Google Schmidt immigration

At the beginning of 20 13, Tesla was on the verge of bankruptcy. Musk contacted his friend Larry Page and asked him if he wanted to buy Tesla.

Page worships Musk very much and almost agrees to all his conditions, including allowing him to continue operating Tesla for the next eight years after Google's acquisition of Tesla, or until the third-generation car is produced. However, just as the two were bargaining, the sales of Tesla Model S suddenly improved, and Musk was greatly surprised and directly suspended the negotiations with Google.

Page, then CEO of Google, did not get angry with Musk. On the contrary, in 20 14, when he attended the TED conference, he said, "if he dies, he would rather donate billions of assets to entrepreneurs like musk to change the world than donate money to charity." In his view, Musk's idea that Mars is the "second home" of mankind is as "bright" as Google's many dreams of changing the world.

In a few years, Musk built a car, launched a rocket and announced his migration to Mars. On August 29th, in a live broadcast watched by 6.5438+0.5 million people, the brain-computer interface shocked four people again.

If Google had acquired Tesla, it might not be Musk, but Pichai, who is now standing in the spotlight.

Steve Steve Wozniak, a former close friend of Jobs, was asked in an interview with National Geographic: Who can fill the vacancy left by Jobs in today's world?

His answer is Musk. He believes that the reason why Musk is like Jobs is mainly because of the motivation behind the products developed by the companies they founded and led. Both Jobs and Musk have developed revolutionary and innovative products. Musk found that the market needs an electric car that can carry a family to travel together. Jobs thought that the mobile phone experience before the iPhone came out was too bad.

Larry Page's motives are very different from both. He hopes that Google can continue to change the world in a way that most people think is incredible. For example, invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Calico, a biotechnology company, to study technologies to prolong human life; A kind of intelligent contact lens is developed for diabetic patients, through which the blood sugar level of human body can be detected.

Jobs once said to Page, "You have done too much." Page explained that we should invest billions of dollars to make people's lives better. If I just do what I did before and don't try something new, I will feel guilty.

Tesla is more and more like Apple. On the 27th, the market value of Tesla exceeded $400 billion. Honda, GM and Ford are not as good as a Tesla, and Space X became the first commercial airline to send humans back to Earth. Recently, Musk showed a high-profile implantable brain-computer interface. The sci-fi imagination of this technology seems to make Tesla more like a "star" giant.

However, looking back at Google, most of the scientific research projects that surprised the outside world in recent years just heard the news of termination.

In 20 15, Google glass, which once triggered the global wearable device boom, was stopped less than three years after its listing and restarted again three years later, but Google glass is no longer amazing;

In 20 16, Google released a modular mobile phone prototype, which attracted a lot of attention at that time. However, in less than half a year, the news that the Project Ara modular smartphone project has stopped came.

On 20 17, Alphabet agreed to sell Boston Power to Softbank of Japan. Boston Dynamics developed a series of robot dogs and robots, which caused a sensation because they were too bionic and often topped the list of robots, but Google still sold them.

In 20 18, x lab developed a smart contact lens for diabetic patients, which can analyze the blood sugar level through the glucose in tears. After four years of research, the plan was stopped and there was no follow-up news.

As Jobs said, has Google gone too far? Maybe more than that. 20 19, Wu Jun once commented on Google in an interview. He believes that "today's Google is a rather mediocre company. Although it has developed some brilliant technologies, it is far less helpful to people than in the past. Google's last greatest contribution to mankind is Android. After Android, I can't think of anything great I have contributed. "

It is worth mentioning that Android was acquired by Google.

More than 20 years ago, among Page's many crazy ideas, one was to download the whole Internet and study the correlation between websites. His tutor advised him to give up the idea, but Page did it anyway, and finally developed Google with Brin on this basis.

Search is actually just an accidental by-product of Page and his team's "absurd dream". They had all kinds of daydreams. At that time, Page liked to study automated cars, sergey brin was interested in data mining, and Scott Hassan colonized the imagination of the solar system, which made the whole team start thinking about how to realize it. Therefore, the space elevator has become the core project for the founder of Google to establish Google X Lab.

