Google's mysterious floating techno barge SOLD FOR SCRAP Google's hopes of operating a floating technology showcase in the San Francisco Bay appear to have sunk, with word that the online ad-slinger has sold off at least one of two mysterious – or merely hare-brained? – Google Barges. The San Jose Mercury News reports that Google has confirmed the sale of the barge that has sat idle …
Maybe they did do illegal experiments. Nine months, after all, is suspiciously close to the gestation period for a human baby; perhaps now that the genetically engineered spawn of Brin and Page (with, no doubt, some stolen gene sequences from Steve Jobs) has been birthed, they've decided one is enough.
Before the wheels fell off the secret squirrel nest, they paid for Google to be a front for these fibre-optic interception listening barges, to be placed at strategic inbound fibre points with 'undisclosed electronics'. Maybe.
People thought it was the kind of crazy thing Google might do, and they would kit out the front couple of layers with lots of Teletubby rolling hills etc to showcase the toys on.
Maybe.
You're right - who knows.
I'd a thought that that under-sea fibre-tapping devices don't require such a large distraction, though.
Using a commercial company to provide cover for a a purpose-built espionage boat?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSF_Explorer
formally the USNS Hughes Glomar Explorer (T-AG-193), the deep-sea drillship platform initially built for the United States Central Intelligence Agency Special Activities Division secret operation Project Azorian to recover the sunken Soviet submarine K-129, lost in April 1968.
I think he's referring to the stories on the Reg and elsewhere about the barges as being "ads".
If so, they fail at that since they didn't advertise anything other than Google's name. Google already has name recognition about as high as it is going to go, so mentioning their name in additional articles is worth nothing to them.
On the other hand, if instead of Google this had been done by some small startup no one had ever heard of that ended up with millions of people checking out their web site and everyone knowing who they were and what they did, it would have gone down as one of the greatest stealth marketing campaigns in history.
The *real* Google World Domination Nuclear Powered Floating Headquarters[tm][c] have been quietly built, completed, stocked for a looooong cruise, and launched on its way to who knows where... their job of distraction complete, the Google Barges can now be scrapped; a cunning move which not only releases a little equity but still keeps people guessing.
I understand they would have been scrapped earlier, but the GWDNPFH launch was delayed as they were unable to locate a suitable white cat.
"I understand they would have been scrapped earlier, but the GWDNPFH launch was delayed as they were unable to locate a suitable white cat."
Google of all people should be able to find a suitable white cat from the gazillions of cat photos online.
But perhaps the ideal fluffy white cat owners are a secretive bunch.
Scrapped? Yeh, right. More like fully fitted, operational and setting off to do no evil somewhere in the world. This is just a cover story so next time someone googles google barge, the only news that pops up will be they've been scrapped. They'll also be invisible to google earth. The barges, and any activities that may or may not involve oompa loompa pron would also have a right to be forgotten. Thus they cease to exist on the interwebz and vanish from subjective reality.
Other possibilities:
1) Pilot craft to be used for the WaveView project.
2) The ultimate place to back up everyone's lolcats, delete all land-based copies and then sell them back to the original owners, when ad-slinging is no longer a viable business model.
DO NO Evil (as he strokes his white cat)
I'll speculate, as everyone else is...
Firstly what were they going to do with them? I recon create off-shore data centres to protect it from governments, but that plan has been scrapped after the US government have since made a number of successful demands for data in other countries.
Secondly why scrap and not sell? For the same reason companies buy paper cups, they're disposable and therefore cannot be classed as an asset. If they were sold they would be at a significant loss, if they're kept they're an asset, but if they're scrapped they can claim back the cost of them as they're not an asset and, technically, resulted in no profit being made.
Or, they were making Waterworld 2 but Kevin Costner turned them down.
It may simply be that they couldn't find a buyer for more than scrap value (and there may be a lot of scrap value in all that old iron).
If google deployed any nice technology into the barges, it's unlikely they included that in the sale price, leaving not much for a buyer other than lots of rust and maybe a fancy paintjob on some walls. I was always thinking that the "technology demo" part of the barge was some kind of VR setup, so there's probably a big welded-together space with some orientation grids / greenscreen painted on it, and lots of empty camera mounts and cable trays.
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