Alphabet Winds Down Mineral, Licenses Ag Technology to Berry Producer Driscoll's

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-03/alphabet-shutters-mineral-licenses-ag-tech-to-berry-producer-driscoll-s

by rntn • 2 years ago

19 23 2 years ago

bloomberg.com

sickofparadox• 2 years ago

https://archive.is/AHfd3

legitster• 2 years ago

"When Driscoll’s learned that Alphabet was changing course with Mineral, the berry producer was eager to find a way to keep using the technology, said Scott Komar, Driscoll’s senior vice president of global research and development. The company uses the startup’s technology to predict how many berries its crops will yield, which enables it to provide more accurate forecasts to its buyers and labor partners, Komar said."
“We were really disappointed that Alphabet decided to change directions,” Komar said. “We have really had a great partnership with the Mineral team and from our vantage point they were just getting takeoff altitude. And then all of a sudden, you know, plans changed.”

Google is beyond parody with how they still continue to kill off promising products.

janekm• 2 years ago

It's the curse of being a company with a $xxxB main product line. It becomes really hard to justify projects that could at best contribute a few million to your bottom line...

office_drone2• 2 years ago

That doesn't track. As long as the project is generating at least a single dollar (TVM-adjusted) and you're not constrained on resources (SWEs, labs, etc.) that could be reassigned to higher yielding projects, that's all the justification you need.

xyst3• 2 years ago

It should be illegal. Unfortunately archaic IP and copyright laws have created this market of build as much junk, hodl the ip until market viable, sue competition that tries to use ‘their’ [unused/under utilized] IP

yumraj2• 2 years ago

One thing I don’t understand is that why Google doesn’t just spin-off these entities?

That is certainly better than killing thesee projects. Let the team take it and raise external funding with Google keeping some equity and assigning rest to the team.

vineyardmike2• 2 years ago

Licensing the tech out is pretty close. It’s not clear they ever had customers beyond Driscoll anyways.

skybrian• 2 years ago

Despite having one good customer, it doesn’t sound like it was a promising business? Why would they do better at finding customers on their own?

Instead they licensed the technology to their main customer.

xyst3• 2 years ago

Fortune 500 companies love to vacuum up all of this IP. It’s a game of “it’s not really viable today, so shelve it and use archaic IP laws to prevent anybody else from using ‘our’ [bought] idea”

foooorsyth• 2 years ago

That is certainly better than killing these projects?

You sure?

Google obfuscates these moonshots (Waymo, Verily) in the “Other Bets” line in their 10-K. They lose money in the aggregate and the detailed financials for each entity aren’t revealed.

If a company like Waymo looked like it were on the path to profitability, Google wouldn’t hide the financials. They report the bare minimum (jumbled up with a bunch of unrelated stuff) because the numbers are grim.

yumraj2• 2 years ago

That’s sunk cost.

Not sure, maybe I’m missing it, how does that impact spinning-off a project that Google no longer considers financially fruitful (it could still be financially viable but not at Google scale)?

spacecadet• 2 years ago

I hear they are axing "Google" next, whatever that is.

uoaei• 2 years ago

Explains why none of my job apps were ever acknowledged.

xyst3• 2 years ago

I’m probably in the minority but current IP and copyright law is holding back progress. People are too afraid to step on the toes of IP owners thus creating this generic marketplace of mediocre trash. At this point, I am honestly surprised China or any other country hasn’t surpassed it.

Manufacturing is already dead in the US. I guess the only thing keeping it together is the all mighty USD being kept as the “reserve currency”

petsfed• 2 years ago

Having worked in the ag-tech space, there are few heavies in the room that are happy to just wait out the IP limits on promising technology held by a startup/competitor who hasn't figured out how to monetize it yet. This is exactly what Driscoll's has done here. They never invested much themselves, and now that the rights are going for fire-sale prices, they'll step in and start developing themselves. I have a pretty good guess about who will be working to extend the tech.

Monsanto, Driscoll's, Simplot, these are companies that have decades of proven revenue that is not going away until humanity evolves photosynthesis directly. They can afford to wait it out until the price drops, and they'll only clamor to acquire a "promising startup" when they think the price can't get any lower.

IP protection here specifically serves to prevent e.g. Monsanto from eating ZipGrow or whoever's lunch.

analyte123• 2 years ago

Mineral's rover really appeared to be a solution looking for a problem. Why do you need a giant, expensive vehicle to slowly roll through your fields and see how the crops are doing when you could fly over it with a $700 drone and just look at the video? "You can't see the berries from the air!" - OK, berries are perhaps a $40B market globally. Most of the rest of the $3T+ market you can see just fine from the air or even one of the many competitors offering satellite crop imagery. The rover doesn't even do anything in the field, unlike for example the LaserWeeder implement.

Alphabet Winds Down Mineral, Licenses Ag Technology to Berry Producer Driscoll's

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