[person_of_color]

Google is cursed by its own success. Any product they release will always be on shaky ground when compared to their advertising and search money-printing monopolies.

At this point, they should give up and settle into their role as the 21st century IBM.

[jariel]

This is not a Google Project, it's an Alphabet 'Moonshot' designed to maybe shake things up, create a market, discover new solutions/opportunities/induce investment with a very high risk profile and no obviously commercial outcome i.e. quasi NGO stuff that VC's won't touch.

There's no way to compare Loon to a regular commercial venture.

It's just stuff the founders want to do and that's fine.

[killjoywashere]

IBM builds their own line of processors and operates some of the biggest supercomputers (e.g. Summit at Oak Ridge). I know at least one guy who works on a pretty ambitious project at Google, and last I talked to him, he lusted after the insanely crazy things he used to get to do in an IBM-internal dev shop.