And they all got canceled once their business case became void.
None of these were bogus projects. They all initially had a business case, and were run by engineers who proved themselves before. When that business case fail to pan out - they were canceled.
> At some point the difference between "engineer retention project" and "risky venture that probably won't pan out but could win big" ceases to matter.
Maybe to you as an employee. Not to Google as a business, nor its shareholders.
If I'm a Google shareholder, and you're wasting hundreds of millions of dollars of my money with nothing to show for it but some vague fears that "my engineers will go to competitors", then I'm going to be unhappy. Beyond a certain point, you're opening yourself up to lawsuits and even criminal charges (Google is a public company).
All of your examples are projects that were interesting and had some passionate senior engineers pushing them forward, but also had a business case. When the business case went bust, so did the project.
To support OP's assertion that Fuchsia is just a retention project with no future, you'd have to show a project of its size (or any size, really) run for the sole purpose of retention with no plausible business case.
I don't think such a thing exists, and it's not in any of your examples.
I have some personal experience with Wave. It had a plausible business case and Google was promoting it heavily. It wasn't bogus. I'm sure the same is true for the others.
"We rely on highly skilled personnel and, if we are unable to retain or motivate key personnel, hire qualified personnel, or maintain our corporate culture, we may not be able to grow effectively."
Acquiring and retaining key people is in the interests of shareholders, and Google invests significantly in this activity. I started this subthread with a comment about $50M acquihires where they shut down the product immediately afterwards. That's just one example - others include funding STEM education for children, the Google Summer of Code, multi-million-$ retention bonuses, and constant recruiting efforts.
This is all disclosed on the prospectus and annual reports. If you don't understand why this is important for a tech company, you should probably not be investing in tech, but I will be happy to buy your shares from you.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000165204416...
Are you a voting shareholder (class A or B)? If you have class C (no vote), they don't have to care. If you have class A (voting public) shares, which get 1/10 the vote of the class B (management) shares, your influence is incidental at best.
I think Fiber was a bit of a miscalculation in that they misjudged where the bottleneck would be. In the early days of Fiber (I worked on it, briefly), the assumption was that key risk factors would be that incumbent ISPs would raise their speeds to match, or that marketing would fail to sign up enough customers to make the build-out economical. These turned out to not be major problems, but the incumbent ISPs blocked expansion to new municipalities through permitting & right-of-way restrictions. The assumption when I was working on it was that if Kansas City could demonstrate a successful deployment, other cities would be lining up to clear roadblocks and bring Google Fiber to their citizens; this didn't happen.
Sure, it took a while after Google Fiber launched, but there was a lot of infrastructure to deploy. I'd argue Google had a hand in this.
At some point the difference between "engineer retention project" and "risky venture that probably won't pan out but could win big" ceases to matter. Larry Page is exceptionally good at "Heads I win, tails I win even more" gambits - historically, these included Google Toolbar (initially conceived as a defensive play against Microsoft, but ended up getting Google Search in front of hundreds of millions of new users - this, BTW, was Sundar Pichai's first big win on the way to CEO); Google Chrome (ditto, with the side effect of becoming the dominant browser); GMail (initially an internal tool to improve productivity, then became a major consumer product); and Google Fiber (worst case, force Internet speeds up through competition, best case, new ISP). It's likely that Sundar & Larry's thinking of Fuchsia is that worst-case, it keeps 100 talented engineers at the company, and best-case, it's a dominant new OS that drives computing forwards. Either one is worth the $50M or so, so they do it.