Google’s Hardware Failure is Inevitable (Premium)

According to a new report, Google is scaling back its hardware ambitions and will downsize the group that makes its laptops and tablets. If true, this is a stunning failure for a company that has been desperate to mimic Apple’s success. But this was also inevitable. Google is no Apple, and its business model precludes this type of success.

And yes, Microsoft provides an interesting proof-point for the limits of competing with your own partners.

According to a report in Business Insider that cites multiple sources, Google has told dozens of employees on its Create team---which makes the firm’s Pixel laptops and tablets---that they will need to find new jobs elsewhere within the company. The sources attribute “roadmap cutbacks” to the downsizing, noting that multiple Create projects for future hardware products have been canceled.

Yes, it’s possible that Google could reignite Create product development. The employees who were working on the canceled projects were told to find temporary, rather than permanent, roles within the company. But I think everyone sees the writing on the wall. Google’s hardware efforts to date can only be described as a failure.

And that failure extends across all of its hardware---from smartphones to smart speakers to tablets and laptops and so---and to every possible metric. None of Google’s hardware sells well, and its reliability issues are both well-documented and legendary, especially in smartphones.

Google moved tepidly to embrace Apple’s model, citing the same rationale as Microsoft did when it purchased Nokia’s smartphone business and created the Surface PC line: Those who are serious about software must inevitably make their own hardware as well. As I noted before, however, both companies took this infamous Alan Kay quote from yesteryear and misapplied it in their own product plans: Google and Microsoft, unlike Apple, rely on partners to distribute their software platforms. And it is not possible to effectively compete with those companies while also partnering with them.

The correct application of the Alan Kay quote for partner-centric firms like Google and Microsoft is to create hardware components---like Google’s Visual Core and Microsoft’s PixelSense Accelerator---that benefit the entire ecosystem of partners. Instead, these firms have tried to differentiate their own hardware offerings with these unique components, effectively leaving their partners at a disadvantage.

And both companies have suffered as a result of this miscalculation. In Microsoft’s case, the Windows Phone platform on which Nokia’s smartphone business was based cratered, and Microsoft killed it off in 2015. As for Surface, it remains a boutique PC business by the standards of Microsoft’s biggest PC maker partners and is thus considered uncompetitive. (Yes, yes, Surface is a billion-dollar business. It's also an unprofitable billion-dollar business.) It also helps that Microsoft has igno...

Gain unlimited access to Premium articles.

With technology shaping our everyday lives, how could we not dig deeper?

Thurrott Premium delivers an honest and thorough perspective about the technologies we use and rely on everyday. Discover deeper content as a Premium member.

Tagged with

Share post

Please check our Community Guidelines before commenting

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Thurrott © 2024 Thurrott LLC