When Mario Queiroz joined Google in 2005, the company had just one hardware product; a bulky,
bright yellow box that sat in the server rooms of huge companies and let them compile and search internal documents. It was exactly kind of device a search company would make: functional, ugly and never designed to end up in the hands of consumers.
But since the release of the Google Chromecast, the search giant has gone big on hardware. Now it produces its own laptops, smartphones, home assistants and products in a handful of other categories. In early 2018, Google expects to complete a $1.1 billion (£825 million) acquisition of part of HTC’s mobile division.
“Really, to bring all of our ideas to products we need to bring people on board even faster,” says Queiroz, Google’s vice president of product management. The HTC deal should bring around 2,000 mobile engineers to Google, increasing its ability to develop more smartphones for a greater number of countries. “Now we have our own hardware engineers working with our own software engineers, working with our own supply chain people to develop the product,” Queiroz says. His end goal? To get Pixel phones into the hands of as many people as possible.
For Queiroz, Google really started to take hardware seriously in 2013 when it launched the Chromecast video streaming stick, bringing smart features to TVs with a HDMI port. “We had an idea of a way to bring streaming video to a large number of TVs that could only be done if we develop the hardware,” he says. “That was our first time doing hardware and software together.”
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After seeing that people were using the original video Chromecast to stream audio, Queiroz says it only took a small conceptual leap to create an audio-only Chromecast. Add in the voice-activated Google Assistant and a speaker and he says the product eventually evolved into Google Home, the company’s rival to Amazon’s Echo series of voice-activated home assistants.
Despite this neat timeline, Google Home wasn’t released until November 2016, almost a year-and-a-half after the first Echo. This sluggish start has given Amazon a huge lead in the home assistant market – it has a 76 per cent share according to a September report from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. Recently, competition between the two companies spilled open into open acrimony when Google pulled its YouTube from Fire TV and Echo Show devices, in response to Amazon’s unwillingness to list Google products on its online store.
“We were not in a very reciprocal situation,” Queiroz says, before referring me to Google’s official statement on the issue. “It will continue to be our objective to be open and to have our services on as many different devices as possible.”
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Even outside of home assistants, Google has been fairly slow to bring its own products to market. Although it had developed Android phones in collaboration with other manufacturers since 2010, the first Google-manufactured phone, the Pixel, wasn’t released until 2016.
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But Queiroz doesn’t think that those late starts mean that Google has been a copycat when it comes to new hardware launches. “When we go into new thing we like to take a new approach. Yahoo! Mail already existed and Gmail came along,” he says. “You can't change what's behind you, you can just think about the experiences you're going to deliver going forward.”
At the Pixel 2 launch in October 2017, Google’s hardware chief Rick Osterloh outlined what the company sees as its own unique take on gadgets: combining hardware, software and artificial intelligence. That last point is key to differentiation in a crowded market, says Quieroz. “Even though there is great hardware out there, and we have to be really good at developing the hardware, we bring the uniqueness of the AI capabilities, both on device and server-side.”
The Pixel 2 smartphone is the closest Google has come to putting this vision into a single product. It comes together in small features such as Now Playing song identification, which automatically recognises a song playing in the background and allows users to immediately add that song to their music streaming service. All the recognition is done on the device itself without any data being sent to Google’s servers, which meant squeezing down the fingerprints of tens of thousands of songs so they could fit onto the phone.
“It’s very important for us to develop the capability to do a lot on the phone, not just for it to be fast and power efficient but also for privacy reasons,” Queiroz says. “We'd like to be able to have the ability to do things in a way where not everything has to access a Google server.”
But moving more AI capabilities onto the phone inevitably means widening the gap between Pixel phones and other Android devices. Now it’s making its phones of its own, Google can tweak its Android operating system to specifically take advantages of features that are only available in Pixels. In the future, some features will make their way to Pixel phones first before coming to other Android devices, while others will exclusively take advantage of Pixel hardware so won’t be available on any other phones. The majority of features, Queiroz says, will still be available across all Android devices.
This might cause some tensions between Google and other major manufacturers running Android OS. Differing interpretations of the Android OS have long been a sticking point between Google and Samsung, and a patent deal between the two companies in 2014 committed Samsung to toning down its Android skins. Now Google has ramped up its own smartphone production abilities, it has put itself in the best position to create the perfect Android phone.
But Queiroz doesn’t quite put things that way. Even when I push him, he doesn’t say that Google wants to create the best Android phone in the market. If he did say that, he’d be squarely putting the likes of Samsung and HTC, who are key hardware partners, in his crosshairs. He prefers to frame his company’s strategy in more diplomatic terms. “Our goal is for Pixel to be the best package of Google experiences you can get,” he says.
Google still has some way to go before it really cracks the formula it has set out for itself. Its ambitious Pixel Bud earphones received a less-than lukewarm reception from reviewers, and feel more like a proof of concept than a product that people might actually want to use. The company doesn’t publish revenue figures from hardware sales so it will be hard to tell whether Google is making its hardware division profitable in itself, or if it really sees it as a platform to support is core advertising business.
"What we’re trying to do is to make it seamless for you to use assistant across any device,” Queiroz says. It appears that after its early attempts to create a genuinely groundbreaking new device with Google Glass, the company is concentrating on building a more coherent set of devices with Google Assistant at their heart. The key to doing this right, according to Queiroz, is by blending hardware design with Google’s strengths in AI. "That is what we believe we can bring that’s new.”
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/google-hardware-product-strategy-pixel-home-assistant-mario-queiroz
