Why has this gone on so long? Surely the optics are worse than the revenue at this point. “We hear you, we are canceling this, we deeply apologize,” blah blah.
I also think that while there is a lot of gnashing of teeth, it's not really clear that the optics here matter. Amazon & Microsoft are already doing these sorts of projects with no backlash. This is really only a story because there are people inside Google speaking out.
What's pretty clear from these threads is that people who are already dislike Google, dislike this too, but it's not clear that this is having an impact on people's opinions who otherwise have a positive image of Google.
But then: why didn't they create an alphabet company for military research ? (you can even call it Google Mars or Ares). Would have been more compartmentalized away from the rest of the company (that's how the military likes it).
also interesting that this item seems to have disappeared from the front page - is this an editorial practice here with discussions that have gone 'bad'? (idea for a new application: track HN stories that have been on the front page but then disappeared from it).
[1] https://fcw.com/articles/2018/03/07/cloud-jedi-dod-contract....