Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is saying goodbye to another of its long-term experimental bets: this time it’s Loon, the giant balloons that the company hoped to transmit to the Internet in rural areas of the world.
“While we’ve found several willing partners along the way, we haven’t found a way to get costs low enough to build a long-term sustainable business,” Loon CEO Alastair Westgarth said Thursday in a post to block. “The development of radical new technologies is intrinsically risky, but that doesn’t make it easy to spread this news. Today I’m sad to say Loon will be finished.”
The cancellation comes after the company closed another experimental business called Makani, which provided wind power from giant stars, in 2020. Both projects came out of Alphabet’s “X” business unit. , which uncovers long-term experimental projects, and was accounted for in Alphabet’s “Other Bets,” other than Google, which provides almost all of Alphabet’s revenue and all of its profits.
In its third-quarter earnings report, Alphabet said Other Bets generated revenue of $ 178 million compared to $ 155 million the previous year. Meanwhile, companies showed an operating loss of $ 1.1 billion, up from $ 941 million the previous year. Google, on the other hand, earned operating income of $ 12.6 billion with revenue of $ 46 billion.
Loon had suffered financial problems recently, according to a November report from The Information. This report noted that the main goal of Loon executives for 2020 was to achieve their second round of foreign investment.
“The arc of innovation is long and unpredictable,” Westgarth continued in his farewell message. “While this is not the result I imagined for Loon when I joined four years ago, I still feel a huge sense of pride for the successes of the entire Loon team and I hope our efforts continue in ways we still can’t imagine. . “
In a separate blog post, Astro Teller, CEO of X and chairman of Loon’s board of directors, said Loon would pledge $ 10 million to “support nonprofits and connectivity-focused businesses, the Internet , Entrepreneurship and Education in Kenya “.
“Unfortunately, despite the team’s innovative technical achievements over the past nine years, the road to commercial viability has proven to be much longer and riskier than expected,” Teller added.
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