The community here isn’t digging on Google trying to innovate. The anger comes from a highly successful company taking a risk, seeing it fail, and just peacing out leaving others to clean up the mess.
If Google Fiber misrepresented their microtrenching then that would certainly be fraud and they would be liable for damages.
When I try a crazy new idea at work, and it fails, I don't just leave a mess and walk away. Come to think of it, I don't do that if it succeeds, either. Supporting your mess is part of professionalism.
This is the key difference between doing research and providing a service. Are you serving the people or just the technology? Google is full of smart people who love technology and want to do research all day, but they're not very service-oriented.
Should they be? Eric Schmidt said of Google Fiber, "It’s actually not an experiment; we’re actually running it as a business". I'm not seeing that here. They learned something valuable about a technology they're using, and they're leaving customers in the lurch.
You make it sound like the people of Louisville are now in a worse position than before Google Fiber came, and that they've somehow left the community in a lurch. All that's really going to happen is the subscribers go back to whatever ISP they had previously.
Now if there's evidence that Google Fiber is abandoning a liability for torn up roads, or misrepresented their micro-trenching to the city council that made the deal, that would definitely qualify as "leaving a mess", but I haven't seen evidence of that.
Kudos to Google Fiber for actually trying to innovate in a stagnant industry. I'm no insider here, but I suspect the micro-trenching did go through internal testing which looked promising before they approved it for real city use.
If the micro trenching had been successful we'd be cheering for Google for finding an innovative way to bring fiber to more people. Turns out it didn't work in their one trial city and since they discovered this at a time when Google Fiber is no longer expanding it is no surprise that they don't "re-open" Louisville and retrench the entire city.
For a community that celebrates failure as a natural consequence of innovation, I'm surprised at all the negativity here. Not a mention of the 2 months of free gigabit internet they're giving to customers. Yea, Google Fiber is just a bunch of soulless profiteering corporate jackasses /eyeroll/.