FEW management fashions have waxed and waned quite as dramatically as that for conglomerates. From the 1960s to the 1980s business gurus praised conglomerates such as ITT of America and Hanson Trust of Britain as the highest form of capitalism. Today they routinely dismiss them as bloated anachronisms.
.. A tech blogger has quipped that Alphabet is “Berkshire Hathaway for the Burning Man crowd”. Indeed, Mr Page has acknowledged that he looks to Berkshire as a model of how to run an increasingly diversified company.
Why You Hate Google’s New Logo
henever a brand wants to freshen itself up, you start hearing talk about “clean lines,” as if a few gorgeous, old-fashioned letters were keeping us in the Dark Ages. Google’s new logo, announced and unveiled this week, is the latest victim. Its old logo’s typeface—reminiscent of literature, newspapers, printing—had a reassuring hint of history, paying its respects to what it had come to improve upon and replace. The letters’ literary old serifs were subtly authoritative: the sturdy, handsome “G,” the stately, appealing little “oo,” the typewriterish, lovable “g,” the elegant “l,” the thoughtful “e.”
.. Google took something we trusted and filed off its dignity
.. When I see that shifty new rainbow-colored “G” bookmarked on my toolbar, I recoil with mild distrust, thinking of when Philip Morris became Altria—No cigarettes here, see? Just rainbows!—or when British Petroleum suggested we think of it as Beyond Petroleum, or when the Bush Administration would name something Freedom.
.. Let this sans-serif building-block refrigerator-magnet silliness be the New Coke to your Coke
Google Says It’s Not the Driverless Car’s Fault. It’s Other Drivers’.
Last month, as one of Google’s self-driving cars approached a crosswalk, it did what it was supposed to do when it slowed to allow a pedestrian to cross, prompting its “safety driver” to apply the brakes. The pedestrian was fine, but not so much Google’s car, which was hit from behind by a human-driven sedan.
Google’s fleet of autonomous test cars is programmed to follow the letter of the law. But it can be tough to get around if you are a stickler for the rules. One Google car, in a test in 2009, couldn’t get through a four-way stop because its sensors kept waiting for other (human) drivers to stop completely and let it go. The human drivers kept inching forward, looking for the advantage — paralyzing Google’s robot.
It is not just a Google issue. Researchers in the fledgling field of autonomous vehicles say that one of the biggest challenges facing automated cars is blending them into a world in which humans don’t behave by the book.
.. The way humans often deal with these situations is that “they make eye contact. On the fly, they make agreements about who has the right of way,” said John Lee, a professor of industrial and systems engineering and expert in driver safety and automation at the University of Wisconsin.
Google Announces It’s All Grown-Up With Alphabet’s New Logo
Removing the Google name from its experimental ventures allows the company to take more risks without degrading the Google brand name. It gives Google the ability to fail safely in a bigger way; if a venture fails, they can cut it off and move on with little consequence. Another benefit is that Google will be forced to become a better manager of its investments and innovations, as its new technologies will need to be able to support themselves in the market rather than be artificially buoyed by the Google brand name.