They aren't even attempting to play in snake oil or astrology either
At least I hope it's not Bitcoin. The power use is obscene.
* Never say never. Basically I don't think it could possibly be viable because it would require the total cost of transaction to be less than pennies. That includes the shopkeepers time to manage the automated store, the electricity used in the transaction, and a bunch of other non zero components.
Hell even transactions with real pennies today are almost a net loss. We eradicated 5c coins in NZ because they cost something like 6c to make.
And to be clear I understand you mean micropayments in general and maybe it is something possible im just not yet convinced the electricity costs will allow it unless it's subsidized in an unsustainable way.
Why would that matter? A 5c coin is spent thousands, millions of times. Why would there need to be any connection at all between how much it costs to make the coin and the value that coin represents in a transaction?
There were other reasons like inflation making 5c coins largely irrelevant (we also had 1, and 2c coins phased out years earlier) (also 1nzd=0.5usd at that time)
NZ has also been largely cashless for at least 20 years now. (Link below has some interesting info/graphs)
https://www.paymentsnz.co.nz/resources/articles/two-sides-of...
I think the only reason this happening was even a big deal at the time was because they replaced all coins at the same time with much smaller, lighter and cheaper versions. I.e. it wasn't a big deal at all but rather the swap over was.
What exactly is this and what business is doing well in it?
One could argue that getting enormous amounts of money without needing to produce any results for it is the very definition of "doing well".
On the other hand, in the same time period (actually in a shorter time period!), machine learning driven technologies like voice and image recognition have gone from sci-fi to commonplace. I ask: which is more innovative?
If you wait until it's obvious to everyone that something's a good idea, you're not being innovative, you're just an opportunist. Similarly, if it turns out that it's not actually a good idea, you're not being innovative, you've just wasted a whole lot of time.
Innovation happens at the intersection of contrarian & right. You have to be willing to stake your time, energy, and ego on an idea that many people believe is bad, impossible, or not worth it (otherwise it would've been done already), but you also have to be right in your judgment.
1. That Google didn't research crypto internally and purposely decide not to pursue it.
2. That crypto is worth staking Google's time, energy, and ego on.
3. That crypto involvement is a direct reason a company is or is not innovative.
Internal research is useless.
The only way to know whether a new idea will work is to try it: put some minimal form of it in front of people and see if they actually get use it. People are complex; sometimes they do things that all rational thought says they shouldn't (buying Bitcoin and investing in ICOs would both fit into that category, IMHO), and many times they don't do things that all rational analysis says they should (I participated in research projects while at Google for both micropayments for content and for labeling trustworthy sources on the results, both of which most people would agree are good goals but neither of which has ever worked, and I founded a startup afterwards to provide career guidance to undergrads, which every adult we talked to said "I love what you're doing, and totally wish that existed when I was a student" and every student said "I love that idea and would totally use it", and then promptly never looked at it again once we built it.)
There's no guarantee that external research works either, but at least you've learned something applicable to the next idea.
And then get skewered left and right for shutting down products? You can't have it both ways.
Fast forward to today and 10x to 1000x the number of us wonks are getting an overlapping amount of Reader's value (plus new value) from Twitter. The purging of Reader is a distant memory, but it doesn't mean it's necessarily bad to try a bunch of things and kill the non-viral losers (in a relative sense).
> The only way to know whether a new idea will work is to try it: put some minimal form of it in front of people and see if they actually get use it.
And in the face of a universe of potential ideas how do you determine whether you invest time into prototyping pre-sneezed tissues? Internal research. You’ve just moved the goal post.
b) 'Wasting time' is a part of research. If you never fail, you're missing opportunities. That said, you pick your failures with the hope of getting the right kinds of wins... which brings us to...
c) Giant centralized cloud-based businesses have giant centralized and for-the-most-part trusted datastores. There's no reason to use a blockchain if a standard distributed database suits your needs. From where I sit, blockchains are mainly a solution in search of a problem.
(and just imagine the press cycles if a FAANG company rolled out a blockchain, and thus burnt god-knows how much coal bringing it mainstream...)
I'm equally convinced - and I suspect I disagree with most HNers here - that there are also some problems for which blockchains are the only solution - they just don't work with centralized data stores, mostly because nobody would trust a single entity to manage that data store. Google isn't even looking for those problems. In general, Google does not look for problems, it takes problems that everybody knows about and looks for solutions. There are thousands of entrepreneurs in the cryptoverse who are looking for those problems.
There was a time, early in its history, where Google was willing to take a solution - download the web and keep only the links - and then find the problem (search) for which it was the solution. And then they leveraged that solution into all sorts of other problems - webmail, navigation & directions, news, academic papers, video, etc. But the thing is that this is a risky business: most solutions in search of a problem don't actually solve anything, so the time spent solving them is wasted.
Name a single actual problem that is only solved by the blockchain.
I'm not sure if you're being facetious, but assuming Amazon is a member of "FAANG": https://aws.amazon.com/managed-blockchain/. Does that count?
The tech has had 10 years and so far it has produced absolutely nothing of value. In fact considering the damage it has done to the environment, it has been only contributing negative value to the planet.
Just like every other gold rush in history. Fortunes get created, but often not for the folks who think they're going to get rich.
Which is a good thing considering how much of the population's life is already intertwined with and recorded by Google. I can't imagine anything more dystopian than a Google issued currency.
All this would happen even if backed by Larry.
It is a miracle that new projects happen at all in companies, though Google of course actually bought many successful projects.
Google has launched multiple micropayment products as replacements for ads. Nobody uses them.
Can you still extrapolate from this that the tipping model is even anywhere near a threat to Google's ad based business model that they should be incorporating it? And is it even an apples to apples comparison? Many creators don't use Patreon in spite of or to replace ads, they use it as a supplement.
Moreover, just because something is technically simple to integrate, doesn't automatically make it the correct business decision to do so.
> Can you still extrapolate from this that the tipping model is even anywhere near a threat to Google's ad based business model that they should be incorporating it?
No, but we can extrapolate from twitch, and guess that it probably would be.
> Many creators don't use Patreon in spite of or to replace ads, they use it as a supplement.
Because it is a third party site, there is no such option. It would be trivial to incorporate an ad-free experience for donations/subscriptions similar to how twitch does.
This exists, already competes with Twitch, and is part of an even bigger portfolio of media services from Google. You're arguing for Google to do something they have been doing for years.
https://www.youtube.com/premium
You're vastly overestimating what people will actually pay for and underestimating how big and critical the ads industry is.
macOS are the Apple II series iPhone clobbered the iPod.
The Apple II product line lasted until 1992, by which point the Mac product line had become affordable to the people at which the apple 2 line had been marketed.
The iPod continued as the iPod classic and iPod touch products until 2015, nearly 10 years after the iPhone was released.
I'd blame size and market position more. Google was left as one of very few profitable giants standing when the dot-com crash hit, and yet they were young enough to not have the institutional inertia of Amazon, E-bay, and Yahoo. That left them exceptionally well positioned to capitalize on the Internet's deployment phase, where the technology got good enough and widespread enough to really build huge businesses off it. They managed to own the next platform (mobile) but were too large, slow, and entrenched to really understand the implications of it, and they're not even attempting to play in the cryptoverse.