I'm glad that the article highlighted how valuable the mapping information is that Google collects. While Uber probably could still run its current operations without Google map data, there is a much smaller probability that they would be able to run a self-driving car service without a highly accurate mapping product. And to build a mapping product is really difficult and expensive. I was surprised when Google starting putting money into mapping the streets because it's a giant effort with major barriers to entry. Nokia bought a company called Navteq that was the clear leader (and basically a monopolist) in driving the streets and collecting the data (they originally supplied data to Google Maps). Navteq supplemented the data with satellite images and other sources, but the roads change often enough that you need people driving on the streets.
So, Uber really needs to start thinking about the mapping aspect. Perhaps they can incent their current drivers to start reporting back all the street info as they pick up their passengers. Of course, this would bring up problems if the drivers eventually realize that this data could be used to replace them. It would be interesting to see uber cars with Google StreetView style cameras on their hoods.
> So, Uber really needs to start thinking about the mapping aspect. Perhaps they can incent their current drivers to start reporting back all the street info as they pick up their passengers. Of course, this would bring up problems if the drivers eventually realize that this data could be used to replace them. It would be interesting to see uber cars with Google StreetView style cameras on their hoods.
Most likely they would either start having drivers drive Uber cars with steetview-esq data collection gear on it, or pay a premium to drivers who mounted a tray on the roof of their vehicle that contained high resolution cameras, a laser scanner, and a controller to process and forward that data back.
I would not be surprised if Uber was looking at acquiring https://www.mapillary.com for this functionality.
Drivers have basically zero power here, so I'm guessing Uber would just update the driver side of the app to always report location. No need to add incentives when you can just make it mandatory with minimum pushback (from Uber's PoV). Assuming they don't already.
I think the self driving car is a tougher problem to solve than the maps. If uber can buy self driving cars, they can make maps on a city by city basis. If you have a pile of money, you can get maps. If you have a pile of money, it's not really clear you can get an autonomous car. I'm the first to shout they're coming - but they aren't here yet.
Self driving cars will be available to purchase from multiple manufacturers, and those manufacturers will have to deal with the mapping issues. Accordingly, while Google will be a formidable and perhaps dominant competitor in this space, I don't see mapping as the deciding factor here. The fact that Android, with its massive install base, will likely come with Google's service built in seems much more likely to help them destroy competitors.
Uber is already pretty much limited to major metropolitan areas, so maybe Uber would really only need map data in these consolidated areas. At least to start.
One possibility, is that if they can get good enough inital mapping data, and good enough self-driving cars, the cars could update the mapping data while they're working.
That's a lot of trust on the self-driving cars, though.
Uber can simply license their maps from various third parties the same way every car company does today for their GPS.
Google has added some decent additions to Google Maps but really 95% of what they had they purchased. For example Whereis/Yellow Pages data here in Australia.
So much criticism of Google! My question: Why on earth would Google want to cede any significant chunk of the personal transport value stream to Uber - or acquire them at a $40Bil+ valuation - when the main (only?) semi-uniquely valuable thing Uber have (a large network of drivers) is worth approximately zero dollars in a self-driving vehicle scenario. Uber are valuable and effective in a human-driven vehicle model because they have achieved critical mass in the pool of human drivers on their network, and are in a position to grow that pool. In a self driving vehicle model critical mass of vehicles/drivers is available to anyone with a decent line of credit.
The value is only partially in the driver base. Drivers are tangible. But the true value is intangible.
There is enormous brand value in thinking "I'll get an Uber" as a synonym for "I'll get a taxi, but right what I need it, and it probably will smell better." There is value of having that app on the phone, with credit card # already in place.
But perhaps more important is that Uber is building a graph of everyone who wants to go somewhere at any point in time. (And where they all wanted to go in the past) This is what's worth $40 billion. If two companies have automatic cars, the one who knows where they want to go wins.
Perhaps Google wanted to buy at $2 billion or $5, but not at $40.
As much as I am also inclined to jump on the bandwagon to chastize Google for having approaching zero capacity to compete with Uber in this space, I know that they are moving on this for the same reason that Uber is working on developing their own autonomous / self driving vehicles.
