Google Antarctica? Driverless Cars? Google's Aimless Search for Innovation
Innovation is great and all, but after weeks like these last few I wonder if Google has entirely gone off the wind farm reservation in its latest round of inventing. Just since the beginning of October, the company has:
Launched Google Street View Antarctica, which pretty much means one of its employees spent a lot of time and money taking pictures of penguins (at right).- Said it is developing a car that doesn't need a person to drive it, although the car can "mimic different driving personalities." This caused TechCrunch's MG Siegler to quip last night on Countdown with Keith Olbermann that one of those personalities might be a driverless car that repeatedly checks its Android phone. Either that, or Google is looking to expand usage of smart phones since people can text while the car drives -- but inventing a driver-less car to make that happen does seem like the long route to solving the problem.
- Decided to be one of the major investors in a planned $5 billion wind farm off the East Coast.
What we are more likely seeing is the outgrowth of Google's company policy that urges employees to spend 20 percent of their time working on something besides the company's core business -- which goes a long way toward explaining why no one at Google has gotten around to ensuring the keyboard automatically shows up when you start searching contacts in Android.
Seriously though, there's a real danger here of making investors think the company is entirely scattered. Google has only able to avoid that knock so far because of its results. In the second quarter, its revenue was up 24 percent to $6.82 billion. But the patience of investors for these side projects -- particularly ones that have absolutely no bearing on Google's technology business -- will only last as long as things stay that way. If Google has any insight into its tendency to get distracted, then these quirky side projects bode well for Google's third-quarter earnings, which are being announced on Thursday. Only a truly foolish company would cop to the fact it was testing a driver-less car less than a week before earnings if those earnings were going to suck.
Meanwhile, the competition in its core businesses is only intensifying. Twitter is touting that its new ad models are getting click-through rates much higher than the industry average; Apple may finally roll out the iPhone to Verizon because its AT&T-only policy has (temporarily) done wonders for Android's market share; the code hasn't been fully cracked on how YouTube will make money. There's innovation, and then there's meaningless innovation. Too often lately, Google seems to be doing the latter.
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