Business Insider reports that Google is hiring a LIDAR engineer.
Although BI reports this breathlessly as, “Google and parent company Alphabet are not leaving such a key ingredient in someone else’s hands,” it seems a little less earth-shattering than that. To be fair, BI eventually concedes that possibility, as well.
Any large organization that depends on suppliers for key parts is going to have internal specialists in those parts. When I worked at in AOL’s data center, years ago, we had all sorts of routing and switching engineers, despite the fact that AOL never had any desire to build its own routing a switching hardware.
I think the more intriguing, if less newsworthy conclusion here is that Google is gradually looking more and more like it’s going to have a real autonomous vehicle business, and not just a moon-shot lab project.
Originally published at www.davidincalifornia.com on December 14, 2015.
David Silver 