What do you mean? It went very well. We still have Google Books after all.
They've pretty much stopped scanning new books, even new out of copyright manuscripts etc.
Google Books itself had loads of cool possibilities of new ways to make use of the data from those books. This lawsuit has pretty much stopped all innovation, and all the good engineers left the project years ago.
But instead academic opponents of the deal seriously thought they would have better luck pursuing copyright reform in Congress (!), and helped kill the settlement. Of course, in reality Congress did no such thing, and so the chance to rescue orphan works was lost.
Moreover, this does not contradict the idea that the Authors Guild settlement could have complemented public domain efforts. Even today some of the books saved on the Internet Archive were retrieved via Google Books: https://archive.org/details/googlebooks&tab=about
Funnily enough, that's also how the original article described the opposition to the Authors Guild settlement. As it turned out, killing the Google Books project didn't really move us closer to copyright reform.