Personally, when considering the number of ex-Bell Labs employees there, I had hopes that Google would pick up the rights to Plan 9 and continue it. Plus, Google has the deep pockets needed to ensure proper device driver support for modern hardware.
Maybe it's not reasonable now or ever but I'd quite love to think of Google as a company capable of doing things that are immensely interesting but have no obvious, immediate, practical "use."
I don't know if they are there quite yet. It seems to me that they still strongly incentivize shipping products and making things people will use within in their corporate culture. I might be wrong. There could be a light coming on.
