Courter point: The team here developed some interesting new mobile microscopy techniques. It's possible, had the project completed development, that some other cool things could have come from a "useless" tech-art project.
The creators of this project told me they actually wondered if PETA would take offense. Ideally, though, the tardigrades would have had plenty of algae and room to swim around/reproduce.
One big thing here is that Ara was part of ATAP which was acquired from Motorola (back when Google owned Motorola). So the culture of this project is an unusual one, even for Google. The heavy dependence on outside contractors probably made for a complicated setup, but I don't think that was the problem. From the outside, it feels like ATAP/Project Ara just ran the clock out. If they'd have gotten the phone done and ready to ship faster, maybe things would be different today.
Could have been more clear, but this is the reason in a nutshell "Since Chrome’s rise, Mozilla has hardly any weight to thrown around." Chrome is over 5 years old.
I've seen this idea work well in very young companies (2 to 10 employees). It can boost morale at that size, but it would likely feel forced beyond a handful of employees.
No, but a startup is a company designed to grow into something much larger very quickly — that (historically) requires a massive amount of work. Small businesses can require 80 hours a week too, but they traditionally serve a much smaller segment of the population.
Want to be clear, though, that Google Ventures tries to keep pretty separate from Google. Also, the better GV's portfolio companies do, the better GV does. My impression is that the design team actually cares.
Did you read it? The results = an unfinished mockup. A majority of this process is used to help teach design thinking, so companies can make the right design/usability decisions on their own.