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A comment on Google Life Sciences Exodus. Parent comment

Re:Google Life Sciences Exodus by Animats on Monday March 28, 2016 @03:16PM (#11376591)
That's what's discouraging. Google seems to have made a mess in mobile robotics, getting most of the good people and then screwing up the management of them. Life sciences is a bigger field, and Google isn't a big player there, so they can't trash the whole field, but this seems to be a similar screwup.

Google's secretiveness is hurting them. They don't get public feedback when their management screws up. This allows screwups to continue longer. If their R&D people were presenting papers at conferences and filing patents, as AT&T, IBM, and Xerox did in the days when they had big labs, this problem would have been caught earlier.

This is a downside of trying to protect intellectual property by secrecy, rather than patents. You lose external feedback.

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Re:Google Life Sciences Exodus by mappingbabeljc on Monday March 28, 2016 @03:21PM (#11376620)
One area where Google does seem to avoid this secrecy is in AI: both Google Brain and DeepMind are consistently publishing papers & in many cases putting them up on Arxiv pre-publication.
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Re:Google Life Sciences Exodus by TrickedOut on Monday March 28, 2016 @03:29PM (#11376679)
Perhaps these are divisions blessed with good leadership?
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Re:Google Life Sciences Exodus by brianwawok on Monday March 28, 2016 @05:25PM (#11377532)
Well AI can do stuff right now. It can help fight spam and rank webpages. Nanobots in your blood can literally do nothing right now.
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Re:Google Life Sciences Exodus by entee on Monday March 28, 2016 @04:54PM (#11377327)
Presumably, once they actually get results that can be published they'll do so. If they don't, they'll have a lot of trouble gaining credibility in the biosciences.

That said, in science bad management is kind of the norm. Many big labs in academia are horribly run yet consistently publish huge results. In industry the counterbalance is the ability to easily move on to a different employer, which seems to be what's happening. If true, the bad management should correct itself. One hopes.

Full disclosure: I work at a company that could be seen as in the same area as Verily.

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