Hi everyone, so here's a little bit of a surprise coming out of the Google rumour
mill as it were. Now, as you might be aware, Google is actually wholly owned these
days by Alphabet, an umbrella company set up by Google to own all of Google
subsidiaries and now this also includes its robotics division originally made up of multiple
different robotics companies, primarily it seems focused around Boston Dynamics.
Now things have not gone well for the robotics team really at Google. They had
a number of government contracts that they were trying to win by the looks of it and those fell
flat for various reasons and Google then lost its current head of their robotics
division Andy Rubin, who you might remember was the creator of the Android
operating system that we now use on what, 1.1 billion devices. Now rumour has it, back in the
day that Andy Rubin and Samsung got into a bit of a disagreement with each other
and Andy was basically told look you're going to have to go and move on and do something
else, so the robotics division was born. Now Andy went on a bit of a spending spree.
He bought Boston Dynamics and a number of other technology companies related to
robotics around the world. He then left so Google's been in a bit of a problematic situation where the
people he had acquired have left, the person who is leading the robotics
division has left and now they're essentially they're putting the robotics
division up for sale. That's it, end of story. Google is pulling out of robotics
in the sense of bipedal robots I suppose.
Whether the machine learning that they've done during this time will live on I think that
probably will, that's always been Google's forte really. It always seems a little
strange that Google was willing to invest money into what they class as moon shots
and anyone with a brain would say was just fritting money away really.
There's a thing to be said about making the right bet at the right time. They did it
with Android, they did it with Serge, they did it with the email.
Google generally does very well at picking where the next big thing is going to be
but actually over time, over the last sort of 10 years or so that's actually become a lot harder
because the life cycle of a new technology is getting longer and longer.
Look how long it took us to get VR in the current state, and we're not even there yet.
Robotics is one of those things where it's been dragging on for years now and
actually we're no further forward today than we were 10 years ago in many respects. A
lot of the same problems are still there and they haven't been solved by the progress
of technology. So for Google, you can continue flushing billions of dollars
probably a month down the drain on Boston Dynamics and your robotics projects but at
the end of the day they're no further forward now than they were two years ago
in actually bringing product to market. I'm not talking about a Roomba home hoover here,
you know. I'm talking about true bipedal robots
that are more advanced than anything we've seen of Asimov for instance. At the end of
the day we haven't got there yet and we probably won't for at least another 10
years. I think there was a big push at a certain point for we're going to have
robotics, robots, in every single home within three years and actually what we
found is we're now in the trough of disillusionment. It'll be a fair few more
years before we climb back out the other side and find well what are useful
robots actually looking like. Well, useful robots are already working today in car
manufacturing and so on Those are useful robots. Robot butler not
particularly useful when the high cost and technical problems are going to mean
it's not going to be a very good product when it launches
anyway. So for Google this is a very good move and I'm sure their investors have been well, breathing down their neck
a little bit over the last six months or so, to say, look, make a decision with the robots,
either you keep them or you get rid. If you keep them you'd better find a way to bring
this to market profitably, quickly. This can't be another Google Glass. The idea
of being able to spend three years and billions of dollars
on a moon shot, I'm afraid is over. It takes too long to get these products to
market and develop them properly. You can't rush them, as they found with Google Glass.
A great idea, not supported by the available technology of the day, is still
just a great idea, it's not a commercial product. And one thing Google has got to do
over this next, well, three-year period has to find profitability in new areas,
something it has actually struggled with, breaking outside the cash cow that is
search is something Google hasn't managed to really do yet. They haven't
really managed to make Android a profitable system. They've managed to pull in a lot of data which has allowed them to
produce better quality advertising platforms but at the end of the day that's still extending the old flogged
horse. What it's not allowing them to do is to create well, new horses.