Did any of their moonshots really hit the mark or even come close?
And this is where I think google (and many big companies) fail. Technologically, Loons worked. I did not believe it when I read about those, but looking at the trajectories in public ADS-B data (those balloons self-advertise) it is clear that they move as designed, doing 2D positioning using only vertical control and can stay afloat for months. Wow! Mission accomplished. But commercially, nothing happened.
I do not know if it was because business types were not sold on it and did not build a commercial case; did the technical team simply live in their own bubble not talking to the outside; something else? But a 10-year "moonshot" project that pans out technologically and fails commercially indicates that the right hand ("internal VC") does not know or care what the left hand (techies) is doing, which is the problem at the company. My 2c.
Was there really ever anything more?
When the US took a moon shot, we actually made it to the dann moon. It was very expensive and risky and lives were lost. But we committed ourselves and accomplished the goal no matter what it took.
I hope that these Alphabet projects aren't just pr / recruiting investments disguised as big ideas about the future.
The technology worked. It was, in fact, totally possible to build solar-powered, balloon-borne LTE base stations that provided internet access directly to handheld phones.
But in the end, it was just a fundamentally flawed idea. Satellites don't pop and fall out of the sky. Balloons do, frequently.
It's really hard to be a public company and to take big risks like this. The Apollo Program never would have worked as a startup or public company.
I personally had hoped they told analysts that taking large bets for often no financial outcome is just who Alphabet are - but they folded to the Wall St pressure
I just choked on my Tea. Did you perhaps miss the fact they stole Loon technology from a company they were in talks of acquiring? got sued, lost, and finally quietly settled?
https://www.wired.com/story/the-lawsuit-that-could-pop-alpha...
https://www.law.com/therecorder/2019/07/29/google-settles-ip...
it’s just corporate PR so people can fawn over them like your post and want to work there or use their products
Capturing eyeballs and mindshare before anyone else can is hardly charitable. It was 100% for the benefit of themselves, and everyone knows it. Facebook have tried the same scam.
Could a startup set up a commercial balloon based mesh network without running into patents now held by google? Probably not.
THIS is the problem with these "skunkworks" type projects from megacorps. They suck all the air out of the room and prevent others from innovating.
Loon didn't fail, Google/Alphabet just decided they were going to discontinue funding. Now they hold a pool of patents they don't intend to do anything with. Now they will point that funding elsewhere and do the same.
> Loon didn't fail, Google/Alphabet just decided they were going to discontinue funding. Now they hold a pool of patents they don't intend to do anything with. Now they will point that funding elsewhere and do the same.
They did EXACTLY what you are asking for the last X project that was sunset.
From https://x.company/projects/makani/:
> In 2020 Makani’s journey as a company came to an end. To share the lessons and insights the Makani team gained from their 13 year journey developing an entirely new kind of wind energy technology, the team created The Energy Kite Collection, a portfolio of resources including a technical report, Makani’s entire avionics, flight controls and simulation code repositories, flight logs for every crosswind flight of the M600 prototype, technical videos, a new simulation tool called KiteFAST created with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and a non-assertion pledge for the free use of Makani’s worldwide patent portfolio.
However, this is certainly not the norm. Lets see if it holds true for Loon.
For example, if you wanted to use a laser link to communicate between two ground-tethered weather balloons, you would need to account for the movements of the balloons to correct the link alignment. Lo and behold, first patent on the list (https://loon.com/legal/patents/) is for that exact thing (https://patents.google.com/patent/US8634974B2/en).
What about control the descent of a balloon by letting out some of the gas? You know, like flight balloons use, but "with a computer". Yep, patent for that too.
LOADS of the patents are basically "mesh network but with ballons"
These are obvious things you would need to do, and yet they are patented.
In short, they took away the ability to do ANY balloon based communications - not just a stratospheric global mesh network of current maneuvering autonomous balloons.
Of course, this shit shouldnt be permitted. The patent system is broken, as we often discuss around here.
