Why you might never own one of Google's self-driving car and why you won't want to

I've been inspired by Google's ongoing mission to build self-driving cars since I first heard of the project years ago. However, I never put very much thought into the true implications of this project until the past couple weeks. Suffice it to say, I've decided the implications of this project are huge and the outcome may be drastically different, and far more world-changing, than I ever imagined.

To summarise in four words: Vehicles as a service.

Let me explain to you why I think you might not get the chance to buy one of Google's self-driving cars and why I don't think you'll ever need to.

The Autonomous Car

I will start by examining some basic implications of Google's current goal. Google wants to build a car that is completely self-driving with no input from the passenger. We can reasonably conclude, by drawing parallels to other proposed autonomous systems such as aircraft autopilot or LRT systems, that they will have to prove the system is effectively 100% safe in order to have it accepted by the public and governments. Knowing that passengers in such a vehicle will be distracted by other tasks during their travel, the cars will not be able to rely on a driver to hit an emergency break or have any other responsibility. In a Google self-driving car, there will be no driver - only passengers. This is where things get interesting.

If Google's self-driving car has no driver, then presumably it wouldn't need anybody in it at all to operate. I could have a few too many G&T's at happy hour, call my car from my mobile phone and have it pick me up at the front door; even if I left it at home this morning in favour of the office car pool. I'm going to start calling this device Google's "autonomous car". But this is just the start; it gets way better than this.

Before I talk about why you won't own one of these fantastic sounding vehicles, let's consider how Google will launch them when the technology is ready.

The Google Business Model

An analysis of Google's traditional behaviour and product positioning reveals some consistent patterns. Particularly, they focus on products for everybody, not niche markets. They position their products to maximise benefit to society (matching their "do no evil" moto), and they have a strong preference for recurring revenue models.

When Google releases products, they are intended for everybody. They don't segment based on income brackets or special interests. Most products are free and the ones that aren't can be afforded by just about any individual or business. Further more, their products are designed to be user friendly enough to be used in schools yet powerful enough to satisfy enterprise requirements. They may not always succeed at the latter requirement but technically the goal is on the books. Google aims to make products for the general public and works hard to get them in the hands of everyone. Google autonomous cars will be no different and their goal will be to have one for everyone, not just those that can afford new luxury vehicles.

Google's famous moto is "do no evil" and they've put a good amount of effort into keeping up appearances on this one. I've also heard it referenced with sincerity during one-on-one discussions with Google employees so I am personally convinced it is a part of their corporate culture that most likely comes from the top. This is one nice benefit of having Larry Page as CEO. Although profit is undoubtedly a factor, I have some confidence this morality combined with the autonomous car project's potential to save lives was a strong factor for the projects launch and survival of its more risky and costly early years. No doubt, Google will consider a launch model for the car that maximises it's ability to improve the world.

Finally, Google traditionally favours recurring revenue models over selling products for a one-time cost. In just about every product Google sells they will eat any existing set-up fees that most companies would charge in favour of monthly or other recurring costs. Consider AdWords, Google Apps for Business, Checkout, and Android which profits from the marketplace. There are several ways Google could sell their automated car technology but some have better recurring revenues than others.

Therefore, Google will seek out a sales model for their autonomous car that best offers recurring revenue. There are several options available here that offer differing levels of potential. The most obvious model consists of licencing the technology to vehicle manufacturers and taking a royalty on each vehicle sold. This is a decent model that is arguably recurring but I think Google could do better.

Managing Potential Drawbacks

Let's first take a side-step and examine the benefits and drawbacks of autonomous cars. The way I see it, there's a mixed bag of each.

Benefits:

• Autonomous cars are incredible safe and could prevent tens of thousands of deaths and even more serious injuries every year.
• The vehicles are incredibly convenient and allow increased productivity while travelling.
• Cost savings should be introduced in the form of more efficient driving and reduced insurance costs.