As fun as the Uber-jerking is, the future, if not sabotaged by all the many different interests that have high stakes in doing so, will be one where there are few if any real competitors to one monopolistic offerer of autonomous transportation services. Obviously Uber wants to be that one monopoly and I expect they will continue with their dirty tricks to get there, but others will also try to knock the king from the hill before he can complete his castle. Lyft, Curb, now Google, they will all try to beat Uber to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
My inner paranoid finds this interesting from the perspective of Google entering yet another domain where they have high accuracy data on the present/future whereabouts and private concerns of a large number of people.. add it to the hundred other properties they maintain that appear to have no direct business value other than capturing masses of sensitive data that was previously nicely decentralized and private.
Can't book a flight (ITA), order a taxi (this), book a hotel or chat with a friend (Gmail), or pay for dinner (Wallet) without generating an activity log with a single company.
Even if (and perhaps even probably) Google weren't doing this intentionally, they've already demonstrated through failing to encrypt their inter-DC connections how they're becoming a massive single point of failure (remember Snowden showed us the NSA were tapping Google's internal network already). Whether the end result is an intelligence service tap, or some legislative measure affecting the company done in the open, I'll simply never be comfortable with one company concentrating so much personal data affecting so many people.
Excessive. You can call an airline, hotel or taxi company directly, text your friends or pay for dinner with cash. Your inner paranoid is drawn to the convenience of the services that google offers. If you don't want one company to have a lot of information about you, then don't use that company for everything.
Google loves data. But generally in the aggregate, not the personal. I've yet to see anything even remotely creepy of any kind from google advertising. "Hey karmacondon, we saw that you recently booked a trip to las vegas, took a self-driving cab to the Bunny Ranch and used your Google Wallet to pay for two hours with someone named 'Bubbles'. Can we interest you in some anti-itch creme?". That kind of personal intrusion just doesn't match anything I've seen from Google, and until that day comes I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
MasterCard and Visa know more about you than Google ever will. You can't book a flight or check into a hotel without using a credit card, which is directly attached to your name and is trivially subpoenable. If you're really worried, there are ways to live a cash only existence, but it isn't easy. Some level of trust is required to live in modern society. It's good to be skeptical, but it always comes down to the level of inconvenience you're willing to trade for privacy.
I wonder if eventually NSA will get massive layoffs because much of what they'd do would be redundant, and for 80 percent of the stuff they want they could just ask/hack Google. The other 20 percent employees will remain for users of Google competitors and more targeted spying. So essentially 80 percent of NSA's "intelligence" would be outsourced to Google (for free).
i assume you've read the recent article by nafeez ahmed from vice, etc, about how google's search algorithms were funded via the NSF/CIA/NSA for 2 years before google ever existed and that sergey reported to someone working for the CIA's ORD for that period.
Uber have struck me before as a bigger potential headache for Google than even Facebook were/are, and I suspect this is all an effort to acquire them and drive the price down.
There is something about the automated dispatch at giant scale business which overlaps with the search as interface idea. "Get me to [wherever]" is a natural extension of what you might do after searching. Furthermore, the act of finding a driver is itself a search. Feed the driver information back into search and it gets entertaining, with queries like "What are the restaurants right now with 80% rating, tables available and will cost me less than $20 to get to?" That's a query you can only answer with the driver and price data. As such Uber have the hard bit and can grow the rest, Google face a move into a physical world full of people, which is pretty much their Achilles heel.
Facebook was viewed as a threat to Google for two primary reasons:
- Facebook had access to tremendous amounts of personal information, and it was assumed they could leverage this data to improve ads and search and beat Google at their own game.
- Everyone sat at their desktop computer staring at Facebook for hours on end, making it valuable ad real estate. Again, this cut into Google's core business.
So is Uber a comparable headache for Google? I don't see Uber as being a threat to their core business (their business is ads, not search; search just happens to be their best channel for ad delivery). Arguably it provides valuable information to improve their ad targeting, but it seems like a huge investment for relatively little payout in that regard.
My guess is that it's a natural extension of their work on self-driving cars. People have identified how Uber would be natural fit for self-driving cars. But I doubt Google wants to be reliant on a third-party company with reputation problems to introduce these cars to the world. That would introduce too many variables. So they're cutting out the middle man and doing it themselves, at least at first.
