We had heard whispers that Google parent company Alphabet's robotics division was in trouble, but we never expected something like this. A report from Bloomberg says that the company is looking to sell Boston Dynamics. Boston Dynamics is easily Alphabet's highest-profile robotics company, regularly showing the world its creations through its YouTube account.
Alphabet's robotics division, internally called "Replicant," was created by Android founder Andy Rubin in 2013. To jump-start the division, he snapped up eight robotics-related companies in about six months, including Boston Dynamics. After only a year at the helm of the new division, though, Andy Rubin left Google.
The sale of Boston Dynamics lines up with an earlier report from Business Insider, which said that Google's hodgepodge of companies had "little in common" and were "scattered across different countries and working on unrelated projects." The loss of Rubin apparently greatly impacted Replicant, and the BI report said that "many of the people who had joined Google through the robotics M&A felt confused and disappointed." Bloomberg's new story backs this statement up, saying the division "was plagued by leadership changes, failures to collaborate between companies, and an unsuccessful effort to recruit a new leader."
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