IMHO, if these megacorps had ANY honour, they would release all patents to public domain - with revocation clause from another entity if that entity creates a derivative patent without same license. THAT is how to foster innovation - everything else should be a trade secret.
They dont own any patents, they stole the tech from a startup, got sued, lost (patents) and finally had to settle.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-lawsuit-that-could-pop-alpha...
https://www.law.com/therecorder/2019/07/29/google-settles-ip...
I know Google gets hate for shutting things down, but they have hundreds of products – I can't think of any other tech company with such a wide range of products. They make bets, and with bets comes a certain amount of failure. I'd guess they have a better "success" rate than, say, YC.
(Ugh, I hate defending Google, but alas)
But I think Gmail and Maps were fairly innovative products when they came up. Both in terms of "wow I didn't think this would be possible before" and being viable businesses.
Then they served their real function: marketing
Loon is not competitive in a world with Starlink (even without Starlink it seems).
The business didn’t make strategic sense.
I still really liked their original goal of loon for all and the first video they made for it: https://youtu.be/m96tYpEk1Ao
It’s a little sad they had to downsize and give up. I guess Licklider was right to title the original internet paper an “intergalactic computer network”.
Musk started with interplanetary goals and he’ll at least end up with one that covers the earth.
Loon for all started too small.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergalactic_Computer_Network
—-
Related:
But yes, you’re right that being able to use LTE and existing phone radios was a point in loon’s favor.
But, even if so, look at Google Fiber. Google benefits from networking build out, regardless of if they're providing the network; it's just as good for them if someone else builds the network. If starlink can fill the niche that Loon filled, that works just as well for Google, on someone else's capex/opex.
Or if the freespace optics they worked on for Loon can reduce backhaul costs for traditional cell towers, that might help get more deployed in areas that don't have connectivity; which again works well for Google.
The strategic failure was not recognizing that starlink’s approach to the problem made way more sense.
They didn’t see that as the existential threat it was.
Instead they downsized their implementation to running the network over poor countries and hand waved a bit about being able to provide connectivity in congested areas.
Loon has no viable future in a world with starlink.
When I look at Google X and bunch of modern corporate labs (Lab 126, Facebook probably has something, Intel Labs (drones!), Microsoft Labs), I see a whole lotta hoo haa about tech innovation, but nothing with a long term vision of integration, capitalization and sustenance. No sense of practicality and pragmatism. May be Loon is a way to make Google an internet company (ISP), I could be wrong but as an outsider, it feels like a PR stunt than anything else.
Highly recommend this book.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Factory-Great-American-Innovatio...
Similarly Google has had huge contributions on "research" focused on their core problems: MapReduce, BigTable, Borg, BERT, etc.
And if it have worked reliably and affordably, they probably could have found some way to monetize it.
Oh, and Fire TV, and Echo.
Yeah, Lab 126 definitely did its job. Literally every product integrates is a core part of the Amazon experience.
I get the basic idea, that you try lots of big ambitious projects, and most of them will fail but some will hopefully stick; but how do you distinguish between a 5% success rate and a 1% rate, say?
Deep pockets and the willingness to place big long-term and medium-term bets is crucial, but it’s not everything you need. Does Google X have processes, people, notable successes they can point to to show that they really are good at moonshots?
https://storage.googleapis.com/x-prod.appspot.com/files/Gimb...
I think their self-driving cars project is probably what X could be at its peak, incredibly challenging projects, high profit potential, well financed.
Projects like loon seem more like a project that a university would get grant funding to finance.
Did you know that his grandfather was Edward Teller, inventor of the hydrogen bomb? In one of Edward's final contributions [1], he mathematically modeled the cost and effect of pumping sulfur-based compounds into the upper atmosphere to reduce runaway feedback loops of global warming. On paper, it works. Solving global climate change is a real moonshot -- but too bad it is so taboo, because it could dramatically benefit all life on earth, if done right. Looks like balloons could be helpful for the implementation, too [2]
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160127185550/https://e-reports...
I don't really understand - wasn't the whole premise of Google X and their "Other Bets" that "Google has deep pockets. Let's use this to explore radically big ideas, that are ahead of their time, and let the world catch up to them?"
