How do you define "immense progress"? Fully attempt to me means actually sinking a significant portion of overall company budget (say, greater than 5%) into a project, marketing it, and attempting to spread it to a wide market. Or put it another way, if a venture-backed startup were pursuing one of these avenues, what would they do? Certainly they wouldn't be content with pilot projects that fizzle out and glacially slow deployment across the country. If Uber were a Google moonshot, they would still be running only black cars in SF.
Google is fantastic at highly-automated software, but really sucks at any kind of real world hardware or service.
Google is fantastic at highly-automated software, but really sucks at any kind of real world hardware or service.