a long obstacle course with all sorts of weather/environmental conditions. Different teams/companies could compete to see who can get all the cars the finishing line without crashes. Of course one team will be all humans. The final test will be mixing all the teams that placed (except not the humans) to see how well they all do aga
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There is also a lot of talk about building a minimum viable product, with the implication that what Waymo is doing isn't it. But I think it's absolutely one (of many possible MVPs): operating in a limited geofenced area with pre-scanned environments that are very simple in the first place
Usually when people (mostly Silicon Valley people) use the term Minimum Viable Product, what they mean is, "We need to toss some half baked shit out the door as quickly as possible so we can get more funding". You can't do that when it comes to self driving cars because your half baked shit is going to literally kill people. The reason self driving cars seem "real close now" and then a few years later are still "real close now" is because the "Fuck it, let's ship this minimum viable product" is meeting th
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The invention of the GUI and mouse to the extreme liability of putting a driverless car on the streets.
Speak for yourself, I tangled in the cord and nearly choked on an internal trackball.
Re: you cant compare (Score:1)
Liability is the big issue here. Pushing a PC to market has no semblance of the legal liabilities or ethical concerns of self-driving a car.
With that said, companies today are fairly risk adverse because they don't need to take big risks to maintain the consumer/producer status quo. True competition is what inspires innovation and risk taking. We don't see that anymore which is why we have a lot of near functioning self-driving cars but none on the market. No one is ready to bite the bullet and open the leg
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A machine can't be drunk, angry, or irrational. You can see that human drivers are a problem, then you want to project the failings of meat onto a machine.
That bias may be caused by doing your thinking with meat.
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RSI sufferers may disagree. Keyboards spread the load between hands better, and arguably require less body movement if the keyboard-centric interface is designed well.
I expect bots will be driving safer than the average human soon, but bot-involved accidents get heavy negative press. People
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Dangerous enough? Too chaotic? The machine never gets drunk. It never gets tired. It never gets distracted. It does not speed. It does not tailgate. It never takes its eyes off the road. It is implacable, knows no fear and is always hungry.
Er scratch the last three but you get my point. Humans are terrible divers.
Overtaking (Score:1)
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We're not 1 year away from driverless cars. We're not 5 years away from them. We're not even 50 years away from them. It'll NEVER happen, as long as their are non-driverless cars (or tractors, or anything else) on the road.
Well that's the answer isn't it? And why I believe we'll have driverless vehicles on interstates first, on divided highways next and on regular streets last.
Eventually we'll find that all vehicles will be required to have a system that can talk to other vehicles. There will be a time when if your vehicle doesn't have that system you will not be allowed on the interstate. Next will be the automated system to drive on the interstate. Then the insurance companies will force everyone to have such a system to d
Apples and Oranges? (Score:5, Insightful)
Story of the Hare and the Tortoise (Score:2)
I believe Wymo learned that the lawsuit and bad P/R risk is very high in their industry, and thus decided to take the careful approach.
Some slick-sounding startup may look like they are pulling ahead, until their crashes make the news and sink their stock. The careful approach is the best route in my opinion, no pun intended.
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It's also a question of marketing and not losing face (and hence future profits) : Alphabet doesn't want the general public to know how restricted the car's abilities are.
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Ironically, some were bashing "California big-gov't regulation" when Uber moved from CA to AZ after CA officials wanted more safety-related info. Then the AZ collision happened, and most of the same people went silent.
waymo complicated (Score:2)
Creating the PC was game-changing, but creating the self-driving car is a waymo complicated problem than creating the PC. When your PC crashes, no one gets hurt. I think the basic comparison is a poor one. Microsoft and Apple blew past Xerox. Is anyone blowing past Google?
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"Uber tech support . . . it crahed? Have you tried rebooting?" :)
hawk
Failed to market what? (Score:4, Insightful)
They haven't got a finished product yet, how are they supposed to sell it?
erm (Score:3)
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> What is a realistic time frame?
It's a societal change that needs to occur. Current SDC can handle good weather, well-maintained roads, etc, but struggles with ambiguous situations (unprotected left, pedestrian walking on the shoulder). If we, as a society, decided that SDCs are more like trains, and you had best stay out of the way, and anyone getting injured by one is to blame, then we could have SDCs very soon.
There is precedent for this in jaywalking. Look up the history of that term and how the aut
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I hear this all the time, but the fact is that when road conditions are bad people are told to stay off the roads and generally ignore that advice. That's why schools close on snow days and businesses delay opening when the weather is bad.
The fact is that most accidents in bad weather happen because the road conditions are too hazardous for the vehicles out on the roads. A properly programmed self-driving car will simple refuse to go out in weather that is too bad for it to safely drive in. Weather that hum
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The problem is that there isn't one definition of bad weather that applies to all travel. I might be in a vital occupation, and it may be extremely important for me to get into work. I might live paycheck to paycheck and fear being fired if I don't show up. I might have to pick up an important prescription, or see a doctor about something that needs treatment now. I might not have food in the house.
