I'm sympathetic to all those who lost their jobs, but I'm a bit baffled that 400 people were working on this. Can someone enlighten me as to why so much headcount was required by this project?
400 people for an essentially from-scratch OS? That's incredibly lean as far as tech companies are concerned these days.
It's a microkernel-based capability-based object-oriented operating system. They're trying to make commercially viable what is essentially a research project.
How is that a lot if this product should be the differentiator for Google between them and all the ones using just Android?