Bringing "abundant, affordable Internet access, not just to the next billion, but to the last billion" is clearly an investment. You bring them the internet. You spur them to achieve great things. Then you reap the financial rewards.
But that's not a 10-year plan, that's a 20-50-100 year plan. But, there's no reason to think that Google couldn't think like a 20-50-100 year company if they tried.
So what happened? Did they really think that they were going to make money from the poorest 1B people on the planet BEFORE they brought them ubiquitous internet and helped them use that internet to improve their quality of life?
It looks to me like Google made a couple of bets over the last 10 years on different paths to getting worldwide internet access.
One path is looking more promising than the other, so they're culling now.
I never understood it. It is expensive to keep things fighting gravity. The only way to avoid that is to either a) not put them up above the earth, or b) put them high enough that gravity isn't much of a force, like low earth orbit.
It doesn't take a genius to understand that, but it took Elon Musk to prove it.
Meanwhile... Google launched balloons.
See also: FB project Aquila.
> Sadly, despite the team’s groundbreaking technical achievements over the last 9 years — ... — the road to commercial viability has proven much longer and riskier than hoped.
Focus is on the technical achievements, never mind if anyone ever used it.
For example, providing Loon antennas to a telecom provider, and decreasing the infrastructure cost of setting up networks.
Historically yes, but while I don't know the numbers, a launch provider that is able to reduce the cost by about an order of magnitude might have an advantage here (SpaceX are also launching 60 of them at once).
It also seems like satellites would be a bit less vulnerable to outside interference than balloons.
In a world in which satellites stayed very expensive I could imagine it being a bit more successful.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-lawsuit-that-could-pop-alpha...
this project was dead in the water a long time ago, and for years
At this point, they should give up and settle into their role as the 21st century IBM.
There's no way to compare Loon to a regular commercial venture.
It's just stuff the founders want to do and that's fine.
Musk is offering $100 million to the team providing the best carbon capture technology.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-musk-carbon-capture/e...
The sky - our sky - is not a playground for tech companies.
Imposing a mesh-grid of thousands of balloons in the sky is an incredible intrusion for people around the world who have not asked for anything.
It's the same for mega constellations of satellites (Starlink).
Would you be willing to have a company come and put unsolicited electronic equipment in your backyard? Probably not. It's the same for our sky - I don't want that Facebook or Google impose thousands of electronic devices in our sky. Or maybe ask "the owner" before you start, i.e. the citizens of the world.
What's more beautiful than watching stars in the sky in a July/August warm night?
Do you really want to lose this landscape forever and have 100 times more satellites than we already have? and have series of white dots one behind the other?
OK, companies and states have done it the past, but it's not a valid argument to justify the acceleration with a factor 10 or 100 of this process with thousands of Starlink satellites for example.
Regarding the satellites, i hope the Starlink satellites will also be not visible to the naked eye once they reach their final orbit now that they have the sunshade.
On the other hand, these technologies provide a huge benefit to the people on the ground.
If you want to complain about Loon you should also complain about regular airplanes, helicopters, zeppelins, weather balloons and balloons in general.
This is not guaranteed at all. I read articles in the past mentioning that you will see "trains" of dozens of white dots one behind another in the sky.
Do we currently see satellites in a dark summer night? Yes. So for Starlink it will be the same, except with 10 of them one behind another.
I'd be happy to read more sources confirming or infirming this.
NB: currently we don't have "trains" of satellites, i.e. ten white dots one behind the other in the sky. The mega constellation projects would create this.
Are you under the impression that the sky and satellite space is unregulated, by the people's representatives?
Huh.
I don't think I heard it addressed even once on public media during major elections.
You'll probably say: "then change your representatives or do some lobying or choose representatives who care about this".
This is a little more complicated than this: people are busy with hundreds of other things when they vote, and the fact these questions are never addressed in public debates should not give an 'implicit consent' about "Ok, tech companies, you can do whatever you want with our sky. Dozens of thousands of new satelites? Ok, no problem, please do!"
