Which is kind of funny because the original moonshot was a rather predictable thing (build bigger rockets until one is big enough) and success only meant that you could stop spending billions.
If you sit around moonshotting all day and never shipping they're worth $0.
So far, no moonshot by a big corp has paid off. Maybe it's too early, or more likely Google is hoarding tech and filing patents like a rational engineer running a business using machine learning would do, and while that's good for Google it's bad for Society to have so much cool tech locked away in a damp basement when it could be changing lives and being iterated on.
I used to work at Google. I remember the term "moonshot" being thrown around, it started with Larry and Sergey. If there's a definition for what this means, in the Google context, it's in their heads and nowhere else. But the way I interpreted it was "really really ambitious project".
One thing I do remember is that several projects that were described at the time as moonshots did pay off. The one that comes to my mind immediately was Street View. The idea of driving a car with a spherical camera down every road in the world seemed completely insane at the time it was first proposed, the idea it might make money even moreso. But Street View worked, and whenever we switched on SV in a new country usage of Maps in that country permanently increased. It really increased the value of the product, and in turn I guess it also raised ad revenues (or it'd be odd if increased usage didn't correlate with increased ad revenue at all).
There were others I remember. Rewriting the web search indexing system more or less from scratch was a big one. You don't hear much about that, but it was a big risky effort to rewrite the core of your product from scratch.
I think people tend to take past successes of radically ambitious projects for granted. Android was a moonshot at the time. We don't think anything of it now, but it wasn't clear at all it'd be so successful.
What about that mobile phone apple launched in 2007?
This was around before the iPhone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPAQ (HP IPAQ)
Combine that with a phone and update the software and make it designed and you have an iphone.
