Re:Saying Goodbye to Louisville
by coryfklein on Friday February 08, 2019 @11:30AM
(#19115793)
> just leave a mess and walk away
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.
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.