Is Google committed to either of these? These are basically hobbies: there&#x27;s no evidence that Google is pushing hard on them. Six years after starting, and they&#x27;re still pilot programs at best.<p>These are certainly cool technologies and producing amazing preliminary results. What I am questioning is whether this strategy of dipping their toes in a bunch of different ideas actually works. Google&#x27;s hope seems to be to throw a bunch of stuff and see what sticks, whereas Apple&#x27;s approach is to pick a few ideas, and then devote tremendous resources at it until they get it right.<p>Google thinks that their autonomous vehicles will be ready for broad scale use by 2020, the same year that Elon Musk thinks Tesla will have their autonomous car ready, and the rumored date of the Apple car. So it doesn&#x27;t seem that their head start allowed them to bring things to market any faster. Maybe Google&#x27;s offering (in whatever form) will work way way better than its competition, but my guess is they&#x27;ll be roughly comparable.<p>And six years on, Google Fiber is only available in a tiny number of municipalities, and has a small fraction of the subscriber base of, say, Verizon Fios. Six years!<p>I&#x27;m an outsider, but I speculate that these types of projects are low pressure. There&#x27;s no revenues at stake, no expectation of profit, no hard deadlines, and probably no serious threat of cancellation. So it is not surprising that progress is slow. Recall that the literal moon shot - the Apollo program - was a national goal, set by the President, with an explicit deadline.