To distill the meaning further:

>Making an airplane happened to be harder than running a clickfarm

It reads almost like they choose to shutdown because the program itself is too successful. The irony.

Arguably they have to give some context for people that are not as deeply informed about that project as many HNers are. I don't think it's that bad to state the vision, progress and outcome before announcing they will not manufacture their own planes anymore.

Facebook doesn't bring anything of real value to the planets population but they are masters of appearing like they do.

They are a gossip magazine where people are the celebrities themselves. Useless.

Company hires more people => probability of critical human error rises => company introduces more processes and internal norms => the average individual in the company starts to feel less free => the culture shifts from "ask forgiveness" to "ask permission" => people start to think about what they can do wrong much more => it also applies to all outward communications.

I mean, it's not neccessarilly a bad thing: don't we all want to Facebook to be more responsible and cautious in what it does with our private data, for example? Of course we do. But company's culture is a non-separable thing, so we shouldn't be surprised by this corporate-speak from them now. Days of "I'm CEO, bitch" a long, long over.

I would be surprised if there wasn't corporate speak about it.

Honestly, if you were running the corporation would you just boil it down to "We stopped building our Internet airplane thingy. Sorry y'all" ?

...don't catch you slippin' now

haha - right out of the Veridian Dynamics playbook :)

edit: see also - Jabberwocky http://www.veridian-dynamics.org/jabberwocky.php

It's not exactly shutting down, they are shifting priorities away from manufacturing their own planes as they realised that other have caught up and they can just buy the things. They seem to still be working on the main vision, connecting more people (and future customers) to the internet.

That's not the case though, they are shifting to external vendors rather than developing their own aircraft.

Sure. But don’t you guys ever get tired of pointing out the same thing over and over again?

Maybe this? https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/02/facebook-free-basics-qui...

There is also this from 2016 - https://www.computerworld.com/article/3032646/internet/the-s...

So even if Free Basics "sites" were actual sites on the Internet (which they're not), it would be 0.00000005 percent of the web. The real Internet is at least 20 million times bigger than Facebook's fake Internet. It's like McDonald's giving a poor person a free sesame seed and claiming credit for giving them a free Big Mac. The other important difference for Facebook is that Free Basics offers a version of the "web" without any of Facebook's competitors.

It was overly obvious capitalist “altruism washing”. If they had just come out to say directly that they wanted to provide free internet so that they could monopolize emerging undeveloped markets it might have been better received.

Hmmm, I wonder if the golden handcuffs all fell off at 4 years, and everybody who was part of creating the project and technology has cashed out and left?

What could they have done better?

Google balloons still show up on ASD-B (aircraft transponder tracking) from time to time, but beyond that I dunno.

It looks like they're actively hiring to commercialize Loon, which seems like a good sign:

https://careers.google.com/jobs#!t=jo&jid=/x/head-of-supply-...

> Preferred qualifications:

> Have taken a telecommunications product or aerospace product from concept to mass production

They appear on https://www.flightradar24.com/ once in a while. 3 in Northern Nevada right now.

Not very well. They had a short span during the hurricane disasters where they got publicity, but they face a lot of the same problems: spectrum, movement, and small coverage areas.

my initial reaction to this news was "oh good, now Google can cancel Loon without feeling like they lost to Facebook"

If Musk launches his satellite data mesh, would loon still have a place?

They made a major advance in the last couple of years by integrating real-time wind data to the flight planning. The baloons can 'loiter' much better now by changing altitude to drift back and forth over an area of interest.

Here is some info from my observations of the Google Loon activity out of Winnemucca, Nevada...

https://desertfog.org/projects/project-loon/launch-activity/

how often does a company build entire research and development facilities and lobby regulators and be the first movers... just to instigate a market? If competition is the problem they’re not even acquiring a single company? And if it’s just insufficient tech instead of worry over competition, Facebook usually has no problem acquiring what it can’t develop. They even acquired oculus to step into VR. It would appear that there’s more to it than just that.

Facebook might still be salty with the Falcon 9’s rapid unscheduled disassembly on the pad with their communications satellite onboard.

“Facebook has expressed disappointment in the loss of its Amos-6 communication satellite. The satellite was supposed to deliver broadband internet access to remote locations in Africa as part of the internet.org initiative. Facebook and satellite provider Eutelsat spent $95 million to license satellite’s Ka-band communications array for five years. The satellite is owned by Israel-based Spacecom.”

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/234845-spacex-falcon-9-e...

There have been news about most of these. In general, they're all late. SpaceX was the last I saw that publicly stated the problem was harder than they expected, and it will be delayed an unknown amount.

I have a hard time believing these can compete with wireless for anything but the most remote areas.

> This is definitely an instance of burying the lead. Perhaps the audience isn’t HN, rather it’s the engineers they want to keep engaged after their project got sacked.

As an engineer, having to parse a bunch of corpspeak to extract the buried lede that my project was canned is not going to keep me engaged. If they want to keep people engaged, they need to be clear and upfront about what's happening now and what's happening next.

I worked at a company that hid a layoff announcement in a self-congratulatory email about positive quarterly financial results. I wasn't personally laid off, but communicating in that way lowered my opinion of the executive management.

Here is the post on AirBus partnership by same guy. Again virtually information-less and 99% full of corp-speak. Can't believe such a corporate suit is FB's director of engineering of all things. Is Zuck finally not recognizing talent anymore?

https://code.facebook.com/posts/2265698886989780/facebook-an...

Also the fact that they should rightfully be ashamed about shutting down this moonshot. It's super amusing that these companies are sitting on billions of dollars that they don't know what to do with and essentially running hedge fund instead of investing for next technical breakthroughs. My guess is that guys working on this project have moved on and no one else has enough passion to run it. But seriously, I can think of two dozen folks who would be happy to dedicate their lives to this project. Saying that aerospace is companies would take u the slack is pure fantasy given tight budgets and general lack of risk tacking there.

It's not finished yet and Iridium will never be cheap enough for the developing world.

Because satellite internet already exists and apparently didn't fully solve the problem.

Better satellite internet would help. But the best way to do that is to fly the satellites lower, which means you need a lot more of them. Unless you happen to own the cheapest space launch service on the market that's hard to do, so only Elon Musk is really pursuing that path.

Aircraft on the other hand are kind of like really close satellites that are cheap to refuel. Satellites (that aren't geostationary) are all or nothing: you either cover the entire globe or it isn't very useful. Other aircraft are easy to keep over one select area

Geostationary satellites are a long way away. Twice as far out as GPS satellites. You need a big dish to communicate with them.

Rockets Expensive.

Really? How did you come to that conclusion?