I know Alphabet put a lot of money into Loon, but it feels like it got a bunch of positive PR for not delivering. And it's not going to get nearly the same PR for canceling.<p>"Google delivers internet to poor parts of the world" is the headline in a thousand newspapers. Almost none will run "Google fails to deliver internet that it promised millions of poor people."<p>But we've been to this rodeo before. Google promised free WiFi to poor neighborhoods in Chicago a decade ago, then backed out when it found out that was hard.
Most of the conversations around Loon seem to end up with the question "is X actually a good use of Google's money?"<p>So just a reminder that Google Brain started out as an X project, and by all accounts, it has created enormous financial value for Google.
Looks like the FP Castle will need a new internet plan<p><a href="https://fpcastle.com/" rel="nofollow">https://fpcastle.com/</a>
It was interesting to me that in the X blog post about Loon, they elevated Wing to the same level as Waymo: <a href="https://blog.x.company/loons-final-flight-e9d699123a96" rel="nofollow">https://blog.x.company/loons-final-flight-e9d699123a96</a>
Sounds like the signaling technology has been adopted by a new project Taara which is similar but on the ground, and not floating from weather balloons.
Long-lasting instrumented moderate altitude balloons are interesting to me for science reasons, so this is unfortunate since it'd be nice if a turnkey commerical solution existed.
It was always surreal to see these flying/floating over my city. Couldn't help but feel like you were being further surveilled by Google's all seeing eye.