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0 pointselmerfud1y ago0 comments

Considering that I've worked at ISPs since the early '90s when they were dial-ups and watched them grow up into something more, Yes I would say that I've analyzed.

You offer no evidence of any futurist thing that Google has done. At least nothing to the scale of what Elon Musk has done. Everything Google is done has been a calculated safe risk taking a small step forward in technology that was safe. It was absolutely intended to embed their position as a global leader in search and nothing else.

So you can be snarky all you want but it's more important to be correct and back up your statements with evidence. Even Google coming out with Chrome was not a futurist moonshot it was simply taking advantage of the fact that all other browsers sucked and they wanted to cement their position as a search leader and tracking what people do.

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snowwrestler1y ago· 2 in thread

Project Loon was futuristic. It did not achieve the scale of Starlink because it failed, not because it wasn’t futuristic.

Google also invested early into self-driving cars and remains well ahead of Musk in that area.

elmerfudOP1y ago

According to you balloons with radio transmitters are futuristic technology. It didn't achieve scale because the benefits that it offered were too small, and it was too impractical. There was literally nothing futuristic about it at all.

You have to understand that starlink itself is only quasi-futuristic and it's the idea of SpaceX that is futuristic. Starlink is just a spin-off. Bringing faster satellite internet around the world is certainly a benefit and a step up from iridium and other satellite providers but SpaceX wasn't founded to make starlink happen. Starlink happened because SpaceX was a thing. SpaceX is a thing because Elon Musk's future vision is for the human species to become multi-planetary.

Show me anything that Google has done approaching that scale of future vision. Till we understand I don't know if Musk will actually achieve these visions but that is what is driving the offerings that he has.

asadotzler1y ago

Agreed.

Lofting up balloons, an technology from the 3rd century, carrying radios, a technology developed a century ago, and having the whole thing fail because it was a stupid idea, that's some real futuristic stuff right there.

jiveturkey1y ago

I've worked at ISPs (on and off) since mid-90s, including starting one from scratch (ISDN and T1 bank) and building out a national colo/hosting offering for a mega telco you've heard of. I also worked at Google, not in Google Fiber but I worked with that org deeply during the post-POC (ie post-Nigeria) initial and then subsequent locations. So I reject your appeal to authority both as a matter of principle (logical fallacy) and personal experience.

I don't need to offer evidence, it is visible if you merely look for it. X (not twitter, google X) was a big money loser because it was too futurist, and Ruth killed it. Google took very large risks back then. They weren't even risks, they were known to have limited or no commerical value and they were experimenting with simply what might be possible. Not completely in a Bell Labs sense, but not all that far from it.

I mean even Waymo should be clear evidence.

I didn't mention Chrome, or "even Chrome", so not sure why you mention that. Chrome was not futurist. It was less about other browsers' sucking, and more about controlling HTML so that MSFT wouldn't, because MSFT was too narrow-minded. Google didn't have a desktop OS (even now, ChromeOS isn't viable outside of niche use cases) so they were highly depending on the browser functioning in a way they could asset control over it. At that time it was definitely not about tracking people. They just lost their way.

I thought you were just off base before, but here you are just plain wrong.

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