In all these situations, the human can make the call whether to go out or not. If the human has bad ju
Xerox invented the "Personal Computer"? (Score:2)
I would have to consider that a stretch as it might have been available to (Xerox) researchers, but I don't think there was anything available from Xerox was mainstream until the '80s, well after there were a goodly number of small computers and IBM coined the term.
Just did a quick wikipedia search (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto) the Alto wasn't available for sale until 1979 and it cost $32k. I remember a friend of my parent's having a Xerox Star word processor in the early '80s, but that was a
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They invented not the personal computer (that would have been 1971's Kenbak-1 [wikipedia.org] or 1974's Altair 8800 [wikipedia.org]), but "a personal computer with a graphical user interface" which implemented many of the concepts introduced in 1968 [wikipedia.org].
And I agree, the Alto was more of a personal workstation ("personal" meaning a single-user computer, not a multi-user one such as a UNIX or RSX-11 server) than a personal home computer.
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They were generally called 'micro computers'.
Is it a blunder? (Score:3)
Xerox made copy machines, they still make copy machines, and they seem be be doing well enough.
Would the situation have been different if they didn't make Xerox PARC?
A blunder would imply they did something particularly stupid. They didn't. They invested some of their excess money in researching promising technology, millions of things could have gone wrong, turned out it was marketing, well, too bad, but it is not like Xerox completely disappeared. From the point of view of Xerox, it was certainly a failed experiment, but that's a controlled failure, hardly a blunder.
It is like calling the Apple Newton a blunder because the Palm Pilot took most of its success. Yes, it was a failure, but it didn't prevent them from turning it into the resounding success that was the iPhone 20 years later.
No, PARC made billions for Xerox (Score:5, Interesting)
This isn't the same issue at all (Score:2)
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Far more came out of PARC than just the GUI.
They invented ethernet networking, object orriented programing, WYSIWG, bitmap imaging, laser printers, etc (see the wiki link below). Had Xerox utilized all those developments they would have completely controlled the entire computer marketplace and would probably be the biggest computer company in the world right now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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And Xerox got quite a bit from Apple for their PARC visit. Options on 100,000 shares at $10 per share. Given the stock splits between then and now (7x, 2x, 2x, and 2x), and today's share price ($170/share) that's $956 million dollars, if they held it until today.
Self driving isn't going to work (Score:1, Troll)
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It begins with Kodak... (Score:2)
Silicon Valley's most famous blunder? (Score:2)
Osborne Effect (Score:2)
I thought Osborne's blunder was the biggest?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
the Xerox myth (Score:5, Insightful)
With a price to match: ten of thousands of dollars per workstation at that point in time (likely in excess of $100,000 each in 2019 USD). Moreover, you couldn't run this without a dedicated support staff, because it was extremely raw technology.
It wasn't just a decade ahead of its time: it was a full decade ahead of any viable market. Commercializing this beast was a creative act of the first magnitude, all by itself. Xerox had very little expertise to offer in pinching pennies to hit consumer price points.
If they form a joint venture with some Steve Jobs figure down the road, Xerox probably turns into Daddy Bigbucks as the project goes over budget time and time again. You can't license this to a young, upstart, thrifty company like Apple Inc., because Apple certainly did not have the cash on hand at that time to pay hefty licensing fees.
What actually took the market by storm was the IBM PC shitbox, where tiny amounts of memory were suited to an appalling limited operating system. (We're looking at you, MS-DOS.)
How do you win the installed-base software war of the early 1980s, bootstrapping the world with Smalltalk? You can find a price and performance point for a Smalltalk system that will move hundreds of thousands of boxes per month, as the IBM PC later did? Before something else an order of magnitude less sophisticated (at a quarter to one tenth of the price) gains complete market control?
Normally, in technology, polishing something up for market is the other 90%.
But in this case, Xerox was multiple 90% efforts away from a viable sales model, if there was any such model at all.
Probably their best inroad to the future was to build a line of Xerox LaserWriters spanning desktop to enterprise, while pricing the desktop model so attractively that they rarely ever sold the enterprise model (except to displace a fleet of expensive Xerox copiers).
And then somehow you try to cram your LaserWriter authoring software onto any cheap-ass PC client that comes along. Not that IBM wouldn't change the API underneath your hands if you got too big and powerful as a result. So it's better if you own the cheap PC client hardware, too. But this is not a business Xerox could feasibly have entered. $$$ ran in their blood. Good grief, what other kind of company would have a research center with a $100,000 toy stuffed under every desk, ten years ahead of any viable market strategy?
Sure, Xerox built PARC because they were secretly Walmart at heart.
And I've got an Ethernet bridge to sell you, with 16 glorious switched ports of 10BASE5 coax.
Very apt comparison (Score:2)
Its Google (Score:2)
Do you really want to suffer through ad after ad every time you pass a building? Pass a Wendys and have to listen to an ad about their Frosty and maybe a jingle. Pass a McDonalds and they pipe the smell of french fries into the passenger cabin. Pass a state farm agent and have to suffer the ‘like a good neigbor’ jingle. Only later will you discover they buried a clause allowing them to retain all location information where your car went and can sell it to any law enforcement or anyone else witho
Waymo Aren’t In The Car Business (Score:1)