Google finally spins off its self-driving car business, but it may be too late

Google held a press conference today to announce that it would separate its self-driving business (represented by the cute self-driving car) from the [x] lab and establish an independent company under the parent company Alphabet. The new company is called Waymo, and its CEO is John Krafcik, the former president of Hyundai Motor America, who has just joined Google's self-driving business for a year.

Kafcik revealed at the press conference that Waymo will be involved in car sharing (mobile phone ride-hailing), logistics and other businesses in the future. The mission of this new company is extremely important: to end the embarrassing situation that Google was the first to start research and development in the industry, but lagged behind almost every latecomer in commercialization, and commercialize unmanned/autonomous driving technology faster.

The first question in this matter is: Why break up? Or more precisely: Why break up now, and not as early as when Alphabet was reorganized?

This question is difficult to answer, but thousands of words can be summed up in two words: market and talent.

Google is late to the market and lacks talent. If Google doesn't split up, the whole team will just break up and start their own business.

Google is the first large-scale technology company in the world to start developing automatic/unmanned driving technology. At Google, this project was launched in 2009 - that year, all mainstream car manufacturers were still enjoying the market advantages given to them by technological bottlenecks and had not given much serious consideration to autonomous driving technology.

Uber was just founded in 2009. In May of this year, Uber's self-driving cars were put on the road and operated in Pittsburgh; in August of this year, Singapore also officially unveiled its self-driving taxis.

The impression of Google's driverless cars always seems to be those cute little buns walking on the streets of Mountain View. As for the news about the official production and commercialization of automatic/driverless cars, the protagonists are Uber, Lyft, Tesla , and even Baidu . As radical as Uber is, let alone self-driving cars, it has even released a white paper on realizing self-driving vertical take-off and landing aircraft within 10 years - from beginning to end, the market created by Google has nothing to do with Google.

After talking about the market, let’s talk about talent.

Google's self-driving talent has almost gone, and the technical backbones of the early team have all left: Sebastian Thrun left to start the educational technology company Udacity; Anthony Levandowski founded Otto with three familiar colleagues to continue working on self-driving, and this company has just been acquired by Uber; Chris Urmson, CTO of the founding team, just left in August this year; another technical expert Jiajun Zhu also left earlier to form the robotics company Nuro.

So, by breaking away from the past reliance on researching technology and racking up mileage in the lab, and spinning off independent companies to conduct market-oriented business and be self-sufficient - will this kind of Waymo be better than before?

uncertain.

After Google's reorganization, many "moon landing projects" died one after another, and the idea of ​​"changing the world" was defeated by reality: Google Glass smart glasses could not find a market, and the team was disbanded; Access fiber broadband, which was split from Google Fiber, could not be promoted (the parent company thought it was too expensive) and switched to wireless business, and no one knew where its "original intention" had been lost; the modular mobile phone Ara has been talked about for four years but has not been available; the robotics company Boston Dynamics can always use animated pictures to attract users but has no customers who buy it...

Is Waymo's future secure? No.

More than a year after the reorganization, the advantages of the model of so-called "independently operating" different "startups" under the shadow of large Internet "conglomerates" have not been proven.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.