Google Can Still Find Time for Self-Driving Cars, and It Doesn't Expect You to Understand Why

Peter Kafka — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 22:30:01 +0000

Larry Page has made a point of “cleaning up” Google during his first year as CEO by killing off some side projects that weren’t going anywhere.

But Google is still taking fliers on oddities like self-driving cars and computerized eyewear, and that’s not going to stop.

The challenge, Page said today during the company’s earnings call, is figuring out which of those fliers to take. Google has plenty of money to throw at this stuff, but a limited amount of time.

Here’s his answer to an analyst question about crazy projects the company might have up its sleeve, and whether it is still committed to its 70/20/10 plan, where employees are supposed to spend a tenth of their time on far-out stuff.

We’ve got a limited number of things we can do. As I’ve been saying, we’ve been trying to focus. So [we're] trying to make sure that we have the right speculative bets, as well as the right bets we’re making on our core products, and so on. I’m pretty excited about our ability to do that.

I think it’s hard coming from the outside. Because as I mentioned in the letter I published today, Android took three years plus three years, kind of, to get to really where it is today. That’s six years. And you all haven’t seen Android for those six years. We’ve seen it for the six years, and we really invested in it.

It’s not so much money in the earlier stages but attention. And that’s an important discipline for the company to have.

Shorter answer: We know what we’re doing, and that includes the stuff that looks nutty to people who don’t work at the Googleplex. Hence the not-exactly-a-stock-split, which is supposed to let Page use Google stock to pay employees and to pay for acquisitions, without losing control of the company.

Viral Video: Here's the Trailer for the $60 Movie (For Free!)

Kara Swisher — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 07:27:52 +0000

Here is the latest trailer for “Tower Heist,” the new Eddie Murphy/Ben Stiller movie that Universal will offer to home viewers for $59.99, while the Hollywood film is still in theaters.

It’s part of an unusual experiment in digital distribution.

It does look funny, but does it look $60 funny?

The AppleTwitter-Equals-iBrangelina Experiment*

Kara Swisher — Wed, 06 May 2009 11:05:43 +0000

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* Yesterday, in a BoomTown post about the latest unproven rumors that the world’s most iconic computer company, Apple (AAPL), was in “late-stage” negotiations to buy Silicon Valley’s latest pretty young thing, microblogging service Twitter, I wrote:

“Oh, the very notion of Apple and Twitter is a Techmeme dream-ticket, sure to be chewed over for days on end. (I once considered doing a post that just said “AppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitter…” for 1,000 words to see how much idiotic traffic I would get.)”

I wrote that because the pair rivet the tech press and digital fanboys as no others do, fomenting an obsession normally reserved for, say, Brangelina.

And since I imagine that a marriage of Apple and Twitter would be covered a lot like those two are–Red alert: Someone just sighted Evan Williams with a giant iPod getting a scoop at Fraiche Yogurt for Steve Jobs!–I thought I would get started early, just in case.

(Finally, given the epic Twitter diss of last year, let’s all just assume that Facebook will be playing the Jennifer Aniston role.)

AllThingsD » experiment

Google Can Still Find Time for Self-Driving Cars, and It Doesn't Expect You to Understand Why

Viral Video: Here's the Trailer for the $60 Movie (For Free!)

The AppleTwitter-Equals-iBrangelina Experiment*