So how does this impact advertising? A nation-wide or global fleet of automated, networked cars would obviously produce a glut of valuable information (arguably their Uber-clone would too, but an automated solution could be taken to another scale). But really, I think the self-driving car is a disruptive enough technology that it could be completely orthogonal to their core business and still worth pursuing.
On a side note, can we agree yet that Facebook is quickly fading into irrelevance? It seems to have two important properties left (neither of which they developed): WhatsApp and Instagram. WhatsApp gives Facebook as much value as AIM gave AOL in its later years (which is to say, not enough to justify the company's size and market capitalization). Instagram took Facebook's best use case (looking at your friends' photos) and stripped away everything that made the experience suck: ads and Farmville (in other words, Facebook's business model).
This is very spot on. Savvy advertisers are already rubbing their hands, waiting for the day when they can get access to Uber data. Imagine if one can send a message/notification to the people heading towards certain restaurants in Uber cars, asking "How about visiting my place instead, first drink and dessert is on the house :)"
Google seems unable to have a partner without eventually entering their market and becoming enemies. Apple before Android, Twitter before Google+ - I guess it's inevitable with how many different industries Google tries to tackle.
I think if this service is entirely defined by autonomous vehicles it's really a complete different service than Uber. No more driver ratings or passenger ratings, all the same car type, and it's own vast legal challenges
I noted back in 2008 how this was an interesting side effect of Google's empowerment policy.
The way it occurred was that anyone of moderate level inside of Google could start a project involving some outside company. This was seductively easy because those companies always wanted the validation that came from working with Google. But the person could be just a run of the mill senior engineer type (of which there were many).
So this engineer and this outside partner start putting together a mashup, and it goes well. The partner is loving the Google traffic and the senior engineer inside of Google is thinking "Wow, this is going to look great on my next promotion request." So it grows and grows, largely unnoticed by the folks who are really the movers and shakers in Google.
Then it continues to go well, the engineer has recruited a couple more Googlers to help her work on the project and it hits an tipping point. It really needs a full time project manager and the amount of resources inside the Google cloud it is using has gotten to the point where you needed to allocate them specifically. Since everyone likes success this goes swimmingly and now lots of people in the world are using this mashup service. At that point it gets the attention of the 'big boys'.
What happens next is an interesting reverse slicing of the project to figure out what its business model is, how much revenue it is generating, how much it could generate. I always wondered, but never had confirmed if somewhere there was a meeting to look at these and decide on next steps.
One of the outcomes of this noticing could be "Hmmm, we have an advantage/key technology and could do this better if we recast this as a Google Product rather than being a provider to this Partner's product." And then there is some announcement of this new product initiative at Google and how cool it is going to be. Meanwhile the original partner now realized that Google isn't a partner anymore, rather they are at best a competitor and at worst a threat to their existence. At that point, depending on their resources they start scrambling to reduce their dependency on Google services in order to avoid that future.
I think for most people this is understood as a possible 'success' outcome of working with Google.
I'm picturing that you can order the Google autonomous car that has a 42" TV screen, a hot tub, and a magnum of champagne.
Or the stretch limo.
Or a flatbed truck. Maybe one without a passenger compartment.
Picture "PODS." Portable On-Demand Storage. Except the thing just drives to your house.
Picture ordering "Lightning McQueen" for your kid's birthday party. He shows up, and someone is doing the "Talk With Crush" thing, remotely animating Lightning's eyes, etc.
Picture ordering "Herbie The Love Bug" to drive your kid and his date to prom.
Or ordering the DeLorean from Back to the Future. Or the A-Team van. Or KITT.
Or a motor-home / RV.
Or a giant truck filled with Arcade Machines. Again, for corporate parties.
Or a portable kitchen. Stocked with ingredients you pick. Great for outdoor parties at parks, tail-gating, etc.
Or a micro-brew / mini-bar. Whatever bottles you open, you pay for. Stocked blender, ice, brews on tap, etc.
Cripes, if you want to test-drive a car, having one that can autonomously show up at your work, or home... Not that you'd necessarily buy an autonomous one, but the idea of bringing the dealership to you?
Or ordering a snow-plow. No driver. You click a button, pay $10, and your driveway gets plowed.
Or getting a Student Driver car. It sits there watching your kid learn to drive, and saves their ass if they do anything dumb. Gives them a report card. Lets you know how they're doing.
