Anyone else find this entire thing odd from a legal perspective?
* Google Ventures owns a non-trivial stake in Uber.
* Google infamously filed a lawsuit alleging that Uber stole trade secrets from Waymo.
* Uber made an early decision to run on-prem instead of on the cloud (GCP, AWS, etc.) because they feared, rightly so, that Google might launch a competitor to Uber.
* And now they are partnering and merging their core businesses.
Outsider speculation follows: Uber under Kalanis brazenly stole Google tech, and then settled out of court and promised to be BFFs - with money generally flowing towards Google. Uber in return got a very damaging lawsuit dropped. Uber's self-driving project subsequently got shut down after it ran over and killed a pedestrian without braking. This is what's going on
Uber doubled down on the thing it was good at, the logistics of ride scheduling. That's a non trivial problem that benefits from a network effect and data. They're moving away from things they don't need to be doing, like developing self driving cars or running their own data centers.
* Google Ventures owns a non-trivial stake in Uber.
* Google infamously filed a lawsuit alleging that Uber stole trade secrets from Waymo.
* Uber made an early decision to run on-prem instead of on the cloud (GCP, AWS, etc.) because they feared, rightly so, that Google might launch a competitor to Uber.
* And now they are partnering and merging their core businesses.
What's going on here?