[mike_hearn]

No moonshot by a big corp has paid off?

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.