Makes sense to me. Google clearly has a culture/reputation where projects are routinely killed off because they aren't deemed "successful" by some arbitrary met

Makes sense to me. Google clearly has a culture/reputation where projects are routinely killed off because they aren't deemed "successful" by some arbitrary metric. This fosters a "failure/success" mentality among employees, which influences what types of projects they take (obvious, immediately profitable) and how long it takes to develop them (as quick as possible). While they have a lot of smart people working there, I think big G has some organisational problems which prevents them from completing large scale experimental projects like this.