That's what's discouraging. Google seems to have made a mess in mobile robotics, getting most of the good people and then screwing up the management of them. Life sciences is a bigger field, and Google isn't a big player there, so they can't trash the whole field, but this seems to be a similar screwup.

Google's secretiveness is hurting them. They don't get public feedback when their management screws up. This allows screwups to continue longer. If their R&D people were presenting papers at conferences and filing patents, as AT&T, IBM, and Xerox did in the days when they had big labs, this problem would have been caught earlier.

This is a downside of trying to protect intellectual property by secrecy, rather than patents. You lose external feedback.