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Comment by rmason | Hacker News Reader

This is an absolutely horrible and misleading headline. I was stunned when I read it. I'd just read earlier in the day how the Google scientists had ingeniously figured out how to keep balloons in a single spot for months at a time greatly reducing the projects cost.

So basically Project Loon is still going to blanket the globe with Internet balloons. They're just going to accomplish the same original goal with far fewer balloons.

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And I'm hearing from my Loonie friends who got laid off. They don't exactly spin this as a positive development.

Yes, being able to use stationary balloons means that the minimum viable project can be a lot smaller. And now it is.

I'm sorry about your Loonie friends, but I can't help but think that having a real commercially viable deployment could be anything but a good thing for Loon.

The tech is sort of meaningless if it can't be cost competitive with other options.

The article seems to indicate that they're downsizing that project to a small experiment, with 10-30 balloons. Sort of like Google Fiber, which had huge hype and very modest deployment. Before that, there was Google Public WiFi, which covered Mountain View, CA badly, and then went into some Starbucks. Maybe Google/Alphabet should stop trying to be a carrier. Their track record in that business is terrible.

google is an expert at soaking up the good publicity for their "moonshots" and then not delivering. and they slowly fail to where people don't notice it and get excited for the next shiny thing

The saying is you miss 100% of the (moon)shots you don't attempt.

The point of the parent comment is that they don't fully attempt them. They put forth just enough time and money investment to make a big PR splash and get a proof of concept out the door, then slowly back away from things.

So how do you define "fully attempt"?

Both projects made immense progress over many years -- they just weren't able to justify the costs. IMO, they were actually really good attempts.

How do you define "immense progress"? Fully attempt to me means actually sinking a significant portion of overall company budget (say, greater than 5%) into a project, marketing it, and attempting to spread it to a wide market. Or put it another way, if a venture-backed startup were pursuing one of these avenues, what would they do? Certainly they wouldn't be content with pilot projects that fizzle out and glacially slow deployment across the country. If Uber were a Google moonshot, they would still be running only black cars in SF.

Google is fantastic at highly-automated software, but really sucks at any kind of real world hardware or service.

Inflate the stock price with "moonshots". Slowly kill off the moonshots and inflate the stock price with "fiscal responsibility".

Google Fiber had one good side-effect: motivating AT&T to deploy Gigabit fiber in downtown Mountain View -- it's here and it works.

Totally agree. This seems like a clickbait title to cash in on the "yet-another-cancelled-Alphabet-moonshot". It's unfortunate that this particular article about this story is on the front page of HN when there are several others[1] that contradict this headline and actually even provide more information.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/16/how-googles-project-loon-b... http://www.businessinsider.com/project-loon-x-google-alphabe... http://www.recode.net/2017/2/16/14640470/alphabets-balloon-b... https://news.fastcompany.com/alphabet-uses-ai-to-expand-cove... https://www.cnet.com/au/news/google-alphabet-project-loon-la... http://mashable.com/2017/02/16/google-loon-balloon-internet-... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/16/google-pr... http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/afp/article-4233028/Alphabe...

We edited the title (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13665941).

The difference in perspective is between people who are buying Google's marketing copy as written, and people who are looking at the trend of how they're handling all of their project failures across the board. Every other Google moonshot is dead or dying, and news about Project Loon going south isn't exactly new out of left field.

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