Boston Dynamics is such a hyped company, yet it constantly gets shoveled from one mega corp to another...Does it mean none of those companies see a profitable future with it?
Word has it Marc Raibert is not the easiest person to work with as an acquiring company, in a sense that he will keep control of the company, and do whatever he wants with it.
Amazon AWS is the literal incarnation of "money printer go BRRRR" meme. The profit margins are insane on it. They have zero issues with money reserves to expand to new things.
amazon never had their money run out, they have been incredibly profitable for a long time, they just put it back into the company. Building up patents and technology is the not the same as not showing a profit on your balance sheet.
I dunno if he has any say anymore given that the company belongs to Softbank who will write the terms of the sale.
And generally, it got passed around because there is valuable research IP that belongs to the company, which given the right market can be valuable, so in the spirit of capitalizing on it if that market realizes, companies either jump on it, or preemptively buy it for a later sale (which is no doubt what Softbank did)
No, but will that stop him? Or will that allow acquiring companies to start asserting some control? Or will Boston Dynamics yet again use the US military as a counterbalancing force to do what they want?
The main point is that profitability is probably not the issue why BD is switching owners so often. Some of these owners did not need the cashflow from the sale in the first place.
i understand, and i agree that his inflexibility was a large contributor to why Google moved them to softbank.
since softbank though, marc has transitioned to a chairman role, and the company has put in a lot of work into commercialization. i suspect they are still mostly R&D focused, but they are focusing more on commercialization than they ever have before in their history.
Developing walking robots when the wheel has been invented is not big business. Walking is good only for special purposes. Walking is not energy efficient. Their military mule looked cool, you rarely saw it doing anything that small wheeled unit could not do with better range and less maintenance.
Their new pivot towards wheeled logistic robots is acknowledgement of this fact. They still try to push probably unnecessary "legs with wheels" with Handle.
There are two activities for companies like Boston Dynamics. They can either develop technology or develop a product. Those activities take very different skill sets, as Tesla can attest, and many startup hardware companies fail trying to evolve from one into the other.
My guess would be that Hyundai's product development organizations, in theory, can take Boston Dynamic's technology and integrate it into products that can be sold commercially. As an automobile and robotics[0] manufacturer, Hyundai actually has a better chance than Google or SoftBank since they know a fair amount about manufacturing machines.