Or ordering a Sleeper car. Shows up at my house at 9 pm, and drives me to Chicago by 8 am. I'd order one every weekend.
This is not at all a surprise, and I fully expect Amazon to also ultimately enter this space. (I have no insider knowledge of either company.) It's amazing to me how many people think that Uber is somehow building a deep moat when these other companies (Google, Amazon, etc.) have a much deeper connection with their customers -- to say nothing of the data that have collected. Given perfect rider competition and (especially) perfect driver competition, how does the advantage not lie with the established company and brand? Given Uber's nose-bleed valuation, I suspect that they may become the Webvan-esque poster child of this bubble: visionary, but ultimately a ludicrous valuation and absurd misallocation of capital that was obvious to all only in retrospect.
If Google competes directly with a company they are invested in via GV they're going to really damage the reputation of GV. Why would you accept investment from them if they're going to get access to your private info and then turn around and screw you.
I don't have insider knowledge, but I believe Google claims that there's a wall between Google and GV, and they act completely independently. This makes sense to me -- otherwise, no one would pitch ideas to GV that Google might one day implement (i.e. basically all ideas that have a software angle).
To me, if Google uses insider knowledge to copy Uber, then that would be huge mistake and credibility killer; if they want to build up their own competitor from scratch without any insider knowledge, then that's their business.
Many people here are suggesting that Google views Uber as a threat or a competitor. My take is that (a) Google wants to follow through on its self-driving car experiment, (b) public transportation would be a natural fit this product, and (c) Google doesn't want to be reliant on Uber, Lyft, or any other middleman for introducing self-driving car to the word. Initially, it will be a tightly-controlled roll-out that will eliminate as many variables and risk factors as possible.
This is their way of getting a head start in that direction, and smoothing the transition of the technology to partners like Uber down the road.
Google is the only company with a potential edge over Uber right now. The point in time at which self-driving cars are usable by the the public is the only visible inflection point where Uber's hegemony is truly threatened.
(edit) The article suggest self driving cars, and by extension Google's ridesharing service won't be ready for 2-5 more years.
I'm really surprised. G ventures puts ton of money into uber, uber makes a huge pre order for google cars, uber gets put into google maps.
And now this. I guess google is like "well we got the hard part, self driving cars. Why not just go after this ourselves?"
What is the thing google really wants? Is it more valuable to try to directly monetize all this vehicle traffic, or be the platform every else uses? Google could set up rev share, get access to all the vehicle data (even if they don't use google maps), and set google as default software in the car web experience.
It seems greedy, arrogant, and unaligned with their core ways of making money. They're trying to be vertically integrated player which can work if you control all supply but once Google introduces the tech how long is it going to take for a rival to copy, parents aside?
Am I the only one thinking a targeted convergence with driverless cars down the road (no pun intended)? Once you remove the largest cost factor (the human), does pricing reduce to $.56/mi (or whatever the Standard Mileage Rate, or derivative thereof, is at the time).
Added with Express to overload deliveries to maximize utility (maybe offer riders a discount if they can make an express stop along the way...)
I'm sure this has been discussed on a different (uber/lyft) thread but being a nyc'er and amazed at the prices of taxi medallions through the years, I'm glad to see this bubble finally popping (prices are still insane mind you)!-- now if we can do the same for the cost of higher education... With google coming into the fray, this can only drop further.
Out of curiosity, are there any companies in previous history that model the approach Google has done thus far, such as expanding into a vast amount of industries and successfully becoming a contender in those?
Anyway, I'm sure Google has enough money to support any failures (this point was made in a previous article about the multi-tool card). But, in the long run, how will Google prevent itself from appearing to look like a monopoly (such as Apple's iPhones in the earlier days)?
> David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer and senior vice president of corporate development, joined the Uber board of directors in 2013, and has served on it ever since.
Not super related to this story, but I always have to wonder: why do powerful people join boards? What's in it for them? It seems like an awful lot of work, responsibility, and potential for conflict of interest. What do board members get out of it?
I misread the headline; I actually think that all big companies should attempt to set up their own competitor (with a very small flat team, but resources, users, internal datasets etc.). It would be a big investment but would cement monopoly positions and make it even harder for competitors to gain any sort of traction.
A new search engine from Google written with different goals and views of how things should be done would be very interesting and probably gain a good portion of Bing and Yahoo! Users in the process. This applies to a lot of businesses of course.
