That pretty much sums up engineering ventures and, at least in a lot of my experience, Google.
The market wasn’t interested. Yes, they have some of the smartest minds around but they also have the possibility that what they build will be entirely for themselves, as engineers. Sort of technical auto-erotica. I wish them the best in their efforts to disrupt the mobile business but unless they have a good proposal how they will share the monetization generated by these Google phones, I suspect the uptake of their OS software will be limited. Just like Microsoft struggled to gain a foothold because no handset maker wanted to their business to follow Dell, so too will handset makers (and operators) be apprehensive about giving Goolge license. Google believes there are no barriers to entry because they are Google. We’ll know in two years whether they are correct.