Alphabet Inc. to Give Up Boston Dynamics, Robotics Division Up for Sale
Less than three years after buying Boston Dynamics, Alphabet Inc. is reportedly placing it once again in the market, saying that this portion of the company's robotics department isn't generating any revenues.
In a report from Bloomberg, there are two possible buyers – Amazon.com Inc. and Toyota Research Institute (TRI). The lack of money-making potential seems to have been the foremost reason for Alphabet to give the robotics division up, adding that there is no way for it to realistically come up with a product that they can put in shelves a few years from now.
The same report also claimed that the division is getting feelers from TRI, which is a division of Toyota, and the biggest e-commerce site, Amazon.com. In the event that Amazon gets the nod and is able to agree with the price of buying Boston Dynamics, it should be pretty interesting to see how they're going to integrate it with a similar division they already own – Amazon Robotics.
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Alphabet Inc. is a recently created multinational conglomerate company Google created in order to consolidate all other companies owned by the technology giant. In 2013, Boston Dynamics was purchased with the objective of gaining grounds in the field of robotics. The first order of business was to bring in the best robotics engineers to form the project they called as "Replicant." The concept of the "Replicant" was to produce low-cost robots that can be sold in the consumer market.
But after just two years, the division was headed to failure, primarily because of several difficulties and hindrances encountered along the way, including the lack of direction and cooperation as well as leadership changes.
Before Google's acquisition of Boston Dynamics, the company was regarded as one of the most advanced companies in robot engineering and production, of which several of their projects were funded and supported by the United States military. Perhaps the most recognizable product is the Cheetah, dubbed as the fastest robot with legs.