An Uber from Google could also be great too but their once clear idea of what they are is getting fragmented and that'll show in the implementation and UX of Google Cabs.
[+] [-] softdev12|11 years ago|reply
So, Uber really needs to start thinking about the mapping aspect. Perhaps they can incent their current drivers to start reporting back all the street info as they pick up their passengers. Of course, this would bring up problems if the drivers eventually realize that this data could be used to replace them. It would be interesting to see uber cars with Google StreetView style cameras on their hoods.
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|11 years ago|reply
Most likely they would either start having drivers drive Uber cars with steetview-esq data collection gear on it, or pay a premium to drivers who mounted a tray on the roof of their vehicle that contained high resolution cameras, a laser scanner, and a controller to process and forward that data back.
I would not be surprised if Uber was looking at acquiring https://www.mapillary.com for this functionality.
[+] [-] pyrocat|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jfoutz|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] downandout|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TenJack|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jlarocco|11 years ago|reply
That's a lot of trust on the self-driving cars, though.
[+] [-] maxerickson|11 years ago|reply
Waze demonstrated how well a crowd sourcing effort can work.
It's also apparently possible for a small team to start doing sign recognition:
http://blog.mapillary.com/update/2015/01/27/traffic-signs.ht...
[+] [-] Vik1ng|11 years ago|reply
There is of course still the routing part.
[+] [-] avodonosov|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] threeseed|11 years ago|reply
Google has added some decent additions to Google Maps but really 95% of what they had they purchased. For example Whereis/Yellow Pages data here in Australia.
[+] [-] dojomouse|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathattack|11 years ago|reply
There is enormous brand value in thinking "I'll get an Uber" as a synonym for "I'll get a taxi, but right what I need it, and it probably will smell better." There is value of having that app on the phone, with credit card # already in place.
But perhaps more important is that Uber is building a graph of everyone who wants to go somewhere at any point in time. (And where they all wanted to go in the past) This is what's worth $40 billion. If two companies have automatic cars, the one who knows where they want to go wins.
Perhaps Google wanted to buy at $2 billion or $5, but not at $40.
[+] [-] wahsd|11 years ago|reply
As fun as the Uber-jerking is, the future, if not sabotaged by all the many different interests that have high stakes in doing so, will be one where there are few if any real competitors to one monopolistic offerer of autonomous transportation services. Obviously Uber wants to be that one monopoly and I expect they will continue with their dirty tricks to get there, but others will also try to knock the king from the hill before he can complete his castle. Lyft, Curb, now Google, they will all try to beat Uber to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
[+] [-] roskilli|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hosay123|11 years ago|reply
Can't book a flight (ITA), order a taxi (this), book a hotel or chat with a friend (Gmail), or pay for dinner (Wallet) without generating an activity log with a single company.
Even if (and perhaps even probably) Google weren't doing this intentionally, they've already demonstrated through failing to encrypt their inter-DC connections how they're becoming a massive single point of failure (remember Snowden showed us the NSA were tapping Google's internal network already). Whether the end result is an intelligence service tap, or some legislative measure affecting the company done in the open, I'll simply never be comfortable with one company concentrating so much personal data affecting so many people.
[+] [-] thrownaway2424|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karmacondon|11 years ago|reply
Google loves data. But generally in the aggregate, not the personal. I've yet to see anything even remotely creepy of any kind from google advertising. "Hey karmacondon, we saw that you recently booked a trip to las vegas, took a self-driving cab to the Bunny Ranch and used your Google Wallet to pay for two hours with someone named 'Bubbles'. Can we interest you in some anti-itch creme?". That kind of personal intrusion just doesn't match anything I've seen from Google, and until that day comes I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
MasterCard and Visa know more about you than Google ever will. You can't book a flight or check into a hotel without using a credit card, which is directly attached to your name and is trivially subpoenable. If you're really worried, there are ways to live a cash only existence, but it isn't easy. Some level of trust is required to live in modern society. It's good to be skeptical, but it always comes down to the level of inconvenience you're willing to trade for privacy.
[+] [-] api|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] higherpurpose|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] conformal|11 years ago|reply
https://medium.com/@NafeezAhmed/how-the-cia-made-google-e836...
if you haven't read this, it's a long but great read.
the best thing google ever did was create go (golang). huge props to robert griesemer, rob pike and ken thompson for getting it all going.
