Google sets its sights on the iPhone
Google is jumping back into the hardware business, said in The Wall Street Journal. The search giant announced last week that it is spending $1.1 billion to buy a large chunk of the struggling Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer HTC Corp. As part of the deal, Google will get about half of HTC’s researchand-development team—about 2,000 people— including the engineers who helped develop Google’s flagship Pixel smartphone, released last year. This is Google’s second purchase of an also-ran phone maker, following its acquisition of Motorola in 2012. But that transaction “was widely seen as a bid for Motorola’s large trove of patents, rather than a serious move into hardware.” This deal, by contrast, seems designed to help Google develop a uniquely integrated phone, built around its Android software, which now runs on more than 2 billion devices worldwide. “Google realized that if it wanted to improve the Android software experience, it needed more control over the hardware.”
Google is clearly preparing to go to war against the iPhone, said Vlad Savov in TheVerge.com. By poaching HTC’s phone-design and engineering teams, the company is telegraphing a clear-cut ambition: to confront Apple’s dominance in smartphone hardware and services. The “iPhone is a direct threat to Google’s overarching goal of being ubiquitous on every internet-connected device,” largely because Apple has been working feverishly in recent years to become “independent of Google” by offering its own services, such as Apple Maps and iCloud. In response, Google “is moving to become independent of Apple by trying to make a better smartphone.” Having the HTC team in house will allow Google to generate new Pixel smartphone designs much faster, and “do synergistic things with its hardware and software that it wouldn’t be able to when contracting the work out.”
Google’s move into hardware will put it awkwardly into competition with some of its Android partners, such as Samsung, said Samuel Gibbs in The Guardian. But the global smartphone game “has rapidly become much more focused around the services the phone can deliver rather than the device itself.” Samsung’s Bixby AI assistant, which is built into the latest Samsung smartphones, is already a “clear shot across the bow of Google Assistant,” Google’s own AI offering. Google is simply seizing the opportunity to build a device that is “all Google, no longer diluted by others’ services.” And while smartphones are the focus today, “what’s next matters more,” said Dan Frommer and Rani Molla in Recode.net. “It doesn’t take much of an imagination” to think of things that these newly acquired engineers could be asked to develop, including augmented-reality glasses, wearable sensors, or some device not even on consumers’ radar yet. Google knows that it needs to play a leading role in tech’s next wave, “or it will lose relevance.”