Drawbacks:

• Autonomous cars could prove environmentally hazardous. In a time when the world is trying to focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the convenience and productivity afforded by the autonomous car may encourage the use of single-occupancy vehicles.
• Undoubtedly, the cost of an autonomous vehicle will likely be extremely high for the near future. This is especially true if Google simply licences the technology to vehicle manufacturers who have traditionally only offered the newest safety features in higher-end models.

An important consideration about the drawbacks I've listed is that, to a substantial degree, they already apply to regular vehicles. They are bad for the environment and the second most expensive purchase one will make on average. As such, it wouldn't be too surprising if Google simply released their cars upon the world and considered these drawbacks to be an acceptable cost (as would the general public, I'm sure). However, I don't think Google will settle for that. They're not that kind of company.

Car Sharing

The nice thing about these problems is that, because they are already an issue for everyone who drives, the free market has already designed innovative solutions - namely, car sharing. Car sharing services are designed to alleviate the initial (and difficult to justify) cost of a vehicle by charging per-use instead. Additionally, most car-sharing services take advantage of fuel-efficient hybrid vehicles in order to minimise fuel costs (which are generally covered by the service provider) and minimise their environmental impact. The price difference of a hybrid vehicle is easily amortised over the vehicles' years of service.

It is my conclusion that Google's initial focus for their autonomous cars will be car sharing services. This will allow them to maximise accessibility (and, thus, benefit to society) and minimise the identifiable drawbacks.

Before we consider the money side of things, let's get a little excited by thinking about the implications of an autonomous car sharing service. Suddenly, if you live in a city, you don't need to own a car (not that you really do now). Getting a ride at any time will be as simple as calling a car on your mobile phone (not so different from Uber) but because there's no human driver to pay it'll be as affordable (or more so) as current car sharing services which are only a fraction of taxi prices. I expect the cost will rival that of a the realistic costs of car ownership (not even including purchase price). There won't be any need to own a car, fork out a cab fair, or hunt down your nearest car2go on foot ever again. It'll be the best of all worlds and available to everyone.

And there's one more benefit. Current car sharing services have a huge limitation by design. They have operating areas that usually consist of the downtown core of major metropolitan areas and any vehicles need to be picked up and dropped off in these areas. This excludes a huge percentage of people from ever enjoying these wonderful services. The autonomous car will eliminate this requirement. A small remote town of a couple thousand people could conceivably have just two autonomous cars to service the area (until demand increased) and still be profitable.

But how does this approach effect profitability?

One key feature of car-sharing services is that they service the most people with the fewest number of cars. How could selling 200 cars to a car sharing service that services a city of 500,000 people be more profitable than just selling brand new cars to that same market of 500,000 drivers? The answer is recurring revenue.

Google's Car Sharing Service

Google isn't just going to sell its cars to third-party car sharing services. Google is going to launch its own service. They certainly have the capital available and keeping their autonomous car technology in-house would mean they would have a huge competitive advantage over any competition for years to come. This would provide Google recurring revenue from drivers around the world while simultaneously making vehicles safer and more enjoyable for everyone.

Google is poised to disrupt vehicle travel to the same degree they helped revolutionise the world wide web.

Are you looking forward to self-driving cars yet?


Related Articles
http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/12/eric-schmidt-google-self-driving-cars-should-become-the-predominant-mode-of-transport-in-our-lifetime/

http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/07/google-cars-300000-miles-without-accident/

Payment Processing for Canadian Websites

The time has come for me to start sorting out payment processing on my website, YogaConnect.me. This will be the first time I've actually worked with payment processing so I'm doing quite a bit of research on the available options.

My criteria for a good payment processor for my start-up consisted of four requirements.

1. Available in Canada
2. No (significant) setup or monthly fees
3. Ability to accept major credit cards without requiring my customers to sign up with a third-party
4. High usability from my customer's perspective
5. Able to automatically activate user accounts when payments processed.

Once I found all the available options that satisfied this high-level criteria, I would compare the details like fee amounts etc. to find the most ideal system. In the end, I didn't even get that far.

Oh, how I envy Americans sometimes.

