Sense and Sensation

Moonshot Thinking At SXSW this past spring, a Googler gave a presentation about what Google calls Moonshot Thinking, the kind of no-holds-barred, imaginative, off-the-wall, visionquest thinking that solves problems ten times more effectively than existing solutions do.  This kind of thinking was what spawned the Google[x] office, a home inside Google for pursuing radical ideas, like self-driving cars, email accounts with virtually unlimited space, and more.  (The “x” in Google [x] is for ten--as in improving what’s out there by a factor of ten.)  The man speaking at SXSW was Astro Teller , who oversees Google[x], and goes by the title “Captain of Moonshots.” The session was an inspiration session, which means there wasn’t much in the line of content.  It meant to inspire with big ideas, but if you follow what’s going on in the tech world, most of it was familiar.  Despite these shortcomings, it did plant the expression “moonshot thinking” in my head, ...