Because the whole purpose of these kinds of projects at Google is to keep regulators at bay. They don't need these products in the sense of making money from them. They will just burn some money and move on, exactly the way they did hundreds of times. But what kind of company has such a free pass to burning money? The kind of company that is a monopoly. Monopolies are THAT profitable.
Rather than advertising blitz and flashy press events, they just do blog posts that tech heads circulate, forget about, and then wonder 3-4 years later "whatever happened to that?"
This looks awesome. I look forward to someone else building a start-up on this and turning it into a great product.