Why Not Self-Driving Grocery Carts?

We’ll have self-guided drones delivering groceries for Amazon, self-driving cars dropping our kids off at school and self-piloted airplanes shuttling passengers around the country (isn’t this already a thing?)

Self-driving grocery carts would allow us to focus on the shopping while the cart does the steering, maybe the cart could even point us toward sales and hot deals?

While I kid about the grocery carts (though it would be handy) this is the question I often hear, Why is Google building self-driving cars? As in, what’s the point?

If you think about it, the money probably isn’t going to be made in the manufacturing and distribution of cars but in the operating system. If you think about it, Google doesn’t make money selling Android phones, they make money from manufacturers using the Android OS.

I answered a question on Quora about self-driving cars back in August, take a look.

How is Google planning to monetize the self-driving car?

They’re creating a platform, much like Android, that will require users to be dependent upon their technology to navigate to their destination, search for gas stations and restaurants, provide in-car entertainment, and view ads while doing all of the above.

However they decide to license the technology, millions, potentially billions, of users will now interface with all things Google. That’s a ton of money from ad revenue and Google services.

While the technology itself is fascinating I’m leery of an ‘open source’ OS running on our cars, our phones, our TV sets (coming soon to a TV near you) but I guess at the very least it’s not Windows. That’s a good thing, right??