> When there are two very established solutions in the market, Sass and Less, you need to point out why these two come up short and why you are coming out with something new. Simply stating "we have a Google version of the tools you already use with the same feature set" isn't a very compelling sales pitch.
You need to understand that when an announcement like this is made, the development behind it happened over the course of years.
It isn't as if a few days before the announcement blog post is linked on HN, somebody made the decision "we can use Less, or Sass, or write our own. Screw those guys, let's write our own and release it open source!"
Next question: Why now? If this was being worked on for several years, why wasn't it released much sooner?
I have nothing against projects coming from Google. I'm all in favor of it. However I think Google acts as a much better open-source citizen when it adopts a posture like it has with HTML5. With HTML5, Google got involved early and publicly and one of their employees works as a benevolent dictator, which in the case of HTML5 is Ian Hixie.
When a project is released from some company, with no real defined ownership in the form of one human being or a small team at that company, it is a far less compelling project to get involved with, and the likelihood of a community being formed around it is low.
You need to understand that when an announcement like this is made, the development behind it happened over the course of years.
It isn't as if a few days before the announcement blog post is linked on HN, somebody made the decision "we can use Less, or Sass, or write our own. Screw those guys, let's write our own and release it open source!"