Alphabet's Project Loon says it will run the program with fewer balloons

[aresant]

So the story after the headline is that Alphabet hired a seasoned Satellite Broadband guy, Tom Moore, to run the division and he pushed them to make the project more efficient, and ultimately profitable.

This has Ruth Porat's stamp all over it - they hired her as CFO to bring "financial discipline" to Alphabet, and among those duties was to rein the moonshot stuff into actual businesses, or kill them off.

I actually think this is good news for Alphabet's long term ability to innovate: if they can demonstrate that some of these Moonshots can stand on their own their investors / board will be more apt to provide for freedom to innovate over the long term.

[shmerl]

Slowing down Google Fiber doesn't sound good to me, while it probably comes from the same idea.

[fourthark]

Or they'll just stop doing them.

[hellofunk]

If many years ago, someone told me that a humongous company named Alphabet was thinking about deploying balloons all over the world, I'd have told you a thing or two about having a charming imagination.

[rmason]

This is an absolutely horrible and misleading headline. I was stunned when I read it. I'd just read earlier in the day how the Google scientists had ingeniously figured out how to keep balloons in a single spot for months at a time greatly reducing the projects cost.

So basically Project Loon is still going to blanket the globe with Internet balloons. They're just going to accomplish the same original goal with far fewer balloons.

[greglindahl]

And I'm hearing from my Loonie friends who got laid off. They don't exactly spin this as a positive development.

Yes, being able to use stationary balloons means that the minimum viable project can be a lot smaller. And now it is.

[Animats]

The article seems to indicate that they're downsizing that project to a small experiment, with 10-30 balloons. Sort of like Google Fiber, which had huge hype and very modest deployment. Before that, there was Google Public WiFi, which covered Mountain View, CA badly, and then went into some Starbucks. Maybe Google/Alphabet should stop trying to be a carrier. Their track record in that business is terrible.

[Opossum]

Totally agree. This seems like a clickbait title to cash in on the "yet-another-cancelled-Alphabet-moonshot". It's unfortunate that this particular article about this story is on the front page of HN when there are several others[1] that contradict this headline and actually even provide more information.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/16/how-googles-project-loon-b... http://www.businessinsider.com/project-loon-x-google-alphabe... http://www.recode.net/2017/2/16/14640470/alphabets-balloon-b... https://news.fastcompany.com/alphabet-uses-ai-to-expand-cove... https://www.cnet.com/au/news/google-alphabet-project-loon-la... http://mashable.com/2017/02/16/google-loon-balloon-internet-... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/16/google-pr... http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/afp/article-4233028/Alphabe...

[dang]

We edited the title (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13665941).

[ocdtrekkie]

The difference in perspective is between people who are buying Google's marketing copy as written, and people who are looking at the trend of how they're handling all of their project failures across the board. Every other Google moonshot is dead or dying, and news about Project Loon going south isn't exactly new out of left field.

[mrkgnao]

> Loon engineers turned to the computing power of Google to improve the navigational system

That earned a chuckle.

[samstave]

Maybe musks satellite idea is better and they like it?

[exabrial]

The problem is the speed of light is too slow :( Latency just orbit and back is 50ms+

[jonknee]

That's a poor title considering they've actually had a lot of success with their balloons, so much so that they will be able to use less of them. That means it's actually more likely to happen.

[dang]

Ok, we edited the title to use language from the article. If someone can suggest a better (more accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again.

[usaphp]

By the comments here it looks like 8/10 people on HN just comment without actually reading the article itself. Google aren't scrapping the whole idea of balloons, they just found a better way and faster way to make it a profitable business.

[purple-again]

Reddit trained me to comments first then article if it's worth it. I imagine it's the same for a lot of people. Far too often the top comment is telling you all about why the article you were about to read is complete bullshit.

[ronilan]

It just looks this way because 2/10 manage to guess what the article is about.

[ultrahate]

Slightly tangential, but I'm really interested at the political influence of what space satellites or balloon Internet might do.

I'm considering a scenario where a nefarious, space-capable entity is capable of disabling satellites. Idk I guess from the perhspective of like a civil engineer or something, it seems that an idea where your infrastructure is out of reach or particularly vulnerable seems like a bad idea.

There could be """accidental""" space object collisions, direct attacks on them, or even just unforeseeable maintenance difficulties trying to take care of dozens or hundreds or thousands of objects not immediately available to us, serving an incredibly critical and global backbone of infrastructure, for more or less every industry on earth, or potentially ventures off earth as well.

What an exciting time to be alive, it's like some Twilight Zone Star Trek mashup lately.

Edit: the title of this post is pretty dumb btw, I contend it should be changed to reflect changes in the program, not its abandonment

[jmgao]

> it seems that an idea where your infrastructure is out of reach or particularly vulnerable seems like a bad idea.

Is it better to have your infrastructure where someone with a shovel, or a fishing boats dragging its anchor can cause catastrophic damage?

[exabrial]

I thought this was a cool project

[QuercusMax]

Reading the article is helpful to make informed comments.

[Jam-B]

Who does what with what?

[mturmon]

I would think it would be demoralizing, over time, to work on ambitious projects that turn out to never be fielded. (See also the linked stories on Titan and Wing, e.g. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-11/alphabet-...) One of the draws of working for a bigcorp is that your work has the power of the organization behind it, to help it succeed.

[QuercusMax]

...except that's not what it's saying at all. They're scaling back their initial goal to deploy worldwide because it's working so well in smaller deployments, and the worldwide deployment doesn't make sense.