[jlgaddis]

From https://x.company/projects/makani/:

> In 2020 Makani’s journey as a company came to an end [0]. To share the lessons and insights the Makani team gained from their 13 year journey developing an entirely new kind of wind energy technology, the team created The Energy Kite Collection, a portfolio of resources including a technical report, Makani’s entire avionics, flight controls and simulation code repositories [1], flight logs [2] for every crosswind flight of the M600 prototype, technical videos [3], a new simulation tool called KiteFAST [4] created with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and a non-assertion pledge [5] for the free use of Makani’s worldwide patent portfolio.

I just wanna say that this -- all of it, the entire paragraph! -- is absolutely amazing (well, except for the end of the company, of course).

---

[0]: https://blog.x.company/a-long-and-windy-road-f8e09d02c9e1

[1]: https://github.com/google/makani

[2]: https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/bigquer...

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7og_3Jqea4VRCZmMNK4L...

[4]: https://github.com/rafmudaf/openfast/tree/kitefast

[5]: https://storage.googleapis.com/x-prod.appspot.com/files/Maka...

[tobinfricke]

IEEE Spectrum did a story on us a few days ago that you might want to check out too:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/renewables/exclu...

[cloudwalking]

X is what Google used to be.

[nikitaga]

X is still X and Google is still Google.

Outside of X, Google was never known for crazy moonshots. Google was always an ad platform with a search engine.

[bayindirh]

X was Google X, now it's Alphabet X. Google was Google, now it's Alphabet Google.

Google was the name of the search engine and the company. Now the company name has changed, everything is restructured and Google is an ad platform with a search engine.

"X Development LLC. is an American semi-secret research and development facility and organization founded by Google in January 2010, which now operates as a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. X has its headquarters about a mile and a half from Alphabet's corporate headquarters, the Googleplex, in Mountain View, California."[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_(company)

[nikitaga]

"X is what Google used to be." didn't strike me as a comment about the paperwork of corporate restructuring, but rather a comment on how Google isn't doing interesting things anymore. And I don't think anything changed in that regard. They just pulled non-core businesses such as X into Alphabet Inc. That doesn't mean that what X is doing used to be more important to Google than it is to Alphabet now, it's just paperwork.

[bayindirh]

> Google isn't doing interesting things anymore.

I think they've founded X because Google's interesting ideas got too big for a single department, so they spun it off.

We don't know how many smaller X inventions get into Google ecosystem. I'm sure that some of that research got integrated back into their data centers or networking hardware, etc.

[murbard2]

That's the name of the legal entity. The actual name, if memory serves, is "X, the moonshot factory".

[pas]

Gmail seemed kind of crazy at the time.

[mdorazio]

The only crazy part when it launched was the growing storage space aspect, which only seemed crazy because all the other mail providers were so ridiculously stingy. Email as a fantastic data gathering and ad platform made sense from day one.

[nikitaga]

I don't think they risked anything significant to build gmail. Nor was there any significant risk of gmail not succeeding due to hard technical problems. Compared to X projects like autonomous cars or power kites the original gmail was nothing crazy at all. Was it good software? Yes. Crazy? Hell no.