It turns out, if you live in Canada, the options are severely limited. To be specific, the following services - which are otherwise quite promising - are simply not available to Canadian businesses:

• Stripe.com (I was really excited about this one!) 
• Google Checkout
• Amazon Payments

So that leaves...

• PayPal

Well, so much for selection. The only question remaining is: does PayPal satisfy my other requirements?

No setup or monthly fees: True (for certain account types)

Ability to accept major credit cards without my customers requiring a PayPal account: True

High usability: Not ideal on the no setup/monthly fee accounts but acceptable.

Able to automatically active user accounts on my end:  To be decided.

The complication with PayPal is that their basic payment option with no monthly fee (Website Payments Standard) is designed to require manual processing of payments on my end which could impact my user experience. The alternative account with better site integration (Website Payments Pro) could improve the user experience but has a monthly fee of $35. Now, $35 isn't a huge cost but I expect I'll actually be taking a loss with even that low rate for the next 6 - 8 months while I finish developing the product, market, and put early users through free trials, etc.

So it looks like PayPal doesn't satisfy all my requirements like, say, Stripe.com would have if only it were in Canada, but it's the best option I've got. 

I'll have to give it a go and see if I can leverage my swanky technical skills to find a happy medium between user experience and not paying that monthly fee. Worst case, I suppose I'll just eat the cost until I can start breaking even. I can justify that because $35/mo is a reasonably small price to pay for a good first impression on those early adopters.

What payment processor do you use as a SaaS provider? And, maybe more importantly, which payment system do you enjoy most as an online consumer?

Getting Online with SharePoint Online

I discovered today that Microsoft is targeting their Online Services (Office 365) at small and medium sized businesses (SMB's) and BDC had an article that recommended SharePoint Online as an affordable way to host your small business website. This seemed like an ideal first topic for this blog.

Let's take a look at what it took to get a website going.

Step 1: Getting an Office 365 Trial
As affordable as Office 365 is ($6 USD per user per month), I decided to go the trial route to make sure it was a good fit.

I started off at the Microsoft Office 365 home page and, after quickly reviewing pricing and features, clicked on the giant "Free Trial" button.

This brought me to a very simple page asking which trial was right for me. The answer was pretty obvious, "Professionals and small businesses."

After this, the trial signup was smooth and painless. They asked simple questions like my name, organization, country and let me select my new sub-domain (you can add your real domain once you've got your account).

The trial signup took me all of about 90 seconds before I was presented with the welcome screen.

Step 2: Finding my Website

Scrolling to the very bottom led me to what I was really looking for. "View your public-facing website".

There it was, just sitting pretty waiting for me to make my move. The default site looked like this.

Back at the welcome page, I knew it was time to get my content on that page ASAP. At the top there's a link to 'Admin'. That's the key.

First impression? The admin page is... busy. But still accessible!

Scrolling to the bottom of the Admin page, I found what I was looking for. "Design and edit your public-facing website." I clicked "Edit website" and was on my way.

If you've used SharePoint before, this probably looks very familiar and you know exactly what to do. If, on the other hand, you are one of the 99% of small business owners out there who have not, you probably have no clue of what's going on.

Step 3: Understanding SharePoint

The first thing to note is that if you look at the address bar in the browser, you'll see we moved from 'portal.microsoftonline.com' to '<your username>.sharepoint.com'. This is SharePoint. Much like the Matrix, I can't tell you exactly what SharePoint is but I can tell you that it is where your new website is going to be built and stored.

What we're looking at on this page is a 'Library' that contains all the pages that make up your new website. Microsoft has kindly got us on our way with a few sample pages. We can easily remove these pages if we don't want them, or create new pages as we need them.

Step 4: Understanding the Page Editor

Getting my first page ready would be easy since I've got these samples to work with. To get started, I just clicked on the page titled 'Home'.

This brings us to the surprisingly easy page editor.

Before I dive into how to use the page editor, let's take a quick moment to discuss how SharePoint pages work.

