Advancing our amazing bet
This announcement needs a little bit of translation from the marketing language it's written in:> And thanks to the hard work of everyone on the Access team, our business is solid: our subscriber base and revenue are growing quickly, and we expect that growth to continue."We're not yet profitable."> We have refined our plan going forward to achieve these objectives. It entails us making changes to focus our business and product strategy. Importantly, the plan enhances our focus on new technology and deployment methods to make superfast Internet more abundant than it is today."Building fiber infrastructure in cities isn't a viable business model."> For most of our “potential Fiber cities” — those where we’ve been in exploratory discussions — we’re going to pause our operations and offices while we refine our approaches."We're not going to build out any more cities using this approach."> In this handful of cities that are still in an exploratory stage, and in certain related areas of our supporting operations, we’ll be reducing our employee base."We're winding down Google Fiber operations and putting it on life support."> As for me personally, it’s been quite a journey over the past few years, taking a broad-based set of projects and initiatives and growing a focused business that is on a strong trajectory. And I’ve decided this is the right juncture to step aside from my CEO role."I'm getting out of this while it still looks good."--That's too bad. Google Fiber has put a lot of needed pressure on existing telecommunications mega-corps to improve their services. I really wanted to see it take off well enough to result in some major improvements to infrastructure around the country, but having worked for an ISP in a previous lifetime, I was skeptical that they'd be able to do it profitably. Last-mile fiber is expensive, expensive, expensive.I'm sure Comcast and Time Warner and friends are all breathing a sigh of relief.