Google unveils Pixel 3, other devices to stay afloat in hardware business

The search giant unveiled the Pixel 3, a smart speaker with a built-in screen and a tablet that doubles as a PC.

Business Standard : Though sales of its devices have been slow, the search giant unveiled the Pixel 3, a smart speaker with a built-in screen and a tablet that doubles as a PC.

For much of the last decade, Apple and Samsung have dominated sales of smartphones. So why would anyone bother trying to sell a new phone?

That hasn’t dissuaded Google. The company on Tuesday unveiled new versions of its Pixel smartphone, which is a high-end challenger to Apple’s iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy phones. It also introduced a smart speaker with a built-in display and a laptop that doubles as a tablet, in response to products from Amazon and Microsoft.

The gadgets are Google’s third wave since it started making consumer devices in 2016. The internet company has pushed these products as a way to showcase its prowess in areas like artificial intelligence and image processing.

Yet the efforts have not had a meaningful impact on Google’s sales or market share. For a company that makes most of its money selling advertising next to search results, the hardware increasingly appears to be an expensive hobby. One of its biggest hits thus far is a Google-branded wireless router, which is too much of a niche product to serve as the foundation of a hardware strategy.

“There’s some skepticism about how committed Google is,” said Carolina Milanesi, an analyst for Creative Strategies, a consumer electronics research firm. “They are still nowhere near where they need to be to make a dent in the industry.”

Google has said that hardware businesses rarely become overnight successes and that it remains focused on the long term. The company said it put more stock in indicators like high customer satisfaction in its effort to build a loyal base. Google doesn’t break out revenue or profit for its hardware business.

The search giant is also starting to spend heavily on the hardware business. Last year, it used an advertising blitz to promote its new products over the holidays. In January, it closed a $1.1 billion deal to acquire most of HTC’s smartphone design unit, with more than 2,000 HTC engineers moving to Google. A month later, Google’s hardware business absorbed Nest, which makes smart home appliances and previously functioned as a separate subsidiary.

While the handset market is no longer growing as much as it did five years ago, the company wants Pixel to be a blockbuster and to set the bar for devices running Android, Google’s mobile operating system, said Mario Queiroz, Google’s vice president of Pixel hardware... Read More