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posted by chromas on Saturday February 16 2019, @02:22AM   Printer-friendly
from the stop-Xeroxing-me! dept.

Google's Waymo risks repeating Silicon Valley's most famous blunder: Larry Page drew the wrong lesson from Xerox bungling the PC revolution

Everyone in Silicon Valley knows the story of Xerox inventing the modern personal computer in the 1970s and then failing to commercialize it effectively. Yet one of Silicon Valley's most successful companies, Google's Alphabet, appears to be repeating Xerox's mistake with its self-driving car program.

[...] Google's self-driving car program, created in 2009, appears to be on a similar trajectory. By October 2015, Google was confident enough in its technology to put a blind man into one of its cars for a solo ride in Austin, Texas.

But much like Xerox 40 years earlier, Google has struggled to bring its technology to market. The project was rechristened Waymo in 2016, and Waymo was supposed to launch a commercial driverless service by the end of 2018. But the service Waymo launched in December was not driverless and barely commercial. It had a safety driver in every vehicle, and it has only been made available to a few hundred customers.

Today, a number of self-driving startups are aiming to do to Waymo what Apple did to Xerox years ago. Nuro is a driverless delivery startup that announced Monday that it raised $940 million in venture capital. Another, called Voyage, is testing a self-driving taxi service in one of the nation's largest retirement communities.

Right now, these companies' self-driving services aren't as sophisticated as Waymo's. Their vehicles have top speeds of 25 miles per hour. But Apple started out making under-powered products, too, then it gradually worked its way up-market, ultimately eclipsing Xerox. If Waymo isn't strategic, companies like Nuro and Voyage could do the same thing to the pioneering self-driving company.

Previously: Google's Waymo Plans to Launch a Self-Driving Car Service in December
Waymo Announces Limited Debut of "Driverless" Taxi Service in Phoenix, AZ
Waymo Announces Plans for a Driverless Vehicle Factory in Michigan


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  • (Score: 2) by CZB on Saturday February 16 2019, @03:01AM (2 children)

    by CZB (6457) on Saturday February 16 2019, @03:01AM (#801905)

    Maybe there's just too many unresolved, really hard, technical problems that don't make it into news articles. There aren't any fully autonomous tractors on the market yet, just a few research projects and trial units. One guy in the midwest made his own fully autonomous tractor and actually uses it. There was also a Canadian who made a tractor that can do a set of follow-and-return moves. There might be a few full auto orchard sprayers. My tractor has cruise control and blind GPS line following. No company is willing to take the liability risk yet. I'm expecting a no name Chinese company will be the first to sell full auto tractor kits.

    The price point to hit is $5000 to $30000. If it's less than $10k most every farmer will buy one. But there just aren't that many tractors compared to cars.

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday February 16 2019, @03:16AM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday February 16 2019, @03:16AM (#801910) Journal
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by CZB on Saturday February 16 2019, @04:39PM

      by CZB (6457) on Saturday February 16 2019, @04:39PM (#802071)

      Yeah I'm always seeing articles like those, but no one has a product for me to buy. All the big tractor companies have a research project that has had working prototypes for years now. My guess is they just don't want to take the liability risk, or there are technical problems they haven't solved yet. It will be really interesting to see what happens when the first one goes live. Will all the other companies start selling theirs, indicating they were sitting on it? The other interesting thing will be what tractors are compatible. I'm guessing only the latest models, or entirely new ones. My tractor was made in 1998, there's no reason it couldn't have sensors added on. But the tractor companies are desperate to sell more tractors. They know a tractor lasts 30-40 years.