[+] [-] fidotron|11 years ago|reply
There is something about the automated dispatch at giant scale business which overlaps with the search as interface idea. "Get me to [wherever]" is a natural extension of what you might do after searching. Furthermore, the act of finding a driver is itself a search. Feed the driver information back into search and it gets entertaining, with queries like "What are the restaurants right now with 80% rating, tables available and will cost me less than $20 to get to?" That's a query you can only answer with the driver and price data. As such Uber have the hard bit and can grow the rest, Google face a move into a physical world full of people, which is pretty much their Achilles heel.
[+] [-] billsimpson|11 years ago|reply
- Facebook had access to tremendous amounts of personal information, and it was assumed they could leverage this data to improve ads and search and beat Google at their own game.
- Everyone sat at their desktop computer staring at Facebook for hours on end, making it valuable ad real estate. Again, this cut into Google's core business.
So is Uber a comparable headache for Google? I don't see Uber as being a threat to their core business (their business is ads, not search; search just happens to be their best channel for ad delivery). Arguably it provides valuable information to improve their ad targeting, but it seems like a huge investment for relatively little payout in that regard.
My guess is that it's a natural extension of their work on self-driving cars. People have identified how Uber would be natural fit for self-driving cars. But I doubt Google wants to be reliant on a third-party company with reputation problems to introduce these cars to the world. That would introduce too many variables. So they're cutting out the middle man and doing it themselves, at least at first.
So how does this impact advertising? A nation-wide or global fleet of automated, networked cars would obviously produce a glut of valuable information (arguably their Uber-clone would too, but an automated solution could be taken to another scale). But really, I think the self-driving car is a disruptive enough technology that it could be completely orthogonal to their core business and still worth pursuing.
On a side note, can we agree yet that Facebook is quickly fading into irrelevance? It seems to have two important properties left (neither of which they developed): WhatsApp and Instagram. WhatsApp gives Facebook as much value as AIM gave AOL in its later years (which is to say, not enough to justify the company's size and market capitalization). Instagram took Facebook's best use case (looking at your friends' photos) and stripped away everything that made the experience suck: ads and Farmville (in other words, Facebook's business model).
I like what they're doing with React though.
[+] [-] boomzilla|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Vermeulen|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|11 years ago|reply
The way it occurred was that anyone of moderate level inside of Google could start a project involving some outside company. This was seductively easy because those companies always wanted the validation that came from working with Google. But the person could be just a run of the mill senior engineer type (of which there were many).
So this engineer and this outside partner start putting together a mashup, and it goes well. The partner is loving the Google traffic and the senior engineer inside of Google is thinking "Wow, this is going to look great on my next promotion request." So it grows and grows, largely unnoticed by the folks who are really the movers and shakers in Google.
Then it continues to go well, the engineer has recruited a couple more Googlers to help her work on the project and it hits an tipping point. It really needs a full time project manager and the amount of resources inside the Google cloud it is using has gotten to the point where you needed to allocate them specifically. Since everyone likes success this goes swimmingly and now lots of people in the world are using this mashup service. At that point it gets the attention of the 'big boys'.
What happens next is an interesting reverse slicing of the project to figure out what its business model is, how much revenue it is generating, how much it could generate. I always wondered, but never had confirmed if somewhere there was a meeting to look at these and decide on next steps.
One of the outcomes of this noticing could be "Hmmm, we have an advantage/key technology and could do this better if we recast this as a Google Product rather than being a provider to this Partner's product." And then there is some announcement of this new product initiative at Google and how cool it is going to be. Meanwhile the original partner now realized that Google isn't a partner anymore, rather they are at best a competitor and at worst a threat to their existence. At that point, depending on their resources they start scrambling to reduce their dependency on Google services in order to avoid that future.
I think for most people this is understood as a possible 'success' outcome of working with Google.
[+] [-] VikingCoder|11 years ago|reply
I can't imagine why you think this.
I'm picturing that you can order the Google autonomous car that has a 42" TV screen, a hot tub, and a magnum of champagne.
Or the stretch limo.
Or a flatbed truck. Maybe one without a passenger compartment.
Picture "PODS." Portable On-Demand Storage. Except the thing just drives to your house.
