Comment by crabbone

You seem to imply that Google won't have a Python team... Google replaced it with a cheaper (and quite likely worse) alternative. They are still going to do the same thing (at least they believe so). They aren't changing direction or anything like that.

It's unfortunate that we'll likely never know what was the actual reason they decided that the old team was... overpaid? overstaffed? overly something else?

Saving money on workforce isn't the most sound business decision. After all, workforce is what generates the revenues. If you buy cheaper workforce, you should be getting ready to also lose some revenue due to quality drop... well, in large brush strokes. Maybe, in some situations the product was overpriced and making it cheaper by lowering the quality does make financial sense... Hard to tell.