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Comment by Steko | Hacker News Reader

I'm not suggesting Android has dropped in quality or momentum at all under Pichai. I'm just noting the lack of the opposite. As an outsider how can we judge Andy Rubin a failure and Pichai a brilliant success when the former exceeded all of Gooogles goals with Android and the latter by all appearances is just staying the course?

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I don't think Rubin was forced out because he was judged a failure. There's just no proof of that.

Android had succeeded and under Rubin the team was doing great - except that there was a lack of tighter integration between Google's other properties and Android - Chrome for instance took too long to get on Android and become good. Same with other apps. As is evident now from how much progress Hangouts, Chrome amd ChromeOS have made under Sundar - he was well poised to lead a team that would have all these under one umbrella and Rubin apparently had other interests. So it worked out well for everyone.

Andy Rubin is a founder, entrepreneur, techie. He grew Android to amazing level. He found another passion in AI and moved on.

Some people are more interested in building new things than running a huge division. Everything indicated Rubin is brilliant and building new things - maybe he prefers it, too?

Where was Andy Rubin judged a failure?

How else do you interpret 'Andy you're not the head of Android anymore, we're giving your job to Sundar.'?

"I've been in charge of Android for 9.5 years and now I want to go work on robots"?

Knowing that Google A/B tests everything I'd have to guess 'going to work on robots' soundly outperforms 'public cuckolding by Sergei' as a way to force out execs.

That's...not even clever?

What a weird response, but I now realize that I wandered into a thread where you were just looking for some tabloid headlines. Carry on!

Sergei's girlfriend's ex is Hugo Barra, not Andy Rubin.

http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/sergey-...

That was not what happened. Andy Rubin worked on Android since 2003. It's not that unusual to want to work on something else after a decade.

Buying Moto burned a lot of karma. Blowing that kind of money hurts, even when you're Google.

I thot the CW was Google broke even by selling the pieces and getting the IP and a bunch of tax write offs.

   ignoring the time value of money
     $12.5B   purchase
   -   3B     cash on hand
   -   1B     tax credits
   -   2.4B   sale of desktop boxes to Arris
   -   2.91B  sale to lenovo
   ==========
       3.19B

and google kept patents, etc. Plus there are potentially -- reporting varies -- up to another $.7B/year they kept it of tax offsets I didn't mention, so subtract another $1.4B [1]

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/12/22/did-motor...

It wasn't so much the net ~$3B (piffle!) but approximately doubling headcount with the sort of people who got Moto to where it was before they were bought, and having to manage all that in a direction where a sale for $0.25 on the dollar is considered a success ($0.55 if you count the divested bits). It isn't quite as irrational as buying Nokia, but it's right up there. Moto was a big giant messy falling knife.

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