Solution in search of a problem with buckets of seemingly unlimited headcount (at the time) and went and rewrote and discarded half of the stuff on the Home Hub we had already shipped Because Purity(tm).
Fuchsia is neat, but the politics of the whole thing and the absolute idiocy of rewrites for rewrites sake... Makes me not feel so terrible about their reduced headcount.
I never understood who cared enough to bet on the technical side, my understanding was the political weight was on the UX side. Curious for your input if you have any thoughts you're comfy sharing
I surmise either A) Hiroshi wanted a fresh OS without the political risk of committing to it in a well-known way and/or
B) I don't grok how free-wheeling Google could be prior to my arrival (late 2016), combined with general bureaucratic inertia of there not really being an incentive to eliminate things*
* that probably sounds funny, but IIRC most of the major public cancellations are when a big project gets shuffled under a VP who could give 2 craps, or rebrandings that people got too upset about
All the political stuff was way above my paygrade I only suffered from it.
Home Hub launched with a perfectly good HTML-based UI that ran great, and shipped to millions of devices. And then they immediately set about rewriting the whole thing in Flutter and then they had to pretend that Flutter existed for the thing, which it didn't and so that had to get written, too.
Fuchsia is neat, but the politics of the whole thing and the absolute idiocy of rewrites for rewrites sake... Makes me not feel so terrible about their reduced headcount.