One question this article raises, Astro Teller, is “what happens to the assets/knowledge gained in Moonshots that are ultimately scrapped?”

Yeah. I respect the people and the effort involved here, but the public discussion around it tends to be awfully meta. You’d like to see even more introspection about specific circumstances.

Glass, for instance — a rather under-the-radar “graduation” announcement at the time, and reports that indicated a transfer to the (now legendarily troubled) Nest division. Is that… success? Failure? Something in-between, probably? A story yet to be told, certainly. Love to hear it.

Then there’s the robotics “stuff” within X vs the very odd Boston Dynamics situation outside of X. BD would seem to fit the moonshot criteria (and certainly, the spirit), and yet… if the Google mother-ship wasn’t willing to keep the faith on a very high-profile moonshot(-like effort) through what has been described as some personnel and pr bumps (I’m sure it was more complicated than that, always is), what is one to make of that in the context of this philosophy? A real Teller take-apart and analysis (and again, I understand BD wasn’t part of X) of what went wrong there, what went right, and what could or should have been done would be the must-read tech piece of the year.

Again, towering respect to Xers and their achievements, but if they want the moonshot principle to gain traction outside of the mothership, there are stories left to be told, I think.