Good read.<p>> <i>Google’s collection of moonshots — from Waymo to Google Fiber to Nest to Project Wing to Verily to Project Loon (and the list goes on) — have mostly been science projects ....</i><p>...<i>a car service rather far afield from Google’s mission statement “to organize the world’s information</i><p>...<i>What if “I’m Feeling Lucky” were not a whimsical button on a spartan home page, but the default way of interacting with all of the world’s information? What if an AI Assistant were so good, and so natural</i><p>So... I think we should distinguish between "moonshot" and "silver bullet." One is a big, difficult goal that can be a approached with lots of determination, resources and such. The other is a future breakthrough that just fixes everything.<p>Google has always struggled making (great) technology and concepts into products, and products into businesses. The biggest miss, IMO, was cloud. Msft & Amzn relative successes highlight where google isn't strategically strong.<p>Waymo might be the biggest investment (probably >$100bn risked). Cloud is the large business category that actually exists. Google should have been here, considering where everyone was circa 2008. Google had the tech, the concepts, even the products. It wasn't effective at making that a great business.<p>The "OK Google" assistant story tell objectively, because no one else has done a great job with voice interfaces either. That said I think it demonstrate the difficulty of going "concept to products."<p>IMO, the problem with voice assistant has been a problem of imagination. Voice is a UI paradigm. What are the key use cases, where this new UI paradigm is powerful? They never invented it.<p>Anyway... I think the strategic logic is flawed... if that is indeed the strategic logic It's "singularity thinking." An expectation that version N+2 makes version N=1 obsolete. He who attains the GPTn, owns driving, personal computing, etc.<p>><i>The potential payoff, though, is astronomical: a world with Pixie everywhere means a world where Google makes real money from selling hardware, in addition to services for enterprises and schools, and cloud services</i><p>So this is what I mean. A "moonshot" would be defining these and going after them with real big intent. Not one that considers everything side effects of some big breakthrough that makes all linear approaches irrelevant. Voice UIs, even self driving, whatever wing's mission is.... these aren't impossible ideas even with current science & computing power. They're just hard. Requiring imagination. Risk. Vision. Strategy.<p>Drones are a method. Delivery is the task. Human-like drivers are a method. Transport is the task. Voice recognition. LLMs. These are methods. Not tasks. If you're doing silver bullet, it's nice to avoid defining the task. If you're doing moonshots, you want to be brutalist in defining the task.