A company might persue projects for all kinds of reasons.
As a research project to inform design design, as a long term bet and sure, for staff retention.
You have more insight, but it's sort of hard for me to see even Google put that many millions into an OS and, more importantly, put it into production usage on actual hardware (Nest) if that were the case.
One factor here is that Fuchsia is in direct competition with both Android and Chrome OS.
Maligning it as just a staff retention project might serve those teams quite well... either as a coping mechanism or as a political tool to kill it off.
As a research project to inform design design, as a long term bet and sure, for staff retention.
You have more insight, but it's sort of hard for me to see even Google put that many millions into an OS and, more importantly, put it into production usage on actual hardware (Nest) if that were the case.
One factor here is that Fuchsia is in direct competition with both Android and Chrome OS.
Maligning it as just a staff retention project might serve those teams quite well... either as a coping mechanism or as a political tool to kill it off.