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The company that designs various types of robots that are both amazing and yet a little terrifying in the overly passive behavior, Boston Dynamics is being put up for sale by Google parent Alphabet Inc.. While the various robots that the startup Boston Dynamics were truly outstanding and a revolution of robotics as we know them, it would appear that they just don’t quite make the cut in Alphabet’s book.
Alphabet Inc. is a holding company that usually gets mistaken for Google itself, although it represents a conglomerate that includes the latter, along several other businesses that were previously owned by the tech giant directly. While Boston Dynamics is a fascinating name that creates what is sure to become the future of locomotion in robotics, it would appear that Alphabet does not believe that the company is likely to produce revenue in the near future.
And truth be told, no matter how outstanding the abilities of robots such as Atlas or BigDog are, the applicability at this stage is relatively limited; the chances are that none of them will be able to become a marketable product at this point. Alphabet Inc. considers this a grave enough of an issue that convinced them to put the startup company up for sale.
There are rumors stating that Japanese carmaker Toyota Motor Corp. as well as Amazon.com Inc. both see some utility in a possible acquisition of Boston Dynamics, yet none of the companies involved agreed to comment on a possible purchase.
There are multiple factors at work behind this decision that Alphabet Inc. took, however. It has been known from various sources that Google and Boston Dynamics have not had the smoothest cooperation alongside one another since the giant acquired the robotics startup back in late 2013. At that time, it was only one of many purchases of the sort, seeing that Google was suddenly interested in the field of robotics and purchased several other startups in this field.
All the purchases summed up roughly 300 engineers that were brought into Google Inc., specialized in the field of robotics.
However, the numerous representatives coming from different small robotics companies were having difficulties working with Google engineers and as a result, could not come up with a product that could be released on short term. This, together with various internal issues and tensions that were later revealed by Aaron Edsinger, director of robotics at Google in San Francisco.
That, along with Google’s reluctance at being associated with the humanoid robotics that was depicted in the Boston Dynamics videos released sometime during February, led to Alphabet Inc.’s decision to sell the startup.
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