Customers not being able to tell that it happened was a goal of that deployment.

It wasn’t anywhere near that late the numbers you’re saying was about the whole build cycle - board bringup for one of the two boards first commit in zircon was 3y before launch (that codes public, I just checked and Mike landed it in 2018) - and discussions weren’t done then, that was before any prototype/demos could be done. There were sluggish stages and project management was rough, and there were delays at the end related to quality but the quality bar was necessarily high, particularly on the core system - don’t brick all the devices in the field. And we didn’t, and that’s actually a feat replacing everything from firmware to gui in the field without users noticing.

What was the goal? Well two things: fuchsia needed a first, and realistic shipping target that wasn’t excessively lofty. Nest needed to get out of the OS game so it could focus resources on product. Chris talked about this in his 9to5google interview.

It’s a shame you feel so sour about it, everyone involved did good work. I have friends from nest and some of the ics also have similar pained history from that time - it’s sad, once upon a time it was maddening. It’d have been so easy for a leader to substantially improve that. Sure plenty of things could have been better, for sure we could have fixed these awful sentiment and relationship issues (I tried, got burned for it - that even showed up in my calibration), but we all shipped.