Google killed a small smart glass maker after acquiring it (opens in new tab)

In the article it says this move by Google is worse than Amazon investing in businesses and stealing info. How is this worse? Google bought the whole company, didn't make partial investment. They can do whatever they want with the company.

What? This article makes absolutely no sense.

How is buying a company that clearly was not doing well financially (acquisition price at $150m, ~$200m raised with the last $40m being a debt financing, so it is a bail out), in what is clearly messaged as an acqui-hire for talent, in any way comparable to Amazon using its investment arm to acquire confidential information and replicate company products?

Respectfully, the author doesn't seem to understand what's actually going on here, this seems like a standard acqui-hire for future work on a smart glass product within Google. I highly doubt North didn't know they were going to be discontinuing the Focus before the acquisition closed.

What would have actually been unethical is waiting for North to run out of money and then try to hire their people at lower salaries or something.

Would it be worse if they didn’t acquire it, but crushed it in the market? Obviously we won’t know.

This article seems to completely miss the point. Google paid the founders a lot of money to acquire their IP and know how which they will integrate into Glass. Why would google run two identical products? Nonsense article.

These stories about competition being thwarted often seem to ignore the elephant in the room — the companies being acquired weren’t doing well. I’m sure the North team feels like they took the best option they had realistically available to them. We can speculate about what might have been, but unless most scenarios involve them going out of business and everyone looking for new jobs, it’s not very accurate. You could say most startups take the chance despite low chance of success, but North has done that and ended up on the wrong side of that distribution once already, and any further attempt would be saddled with the existing debt and cap table. This is a clean slate for them.

Would anyone have any direction on what kind of projectors North was using for this product? I have no idea where to start searching.

In the same way, I would also be very interested in any further info on Ellsworth's Tilt Five projectors, bottom right-right of [1] (full text of interview [2]). Interesting video with info on the (retroreflective) optics system here [3].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200722042213im_/https://i0.wp.... presumably shows three generations of the product. From left to right board, camera and projector.

[2] https://skarredghost.com/2019/09/24/interview-jeri-ellsworth...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AB4NjMWKV0s

This is a bizarre article. North was unsuccessful in the market and basically ran out of money and time. Google picked up the people and IP and those efforts are now being directed elsewhere within Google. The idea that Google killed off a competitor is not accurate, as North had already failed to succeed. It was a good effort, and like most consumer hardware attempts, brutally hard.

The article doesn't say anything about the internal (to Google) disposition of the team or thechnology -- only that the previous public product roadmap is cancelled. I'm unimpressed.

this seems normal, why would Google continue to market a product rather than integrate the tech into their own branded product, I know Waze is still Waze but I think that's far different for obvious reasons