Seriously, I thought BD was THE coolest acquisition Google ever did. I was also throughly jealous of Andy Rubin's job where he get to be surrounded by world's best robotics experts to work on moonshot projects in world's most resourceful company. It didn't seem to get better than this. Then he left Google in just an year. Now BD is up for sell. Things are just not making sense. I mean selling BD is not going to move any needle for Google's balancesheet. I heard they weren't getting "integrated" with rest of the company. But since when Google had trouble with acquisitions with idealistic eccentric founders who want to live by their own rules? Doesn't YouTube has its own "CEO" and it didn't even had shared login or Google branding for longest time? I heard Rosenberg didn't want to wait for 10 years for marketable products. But isn't that's why it's called moonshot and it's supposed to be the purpose of Google X to incubate very long term projects? Then I heard some PR person talking about negative press on last video. Well, seriously? Are we going to get rid of these coolest engineers for doing something truly amazing because some armchair pundits and YouTube commenters speculated about robots replacing humans? I am not Googler but the whole thing doesn't feel Googley. I just can't understand why no one at Google seem to be keen at keeping BD, one the coolest thing in Robotics. For now I hope someone at Microsoft jumps at this opportunity to get BD and runs with it. I am sure Bezos probably can't even wait.
the only immediate revenue stream is govt defense contracts and I think it goes against the whole do no evil philosophy. I agree the tech is amazing but I the team seems to be focused on frankly speaking military type use and is too long away from a commercially viable consumer product.
Imagine a combat mission with the BD robots playing a supporting role and innocents die... It will be google's name plastered all over. Is it worth sullying the brand or linking it to that kind of activities? They probably bought it to figure out consumer uses and if that isn't happening, maybe beat to divest and move on
Google wants to benefit society, not create war machines.
It sounds like the armchair pundit here might be you :) you have no read data on how much of an asshole the BD guy might be, or what clauses in the acquisition he might have negotiated to protect his influence on BD's direction. At a time in which they are dealing with a challenging transition to new company structure, selling BD off might have been the most rational move for what we know. It's fun to speculate so let's speculate, but let's not think even for a second that we have enough data to say anything with the kind of certainty your post suggests.
8 years later, this is likely exactly what happened. BD hasn't innovated past YouTube videos, and the culture is very eccentric. Wouldn't be surprised if BD leadership was impossible to work with, given Googlyness.
they were so closed off, completely uninterested in integrating
the only way to find out what they were doing was to read the public news
Like buying Motorola Mobility and selling it off?