In the early years of Google X, lab employees can easily apply for developing technologies that may take decades to realize, because they know that advertising revenue keeps pouring into Google. According to Tron's memory, he applied to Schmidt, former CEO of Google and executive chairman of Alphabet, for a $30 million funding project, but Schmidt directly gave him $65.438+$50 million.

However, as more and more projects are cut down, we see that this mode of relying solely on advertising revenue to support technology research and development has faced challenges.

Recently, four American technology companies also released their second-quarter financial reports. According to the financial report released by Alphabet, their total revenue in the second quarter was $38.297 billion, down 2% from $38.944 billion in the same period last year. Net profit was $6.959 billion, down 30% from $9.947 billion in the same period last year. On the contrary, the revenues and profits of Apple, Facebook and Amazon all exceeded expectations, and many indicators also hit record highs.

The decline in revenue, profits and the current backward trend make it impossible for Google to invest heavily in long-term unrewarded technology research and development. In fact, as early as a few years ago, the "20% time" that Google once talked about for Silicon Valley was strictly controlled when the company's large-scale projects were reduced. Meyer, the former CEO of Yahoo, who once worked for Google, also broke the news that the "20% time" policy does not actually exist in Google.

Steve Jaeger stayed at Google for 13 years. Before leaving his job, he criticized Google like this: "Profit gives us a license to survive, but it also gives us a reason to exist. If you can't make your employees understand "why" to do what they are doing every day, they will eventually make a decision that they are afraid of risk, innovation and growth.

The sale of Boston Dynamics is an example.

In 20 16, the video of a walking robot getting up after being hit made Boston Dynamics famous, but Google still chose to "abandon" Boston Dynamics. Part of the reason is that Alphabet executives question the positioning and profit prospects of Boston Dynamics, and part of the reason is the company's infighting. After Google's original robot project Replicant was merged into Google X, the team of Boston Dynamics has not been successfully integrated into any project or department.

From car sales to software-centric Internet services to autonomous driving, Tesla seems to be recreating Apple's old road, and if Tesla takes the closed route of Apple's software and hardware ecology, coincidentally, it will also face Google, just like the entanglement between IOS and Android.

Google's obsession with self-driving has a long history, especially Page, who was obsessed with self-driving cars during his entrepreneurial period. In his view, no matter how much he invests in this technology, it is nothing compared with the huge return. Since the launch of X Lab in 2009, Waymo self-driving cars have traveled more than100000 miles on public roads. In 20 16, the project developed into an independent company, Waymo.

This is probably the origin of the "wonderful" friendship between Page and Musk. However, when the service provider with the most advanced autonomous driving technology in the world collides with the new energy automobile enterprise with the most consumption potential, a head-on confrontation in the autonomous driving industry is inevitable.

Autopilot is the next battlefield for Google and Tesla. In the long run, the cooperation and competition between the two sides for future revolutionary technologies seems more exciting.

Therefore, investing in Space X means that Google's moon landing plan has taken another step forward.

However, today, Space X seems to have become a star enterprise in the global commercial space competition, but the "moon landing plan" of Google X Lab in recent years has hardly caused a sensation among the public and rarely achieved financial success. This is worth pondering.

We may be able to blame the helmsman for this difference. Since Sandel Pichai became the new CEO of Google in the second quarter of 20 15, his quarterly income has soared by more than1300 million dollars, and Page has been out of the public eye since he became the CEO of Google's parent company Alphabet. 20 19, Peggy and Brin gave up their positions directly and gave them to pichai.

Pichai doesn't have Page's cult of technology. In his view, the optimism of Silicon Valley has been influenced by cautious sentiment, and the situation has changed a lot. We are more cautious and more thoughtful about our work, but there is something deeper here, that is, technology cannot solve human problems. On the other hand, Musk seems to have no "cautious" idea and is more willing to rush forward crazily.

Back to 20 14, Page beat Tim Cook and became the "Business Person of the Year" selected by American Fortune magazine. His evaluation is: Page proved to the world that he is the bravest CEO in the world. The "moon landing" project he advocated has now formed a law, any of which can change the lives of billions of people and help Google continue to sit at the top of technology.

A real breakthrough requires huge capital, creativity and, above all, patience. How patient is Google?