Or, they wanted to lay off people from both teams but laying off people from your fledgling product is seen as a bad move so you transfer them to the dying prod

Or, they wanted to lay off people from both teams but laying off people from your fledgling product is seen as a bad move so you transfer them to the dying product then lay them off from there and no headline will read "google lays off engineers working on bard due to it being a colossal failure"