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Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

So the story after the headline is that Alphabet hired a seasoned Satellite Broadband guy, Tom Moore, to run the division and he pushed them to make the project more efficient, and ultimately profitable.

This has Ruth Porat's stamp all over it - they hired her as CFO to bring "financial discipline" to Alphabet, and among those duties was to rein the moonshot stuff into actual businesses, or kill them off.

I actually think this is good news for Alphabet's long term ability to innovate: if they can demonstrate that some of these Moonshots can stand on their own their investors / board will be more apt to provide for freedom to innovate over the long term.

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Slowing down Google Fiber doesn't sound good to me, while it probably comes from the same idea.

I think the idea behind the GFiber shrinkage is that WebPass achieves the same end result, but doesn't require the extremely time-consuming, expensive, and risky negotiation for right-of-ways on the poles or digging permits that GFiber would've. If so, then economically at least Webpass is the way to go. At least, that's the theory. It'd suck to scale back GFiber and then find out that Webpass wouldn't actually scale to a nationwide roll-out either.

I'm sad to see GFiber go as well, I worked on it right before its launch and was really hoping I'd get to try it out as a customer.

Wireless does not achieve the same result. It has a lot of downsides and more limited application.

I think that is political.

What kind of politics do think it is?

The kind that grants a monopoly to ISPs which allows Avg. Americans to have 1-2 choices for internet >10mbs. There was a 1 Trillion or greater global roll up in the last 2ish years.

I think that google was likely meeting friction somewhere in the process, prob everywhere. I am sure they also got pushback internally but I figure launching in major cities w/ 10-20 year better cable would be profitable. Especially since that industry is insanely profitable

I thought their whole point was to break through such crony politics, to prove the point. But I guess they don't have the guts for it.

Or they'll just stop doing them.

And someone else will fill the void. If there's one thing I'm not afraid of scarcity, it's human innovation.

I, however, am afraid of scarcity in resources for that innovation. Moonshot projects don't make business sense, so when beancounters notice, they happily axe them. And VCs are also focusing on short-term returns, hence the proliferation of bullshit one-trick-pony startups that don't create anything of much value. Moonshots are way underinvested, IMO.

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