Moonshots are called that way because they bear both immense risk of failure as well as a potential to bring in billions. So individual moonshots are almost always failures; the ones that are successful pay the other ones. Google is doing the right thing to remain alive in the future without enforcing lock down on their users (like other companies not producing moonshots do).
> Moonshots are called that way because they bear both immense risk of failure as well as a potential to bring in billions.
Which is kind of funny because the original moonshot was a rather predictable thing (build bigger rockets until one is big enough) and success only meant that you could stop spending billions.
Well, predictable in the sense that they would either reach the Moon and come back, or reach the Moon and die trying to come back, or reach the Moon and die there, or die along the way to the Moon, or explode in the air, or explode on the ground.
They're only good investments if they tap that well someday.
If you sit around moonshotting all day and never shipping they're worth $0.
So far, no moonshot by a big corp has paid off. Maybe it's too early, or more likely Google is hoarding tech and filing patents like a rational engineer running a business using machine learning would do, and while that's good for Google it's bad for Society to have so much cool tech locked away in a damp basement when it could be changing lives and being iterated on.
I used to work at Google. I remember the term "moonshot" being thrown around, it started with Larry and Sergey. If there's a definition for what this means, in the Google context, it's in their heads and nowhere else. But the way I interpreted it was "really really ambitious project".
One thing I do remember is that several projects that were described at the time as moonshots did pay off. The one that comes to my mind immediately was Street View. The idea of driving a car with a spherical camera down every road in the world seemed completely insane at the time it was first proposed, the idea it might make money even moreso. But Street View worked, and whenever we switched on SV in a new country usage of Maps in that country permanently increased. It really increased the value of the product, and in turn I guess it also raised ad revenues (or it'd be odd if increased usage didn't correlate with increased ad revenue at all).
There were others I remember. Rewriting the web search indexing system more or less from scratch was a big one. You don't hear much about that, but it was a big risky effort to rewrite the core of your product from scratch.
I think people tend to take past successes of radically ambitious projects for granted. Android was a moonshot at the time. We don't think anything of it now, but it wasn't clear at all it'd be so successful.
There were other no-keyboard all touchscreen devices though. The Nokia N770 (2005-2006), the PalmPilot and later iterations (starting 1997), various HTC smartphones and Pocket PCs before 2007, and so on.
The HP IPAQ didn't have a keyboard on standard models. Touchscreen only for text entry, with a little stylus to tap it out with. Around 5-10 hardware buttons around the case for things like back, volume controls, power etc. POCKET PC had excel, word, played and recorded audio files but was difficult to use and sluggish on the lower end models.
The top wiki picture with keyboard is one of the later models aimed at the Blackberry corporate users.
Iphone wasn't that innovative, just did things simply and really did "just work", which was a big deal at the time.
If the article was titled, 'Will Google's moonshots pay off'? With a list of the top projects and cumulative spending on each one. Some analysis on each of the markets and what their potential size could be in 2020. Who are the biggest competitors in the space? Now that would have been interesting to read!