He left because the reorg stripped his hardware decision authority, and he wouldn’t stay without control to drive the technical plan.[0]
He kept working on the problem. The question now looking back over 6 years is did Google make a mistake. I've seen this at IBM and other large research divisions where people who did something significant 20 or 30 years in fields like AI become stagnant burning tens and hundreds of millions. There was a political battle and Martinis got pushed out. The question I have is did the people who pushed him out know the path forward in quantum computing or did they just know how to play office politics licking the correct behinds.
