Planetary duty

Google's NASA deal may benefit everyone but itself

Call it another moon shot. Google's $1.2 billion, 60-year lease of a NASA airfield near its Mountain View headquarters is another long-term bet on nascent technologies like robotics, artificial intelligence and space exploration. Wall Street won't give Google any short-term credit, but the deal may benefit almost everyone else.

The average tenure of a company in the S&P 500 Index is less than 20 years, according to Innosight, as firms are acquired, fail or lose relevance. That makes six decades an optimistic time horizon - especially for a technology firm, given the massive shifts that rock the industry periodically. IBM has survived over a century. But many stars like Control Data, Commodore and Compaq have flared and then gone cold over the past 60 years.

Wall Street's quarterly focus involves an even shorter duration. Google's top brass has never found this short-termism riveting. Internet search-related advertising has always been, to some extent, a way to make money to fund the company's ambitions in machine learning and artificial intelligence. Chief Executive Larry Page recently handed off many daily responsibilities to a subordinate to focus on new technologies and products. Co-founder Sergey Brin directs "special projects".

The $370 billion Google's big, off-the-wall bets, which it calls moon shots, include self-driving cars, drones, neural networks, balloon-based internet services and cures for age-related diseases. The cars, to take one example, probably won't become common on roads for more than a decade. The pay-off could be huge, but plenty of investors attribute little or no value today to the distant possible success of a risky project. Most companies avoid such money pits.

Yet the world at large might be better off if more of them undertook research efforts like Google's moon shots. Autonomous vehicles could save Americans $1.3 trillion a year, Morgan Stanley reckons, by eliminating fuel costs, accidents and congestion. And while investors may not see value now in Google's attempts to counter aging, in a few decades the geriatric Brin and Page could have the last laugh.