I basically drew analogy between catching fish and Google's basic aim of getting people to access internet via its own curated version. I ended up by saying that merely that does not explain some of it's more ambitious and truly weird investments like those in robotics, biological sciences or Uber. For those, we need to start looking beyond fishes:
Looking beyond the fish:
- 2 months back Google bought a whole bunch of robotic start-ups. Start-ups doing some kick-ass work for everything - from military to automation.
- A few months before that Google put in a mind-boggling $258 million in a Uber - a start-up that allows the top 1% to hail down limousines as taxis.
- Around the same time, it invested in a company called Calico. What does it do? It's not super clear really but Larry Page indicated that it is working towards altering an average human's life-span by approximately a twenty years or so.
- Way back in 2007, Google invested in a company called 23andMe that does rapid gene testing allowing people to understand themselves better.
I could go on, but really one gets the point by now. It is super hard to try and trace all of this back and say that these investments will eventually yield more Google searches and get more people to access internet via Google services.
It's hard because that's not what this ought to be about.
Some time in between 2005-2007, Larry Page and Sergei Brin ought to have realized that eventually Google will reach the limits to the potential of internet. At least what we thought that the internet does. Merely acting as a facilitator in letting people access information is only one part of the business for Google. It was time to encash the dividends earned. Cue - data logging.
Google has access to one of the most potentially valuable properties in the world: our lives on the internet. Practically all that we do today, mail, maps, search, buy stuff, look up weather reports, news reports, calenders, book tickets, chat - any small thing eventually finds its way to the treasure trove owned and controlled by Google. Google has already been cashing this to a large extent by coming up with smarter and smarter context based adverts. However, that definitely cannot be the limits to the usability of this data. Surely, the combined lives of a few billion people ought to be more valuable than that.
The robots are coming:
Google, I personally think, has invested in the robotic start-ups because it believes that this is going to be one of the final problems that mankind solves. Till date we have used robots to help us mechanically, improve our efficiency by taking over all the boring, repeatable stuff as man has moved on to the more 'demanding' and 'creative' jobs. A part of those jobs are also being eaten by computers, as they speed up daily and are able to tackle the most severe analytical problems for us. The future will be bots which will marry these two advances together. These will be machines which will not only take over the repeatable works, but will be able to define these works too, 'on-the-go'. This means super smart AI would marry really kick-ass mechanical structures.
Google knows that its treasure trove of data can allow it to look deep into human psychology. Stuff that can allow it to come up with AIs more advanced than the current generation. Suddenly, the driverless cars and the Google Glass seem to follow a pattern. Acquiring those robotic start-ups has positioned Google as one the most suited candidate to lead this change.
Hail down a taxi-company:
Uber created a company to quickly hail limos for the rich and the famous. However, its founders soon realized that what they had was actually a highly scalable system for meeting people's demands. It started small by servicing weird and random needs of people (lost kittens? no school bus? helicopters? - we got you covered bro'). Eventually it positioned itself as an 'instant gratification service'. It built all of this on the back of a very robust (and yet quite simple) app interface and back-end. It figured out that people like to see stuff tracked i.e. they like to have control - an aspect that is apparent by their willingness to pay a premium for stuff that will be delivered where they want it and when they want it. It need not actually create tremendous value. It is a game of perception. Uber realized it needs to give people the perception of control which ironically comes from a massive level of tracking and control on Uber's part.
This makes total sense for a company like Google. Google has truly got us totally covered bro'. A service like Uber can be expanded into several domains. You press a button and things appear. It's almost as if they know what we need, when we need it. No waiting, no delays, no on-the-spot payments, no reservations. Think furniture deliveries, food deliveries, medicine deliveries.
The bio guys:
Why invest in Calico and 23andMe? For the exact same reason. In both cases, Google can add a tremendous value by utilizing all of it's mined data. This data can be used to facilitate research into the origins and spreads of diseases. 23andMe is already acting like a feeder service to Calico after having analyzed the genetic make-up of close to half a million people.
After investing in Calico, Larry Page said in an interview "Are people really focused on the right things? One of the things I thought was amazing is that if you solve cancer, you’d add about three years to people’s average life expectancy. We think of solving cancer as this huge thing that’ll totally change the world, but when you really take a step back and look at it, yeah, there are many, many tragic cases of cancer, and it’s very, very sad, but in the aggregate, it’s not as big an advance as you might think.”
Is this guy stupid or something? No. He's bang on actually. We are in an era where most problems can be solved given enough resources. Google is spending one of the most easily duplicable resource available - the data it collects and the insights it gathers from it. And it thinks that it can do much better than get a pitiable three years for every person on earth out of it. It is aiming for immortality.
In fact, Calico yields the best possible insight into how Google thinks. Google is not looking at solving any problem incrementally. It seems to believe (in the words of Gregory Ferenstein of TechCrunch) that diseases like cancer and other real world problems could be cured if only we had snappier algorithms.
And you know what? I think they might be just correct..
