People that question the existence of Fuchsia need only remember why Chrome was created. A lot of people thought Google was wasting their time by building a browser, including Eric Schmidt, and look how that turned out. Now, I'm not saying that Fuchsia will have the same success as Chrome, but it's clear that they think that having an OS that they can control the direction of is important to them.
Palm's not the only company that isn't afraid to speak out on the Open Handset Alliance. Nokia, Microsoft and Symbian made it most clear today that they don't perceive danger from the new initiative and corresponding Android OS, with Nokia stating it quite bluntly: "We don't see this as a threat." Microsoft was a bit more on the defensive. "It really sounds that they are getting a whole bunch of people together to build a phone and that's something we've been doing for five years," said Scott Horn, from Microsoft's Windows Mobile marketing team. "I don't understand the impact that they are going to have."
Chrome was based on WebKit, and they bought Android (already based on Linux). Neither one was made from scratch.
Google certainly has the resources to do something like this. But neither of those projects (others mentioned Android) were started from scratch at Google.
And Fuchsia is using code from Chrome, Android and other open source projects. Not much these days is really made from scratch. iOS wasn't nor was MacOS or even MS-DOS for that matter.
It's also interesting that there's a lot of long-term web guys, almost all of them ex-Chrome (and some who were working on Firefox at Google before Chrome was a thing), many of them pretty senior at the point they left Chrome.
Then what about ChromeOS? Do you think they're trying to build a "full-fledged" OS for the modern era, with safety and security in mind, but not as lightweight as ChromeOS?
I think this is a symptom of internal rivalries at Google. Seems like a combination of Dart (arch-rival to Go) and ChromeOS (arch-rival to Android).
That's not necessarily a bad thing -- Google's M.O. has always been to try lots of different things at once. But it may mean they literally don't have a solid long-term plan for it yet.
I was being a little tongue-in-cheek, sure, but only slightly. They're both fairly recent languages, both representing a vision of how to fix the mistakes of the past. I'm sure the leaders of the teams see each other as rivals.
Why should I rewrite my Android app just because Google can't work out their internal politics?
And yes, I know that you'll probably be able to run Android apps on Fuchsia, but what about bitrot? Will JVM-language based Android be put on Life Support?
Yeah, look how that turned out. Now we have Chrome, which is slow, uses shitloads of memory, needs to be restarted constantly, has been bad for web standards, is controlled by Google, constantly phones home, etc.
