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While Osterloh expects the Pixel to "become big, meaningful business for the company over time," right now his benchmark isn't sales, it's "consumer satisfaction and user experience.” So I ask: What about five years out? "We don't want it to be a niche thing," Osterloh says. It's a statement that Google is very serious about turning hardware into a real business on a massive scale - just maybe not this year.
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Last year was a coming-out party for Google hardware.
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That's when Google hardware was "no longer a hobby," as the next Osterloh-interview-driven article at The Verge proclaimed. This is very first innings for us." Google’s metric of success for Pixel won’t be whether it picks up significant market share, but whether it can garner customer satisfaction and form retail and carrier partnerships that Google can leverage for years to come. Osterloh knows that "We certainly aren’t going to have enormous volumes out of this product. "Fundamentally, we believe that a lot of the innovation that we want to do now ends up requiring controlling the end-to-end user experience," then-new-head-of-Google-hardware Rick Osterloh told The Verge in 2016, around the launch of the first-gen Pixel phone model.Īnd then there's this oft-quoted excerpt from that same article: And not only that, we were assured, but it also marked the beginning of hardware becoming a core part of Google's broader business plan for the future of the company. That's when hardware became less of a hobby and more of a business. It was when El Googster pivoted to the Pixel phone plan, though, that things really got goin'. incident circa 2012 (but we won't talk about that). And there was that, erm, extraordinarily short-lived Nexus Q. It's been making a variety of Chromecast-branded streaming doohickeys since 2013. Aside from its (mostly) fan-focused Nexus phones, Google cooked up its own Chromebook Pixel products starting back in 2015. įirst, a bit of necessary context to set the stage here: It's important to note that Google's hardware-making ambitions technically stretch back to the pre-Pixel days. And it'd require Google overcoming a major challenge the company has yet to show any sign of being ready to pull off. But I'm also cautiously expressing optimism that the answer is a resounding: "Right now - for reals this time."Īll hot air aside, there's only one way that hope could happen. I'm asking, publicly, right here and now. At a certain point, you've gotta ask: "Uh, gang? When is this actually starting?!" (Just kidding about the tattoos, by the way.) (For now.)īut the truth is that we've been hearing the "Google's about to get serious about hardware" line for a long time now - over and over and over again.
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If you've read my ramblings for long (or seen the NSFW multicolored "P"-logo tattoos on various parts of my person), you know how I feel about the Pixel's place in the Android ecosystem and the critical role it plays. Look, I'm a huge fan of what Google's trying to do with its Pixel products.
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I'll pause for a second while you regain your composure. All right, stop me if you've heard this before: Google's about to get serious about hardware.
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