Templates vs. Page Content

The first point to know is that a page is split into two parts, a template and the page content. Templates are shared between many pages (usually all pages on a smaller site like the default site here or the site we are going to design). The page content is the part of the page that is different for every page. This graphic demonstrates how the default home page is split up.

It is important to know the difference between what is part of the template and what is the page content because we are able to change both, but each has its own implications. For example, when we edit the heading, which is in the Template, we will be changing that section for each page. However, when we edit the content of the page, we are only affecting the page we are currently looking at.

Page Layouts


The Page Content section of every page is split into multiple sections called "zones". The number, size and organization of these zones is defined by the "layout" selected for the current page. There is a menu in the Design ribbon that lets you conveniently change the layout for the current page and we'll talk more about that later.

Step 5: Setting Up the Template


Heading

Let's make this page ours with an appropriate heading. Clicking the default heading (which reads "Enter your heading text here") once will open the heading editor.

Here we simply enter our heading and sub-heading and click "OK" at the bottom. Note: If you have a logo readily available, use the "Logo" tab at the top of the heading editor before leaving.

You can immediately see your changes reflected in the editor but what exactly will site visitors see? If you look at the very top-left corner of the editor you will see two small buttons.

• The left-most button is labelled "Save your changes and publish them to the web". This will immediately make your changes visible to anyone who visits your site.
• The button to the right is a bit more magical and is labelled "View how your Website will look to visitors." This is a very useful button because it allows us to save our changes, but doesn't make them visible to everyone yet. This might not be important at this stage of the game, but in the future you'll likely find yourself making changes and wanting to preview them before you commit to publishing them.

Click the preview button to see our new heading on the website.

You can see that our new heading is proudly displayed just as we'd expected. Now, if you click through the various pages in the website, you'll notice that the heading was updated on all of them. This is because the heading we just edited is part of the template that is shared between all the pages.

Once we're satisfied with our shiny new heading, we can close this preview page to return to the editor.

Other template components you can customize are the navigation menus (using the "Location" menu in the Design ribbon of the editor) and the footer which you can create with the "Footer" button in the Design ribbon.


Look and Feel


The next step in personalizing this website is establishing a look and feel that suits your business. There are three menus in the Design ribbon that you are going to want to use for this.

• "Color" lets you select a color scheme for the entire website. There are 42 pre-defined color schemes that are all quite slick. If one of these doesn't tickle your fancy, you can define your own.
• "Style" gives you a set of header layouts to choose from that let you organize the various header elements.
• "Theme" allows you to select from an amazingly large array of provided graphics to be used in the heading or, if you have some better alternatives, upload your own.

You can combine these three elements to produce an endless array of possible designs that best fit your needs.

If you're curious, here's how my site ended up looking after a couple minutes of effort.

Step 6: Adding Page Content

I don't have a lot of content for my home page, certainly not enough to fill three zones, so I'm going to start by changing the layout of my page. To do this, I click the "Layout" menu in the Design ribbon and select the layout that is one giant box.

This results in all the content from the three default zones being stuck in the single zone. Since I don't want any of the default content, I can just select it all, right-click and delete it.

Now that I have a clean slate, I'll add my content. All the text-formatting options you might be looking for are in the "Home" ribbon at the top.

Once we're finished editing our page, it's time to go to the "File" menu and choose "Save & Publish" then "Close the Web page."

Step 7: Page Management

Back at the Pages library, it's time to remove a couple default pages I have no interest in. To do this, I check the "About Us" and "Site Map" pages. Checking these pages automatically switches to the Pages ribbon which presents me with the "Delete" button. Goodbye!

Conclusion

Looks like my micro-site is all done! In less than an hour I've got a simple online presence and with the desire and a couple hours this could be a much more substantial website.

SharePoint is an extremely powerful tool and it looks like Microsoft has made it available and completely reasonable for small businesses looking for a website. At $6/month, this really can't be beat. And the rest of the features in the Office 365 suite are pretty useful as well.

Do you have a small business, professional, or personal website? Where is it hosted and how is that working out for you?