Google Gives Up on Making Medical Gadgets, Fires a Bunch of People

Anyone who's been watching Google's "Other Bets" knew this was coming. Verily shut down its entire medical device program yesterday, which means all those cool medical gadgets they've been promising for a decade are officially dead.

The smart contact lenses for diabetics? Dead. The glucose monitoring system that was supposed to compete with Dexcom? Dead. The surgical robots? Also dead. Hundreds of engineers who thought they were building the future of healthcare are now updating their LinkedIn profiles.

Why This Was Always Going to Fail

Here's the thing nobody talks about: making actual medical devices is fucking hard. The FDA doesn't care how innovative your algorithm is if your hardware kills people. Google excels at software and advertising - they suck at manufacturing physical things that have to work in the real world.

Internal memos show Verily is pivoting to "precision health, data analytics, and AI-driven solutions," which is corporate speak for "we're giving up on hardware and going back to what we know how to do."

What actually got killed:

• Smart contact lenses (been "almost ready" since 2014)
• Glucose monitoring devices (Dexcom and Abbott already won this market)
• Surgical robotics (Intuitive Surgical has a 20-year head start)
• Random wearables (Apple Watch already dominates)
• Medical imaging hardware (GE and Philips own this space)

The Human Cost Nobody Mentions

This isn't just another corporate restructuring - real people built their careers on these projects. Engineers who left established medical device companies to join Verily's mission are now scrambling for jobs in a tough tech market.

The broader healthcare industry is also fucked by this. Hospitals and clinics that were counting on these innovations now have to stick with existing solutions or wait for actual medical device companies to catch up.

Google has a graveyard of abandoned projects, but this one hits different because people were genuinely counting on these medical advances. When Google kills a messaging app, it's annoying. When they kill diabetes monitoring technology, people's health is literally at stake.

Google's Basically Admitting They Suck at Making HardwareGoogle's shutting down Verily's device business because they finally figured out what everyone else knew: they're shit at making actual hardware.

This is the same company that killed Google Glass, bombed with the Pixel Buds, and somehow made Nest thermostats worse after buying the company.### The Real Numbers Behind the BullshitVerily was bleeding money like a stuck pig

• burning through over a billion dollars this year alone.

That's not "strategic repositioning," that's admitting failure. The 200-300 people getting canned weren't "reallocated"

• they got fired so Google could chase the AI hype train.Here's what actually happened: Google realized they can make more money selling ads and harvesting data than trying to compete with actual medical device companies who know what the fuck they're doing.### What This Really Means for Digital HealthVerily's not "pivoting to AI-powered health analytics"
• they're running away from the hard part (making things that work in the real world) to the easy part (selling software that sounds impressive in PowerPoint decks).

What they'll actually focus on now:

• Making clinical trials cheaper for pharma companies (more profit for them)
• Mining patient data for "insights" (more data to sell)
• Building prediction models that probably work about as well as Google's spam filter
• Selling "AI drug discovery" to VCs who don't understand biology

This puts them in direct competition with Palantir and Epic

• companies that have been doing healthcare data analytics since before Google knew what HIPAA was.### What This Means for Other Tech BrosGoogle's failure should scare the shit out of other tech companies trying to "disrupt" healthcare hardware. Turns out you can't just throw engineers and VC money at FDA approvals and expect magic to happen.Apple's still pushing health features, but they're smart enough to stick to wearables and avoid anything that requires actual medical device approval. Amazon gave up on Haven after burning $100 million. Meta's health initiatives are basically dead.The lesson? Software companies should stick to software. Making medical devices isn't like shipping a buggy app update that you can fix later.