I completely agree with it being about killing the public aspect.

I'm wondering how this all /may/ fit into the long term view of patents for all parties mentioned here.

If an idea is born, and they have a good patent on it, there should be less to fear by having the idea out there in a public beta.

Perhaps they are all thinking patents might not work so well long term, or how patents work being tweaked due to public pressure about anti-competition.

(...and of course the dreadful waste of money revolving around patents, and especially enforcement.)

AFAIK MS seems to be doing this too, BTW.

There is no way that they're going to kill off the research group at Google. I suspect that they're just going to be keeping a lot of their research out of the public eye, not letting us play with the toys that they've created.

That might be. Apple now has much more revenue than Google.

Though, just today I was thinking: 'Well, Google with their young nerdy founders might just not care as much about profit.' I hope Google won't sacrifice geeky projects like autonomous cars for better quarterly numbers.

Good thing their autonomous cars project isn't part of Labs and could make them an obscene amount of money if it works out.

I wondered a few days ago about the cars: Wouldn't it make more sense to make that project open source?

The serious money is in the data products, I believe. The Google cars work by localizing themselves in very high quality maps obtained by post-processing data obtained by cars that drove the route already at least twice. The maps are checked and corrected by humans, for example to decide where the center of each lane is, and where to look for traffic lights.

The software alone is of limited value without access to the database. The current database of a subset of California's roads is about 20GB. They'll need to freshen it frequently, but renting access to the database is what I think the business model is in the long term.

From a good-for-mankind perspective, probably. From Google's perspective I really don't think so. If they can perfect that technology they will have a great opportunity to be the only company in the world able to license the ability to automate the transportation of people and goods using existing vehicles and roadways. It would be a gold mine.

Well technically, they could open source and still have patents on it. That way they can be the only supplier of autonomous car software for car manufacturers and still allow people to play with the code.

Where did I say that it was a part of labs?

I was just referring to the parent, that this step might indeed be an attempt to cut costs since the competition makes more profit. And if that is true than they might start cutting elsewhere, too.