We had heard whispers that Google parent company Alphabet's robotics division was in trouble, but we never expected something like this. A report from Bloomberg says that the company is looking to sell Boston Dynamics. Boston Dynamics is easily Alphabet's highest-profile robotics company, regularly showing the world its creations through its YouTube account.

Alphabet's robotics division, internally called "Replicant," was created by Android founder Andy Rubin in 2013. To jump-start the division, he snapped up eight robotics-related companies in about six months, including Boston Dynamics. After only a year at the helm of the new division, though, Andy Rubin left Google.

The sale of Boston Dynamics lines up with an earlier report from Business Insider, which said that the hodgepodge of companies had "little in common" and were "scattered across different countries and working on unrelated projects." The loss of Rubin apparently greatly impacted Replicant, and the BI report said that "many of the people who had joined Google through the robotics M&A felt confused and disappointed." Bloomberg's new story backs this statement up, saying the division "was plagued by leadership changes, failures to collaborate between companies, and an unsuccessful effort to recruit a new leader."

The report blames Boston Dynamics for a lot of Replicant's teamwork problems, saying there was "a reluctance by Boston Dynamics executives to work with Google’s other robot engineers in California and Tokyo." Executives at Alphabet also "concluded that Boston Dynamics isn’t likely to produce a marketable product in the next few years." All of this led to the apparent decision to sell the unit.

The rest of Replicant was recently folded into Alphabet's X division (formerly Google X). Bloomberg's report describes a meeting shortly after the move where "Astro Teller, the head of Google X, told Replicant employees that if robotics aren’t the practical solution to problems that Google was trying to solve, they would be reassigned to work on other things." That statement doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in the continuation of Replicant. Is the whole division dead now?