Following up on yesterday’s post about Alphabet’s considerable wager on its X division becoming a new-generation Bell Labs, realizing that if it’s primarily a search company in a decade, then it’s probably a dying enterprise, well-appointed though its dotage may be.

Robert MacIntosh has penned a Conversation piece suggesting the same, that Google would like to chase immortality as a company while Calico pursues it on a human level. It’s almost impossible to pull off in the long run, though a remarkably ambitious effort. An excerpt:

Many of the investments will turn out to be ineffective, but you usually have no way of knowing in advance. Some technologies or business models will prove unworkable for some as yet unknown reason. Just ask Sir Clive Sinclair – his C5 battery-operated car was in many ways ahead of its time, but soon became one of the most infamous marketing disasters ever.

The logic might be that – if you have the money to spare – it pays to invest broadly and look out for those early signs of rapid growth. After all, the management team at Google has long since demonstrated the capacity to build a market-leading position. Who would bet against them being able to do so again, especially when they are both better resourced and more experienced?

Imperial echoes

A second interpretation of the moonshot strategy could be that the firm’s founders are trying to combine a search for longevity with the adrenaline-fuelled high of creating a new business. But the harsh reality is that it is harder to fake the feel of a start-up when you’re a billionaire. The staggering investment in new ideas is nothing compared to Alphabet’s earnings. In the last three months of 2015 alone, the company made a net profit of $4.9bn. Arguably it doesn’t really matter if these businesses fail because other new ideas will pop up next year and you could fund them instead.

It would be a mistake to think that the future was assured for the company, however. Over the millennia, civilisations have grown to dominant positions and then failed. If it happened to the Incas, the Egyptians and the Romans, why wouldn’t it happen to Google?•