Article 495A5 Google’s Waymo risks repeating Silicon Valley’s most famous blunder

Google’s Waymo risks repeating Silicon Valley’s most famous blunder

by
Timothy B. Lee
from Ars Technica - All content on (#495A5)
waymo-danger-800x450.jpg

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images / Waymo)

Everyone in Silicon Valley knows the story of Xerox inventing the modern personal computer in the 1970s and then failing to commercialize it effectively. Yet one of Silicon Valley's most successful companies, Google's Alphabet, appears to be repeating Xerox's mistake with its self-driving car program.

Xerox launched its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1970. By 1975, its researchers had invented a personal computer with a graphical user interface that was almost a decade ahead of its time. Unfortunately, the commercial version of this technology wasn't released until 1981 and proved to be an expensive flop. Two much younger companies-Apple and Microsoft-co-opted many of Xerox's ideas and wound up dominating the industry.

Google's self-driving car program, created in 2009, appears to be on a similar trajectory. By October 2015, Google was confident enough in its technology to put a blind man into one of its cars for a solo ride in Austin, Texas.

Read 65 remaining paragraphs | Comments

index?i=rDi5-u01k54:hsRgppLXatc:V_sGLiPB index?i=rDi5-u01k54:hsRgppLXatc:F7zBnMyn index?d=qj6IDK7rITs index?d=yIl2AUoC8zA
External Content
Source RSS or Atom Feed
Feed Location http://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/index
Feed Title Ars Technica - All content
Feed Link https://arstechnica.com/
Reply 0 comments