With sensors, the systems and software are a bigger business than the sensors themselves. For example, your body has primitive sensors such as eyes and fingers, but it processes the data in combination, so the whole is greater than the parts. Call it "sensor fusion", something increasingly seen in the automotive, healthcare, and robotic industries.

In 2017, after four years of setbacks and crashes, Alphabet shut its project flying solar-powered fixed-wing drones in the upper atmosphere to beam the internet to those cut-off. They have now ended their upper-atmosphere balloon version as well.