Or more that they're likely useless from a shareholder perspective, but have a small chance of paying off in a large way, and worst-case keep the engineers occupied & employed at the company.
Google doesn't generally allow projects that everyone knows have zero chance of being useful in a bottom-line sense; you can't, for example, build a D&D campaign index on company time even if you're T9. (There was a big debate over this near the tail end of the Eric Schmidt years, when you actually could, and this was one reason for Larry's "More wood behind fewer arrows" campaign.)
But for something with a small chance of having a large impact, like a new OS or programming language or attempt to speed up scientific progress? Google can totally get behind that, because worst-case, you keep the engineers employed and available for future use, while best-case, you've got a computer science breakthrough. Fuchsia fits right into this case, as does Dart and Go and Unladen Swallow and several other projects.
Google doesn't generally allow projects that everyone knows have zero chance of being useful in a bottom-line sense; you can't, for example, build a D&D campaign index on company time even if you're T9. (There was a big debate over this near the tail end of the Eric Schmidt years, when you actually could, and this was one reason for Larry's "More wood behind fewer arrows" campaign.)
But for something with a small chance of having a large impact, like a new OS or programming language or attempt to speed up scientific progress? Google can totally get behind that, because worst-case, you keep the engineers employed and available for future use, while best-case, you've got a computer science breakthrough. Fuchsia fits right into this case, as does Dart and Go and Unladen Swallow and several other projects.