Picture ordering "Lightning McQueen" for your kid's birthday party. He shows up, and someone is doing the "Talk With Crush" thing, remotely animating Lightning's eyes, etc.
Picture ordering "Herbie The Love Bug" to drive your kid and his date to prom.
Or ordering the DeLorean from Back to the Future. Or the A-Team van. Or KITT.
Or a motor-home / RV.
Or a giant truck filled with Arcade Machines. Again, for corporate parties.
Or a portable kitchen. Stocked with ingredients you pick. Great for outdoor parties at parks, tail-gating, etc.
Or a micro-brew / mini-bar. Whatever bottles you open, you pay for. Stocked blender, ice, brews on tap, etc.
Cripes, if you want to test-drive a car, having one that can autonomously show up at your work, or home... Not that you'd necessarily buy an autonomous one, but the idea of bringing the dealership to you?
Or ordering a snow-plow. No driver. You click a button, pay $10, and your driveway gets plowed.
Or getting a Student Driver car. It sits there watching your kid learn to drive, and saves their ass if they do anything dumb. Gives them a report card. Lets you know how they're doing.
Or ordering a Sleeper car. Shows up at my house at 9 pm, and drives me to Chicago by 8 am. I'd order one every weekend.
[+] [-] bcantrill|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k-mcgrady|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lpolovets|11 years ago|reply
To me, if Google uses insider knowledge to copy Uber, then that would be huge mistake and credibility killer; if they want to build up their own competitor from scratch without any insider knowledge, then that's their business.
[+] [-] wmeredith|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MediaSquirrel|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] username223|11 years ago|reply
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/12/books/money-and-power-abou...
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] billsimpson|11 years ago|reply
This is their way of getting a head start in that direction, and smoothing the transition of the technology to partners like Uber down the road.
[+] [-] ajju|11 years ago|reply
(edit) The article suggest self driving cars, and by extension Google's ridesharing service won't be ready for 2-5 more years.
[+] [-] xivzgrev|11 years ago|reply
And now this. I guess google is like "well we got the hard part, self driving cars. Why not just go after this ourselves?"
What is the thing google really wants? Is it more valuable to try to directly monetize all this vehicle traffic, or be the platform every else uses? Google could set up rev share, get access to all the vehicle data (even if they don't use google maps), and set google as default software in the car web experience.
It seems greedy, arrogant, and unaligned with their core ways of making money. They're trying to be vertically integrated player which can work if you control all supply but once Google introduces the tech how long is it going to take for a rival to copy, parents aside?
[+] [-] rottyguy|11 years ago|reply
Added with Express to overload deliveries to maximize utility (maybe offer riders a discount if they can make an express stop along the way...)
[+] [-] nilkn|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] relaxatorium|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bhaumik|11 years ago|reply
"@business We think you'll find Uber and Lyft work quite well. We use them all the time."
https://twitter.com/google/status/562392039459807232
[+] [-] geoffwoo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sushirain|11 years ago|reply
* "Chris Urmson of Google has said that the lidar technology cannot spot potholes or humans, such as a police officer, signaling the car to stop." [1]
* "Another big problem for Google is the current cost of its driverless car, which is reportedly outfitted with a whopping $250,000 in equipment." [2]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_driverless_car
[2] http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/01/21/3-reasons-g...
[+] [-] rottyguy|11 years ago|reply
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/08/upshot/new-york-city-taxi-...
[+] [-] wkcamp|11 years ago|reply
Anyway, I'm sure Google has enough money to support any failures (this point was made in a previous article about the multi-tool card). But, in the long run, how will Google prevent itself from appearing to look like a monopoly (such as Apple's iPhones in the earlier days)?
[+] [-] don_draper|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haberman|11 years ago|reply
Not super related to this story, but I always have to wonder: why do powerful people join boards? What's in it for them? It seems like an awful lot of work, responsibility, and potential for conflict of interest. What do board members get out of it?
[+] [-] andy_ppp|11 years ago|reply
A new search engine from Google written with different goals and views of how things should be done would be very interesting and probably gain a good portion of Bing and Yahoo! Users in the process. This applies to a lot of businesses of course.
An Uber from Google could also be great too but their once clear idea of what they are is getting fragmented and that'll show in the implementation and UX of Google Cabs.