Alphabet and Google's very bad no good summer | The Verge

"Let's review what’s been happening at Alphabet in the past months. We’ve been seeing a lot of bad news come out lately, and I figured it’s time to try to make sense of it all — or at least to put all of the bad news in one place. The very latest is that the new head of hardware at Google, Rick Osterloh, has decided to kill the Project Ara modular smartphone project. It occurs to me that it’s just the latest in a string of missteps and corrections for both Alphabet and Google

You can look at all this as a company flailing, or you can look at it as a sign of a company that’s cleaning house and locking things down without being willing to publicly say so.



There are reasons to see it both ways.



If you want to see this as just the external signs of a company that’s reorganizing a bit and cleaning up what had been a very, very cluttered house, you can easily cobble that story together. For example, back when former Nest boss Tony Fadell left, we examined the reasons why. According to Randy Komisar (who had served on Nest’s board), Fadell’s reputation as a hard person to work for was only part of the issue. Instead, he said, "The real story is Alphabet. This isn’t really about Tony Fadell. This isn’t really about Nest. Nest is still full of potential. This is about Google, and Google’s decision to build Alphabet."



Alphabet and Google's very bad no good summer | The Verge