4 ms·

Fascinating story, and explains why the product is so odd and rushed. It raises the question: why did this ship at all? Why waste marketing dollars, muddle you

by mrpippy 11y ago

Fascinating story, and explains why the product is so odd and rushed. It raises the question: why did this ship at all? Why waste marketing dollars, muddle your overall branding/product lines (Nexus vs. Pixel), and compete with your own existing products (Nexus 9)? Microsoft canceled the Surface Mini at the last minute, because it was clear that WinRT had no future. Once the touchscreen Chrome OS got canceled, the Pixel C should have been too.

tdicola 11y ago
Perhaps there were contracts with manufacturers that would have been more expensive to back out of at the last minute. It's also hugely demoralizing to a team to work on something for a couple years and then see it never ship because of mismanagement many levels above them. They probably ran the numbers and saw it was cheaper to pay X million to ship a shoddy device vs. a greater Y million to back out of contracts, perhaps lose team members in frustration, etc. See also: Microsoft's Kin phone that actually shipped and was discontinued 48 days later.
- r00fus 11y ago
  Well the results are... this was likely the best way they could put a knife in ChromeOS as a platform.
  - ossreality 11y ago
    Huh? In the AMA they hinted that the thing can boot other OSes. Whatever the convergence plan is, Pixel C is the test hardware. The bootloader bits are in the ChromeOS tree. It uses Coreboot. It's a ChromeOS device and I suspect it's future will include a return to its roots. ARC in Chrome will be a better way forward for Android than trying to fix all of Android's insidious problems on the "desktop" and making mobile Chrome more fully featured. It just seems painfully obvious that Chrome is going to win. It's better tech all around.
    - nextos 11y ago
      If so, I guess this would be a fantastic machine for running Linux ARM.
      - bch 11y ago
        This (well, *BSD) is what I'm interested in. It'll be interesting to hear from the Linux/BSD pioneers what the networking, gfx, and touchscreen support are. [edit: insertspace]
        nextos 11y ago
        Except for the slightly odd keyboard (e.g. no Esc), this could be a fantastic machine for a keyboard driven setup. That's how I use my MBA 11''. XMonad, mutt and friends. But this one could be better.
        ant6n 11y ago
        At least the MBA is a clamshell. This I could not imagine working on.... Why didn't they just do a Nvidia X1 Chromebook.
- blackguardx 11y ago
  Speaking as a hardware engineer, I can't see it being more expensive to pay a breakup fee than to ship a product. Shippings products of that scale takes many people across many different organizations working together. There is a lot of pressure involved and many late nights. Hardware projects gets canceled all the time. People on the team would rather it get canceled than do all the extra work to see it ship and not sell. No one wants to work on a dud.
- mrpippy 11y ago
  These are all good points. Google clearly wants to build and maintain an internal hardware development team, and it might be easier to ship this not-ideal device rather than risk a mass exodus of the hardware team they've been building for years. The dichotomy between (Android phones/tablets->Nexus->outside OEMs) and (CrOS laptops/tablet->Pixel->internal) is very odd though, and I wonder how confident the Pixel team is in their place at Google. Chrome OS is finding success, but the future still looks like it'll be Android. As for the Pixel C specifically, the problems are all in the software--maybe rather than making another Nexus tablet for Android N, they'll build it for the Pixel C.
- MrZipf 11y ago
  I had the feeling several times at MSFT that sometimes projects go all the way to completion for the sanity of the team. Kin looks like an example of this. The Kin team were mostly from the SideKick acquisition and they worked really hard on it. Kin had the social angle and it would have been interesting if it had sold to the target audience (teenagers). WP7 picked up on the social aspects in Kin and that was probably final blow to it as a product (before it even shippet). It was ahead of it's time and pitched at completely the wrong price point.
PhantomGremlin 11y ago
the product is so odd and rushed Google (Alphabet?) mostly does "fail fast", where they are funding a plethora of products in a myriad of different fields. So it's not surprising that some products appear to be half-baked. So they threw this one out there. If it gets traction, then fine. If it doesn't, it will be terminated quite quickly. This is a strategy adopted by many other companies. It's the antithesis of the oft quoted Steve Jobs philosophy: “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”
ChuckMcM 11y ago
Perhaps the question was "Why not?" After all they had the hardware in a state where it could be shipped, so maybe pushing OS updates to make it better was a way forward out of a deadlocked product marketing group. In a completely unrelated company the Lenovo Intel tablets were a lot like this. They came out too early, Lenvo discounted the hell out of them (with Intel's help) to get them into people's hands, and then it took a year of Android on x86 updates to get them into something resembling a usable product. I don't think it was very confidence building in the Lenovo tablet brand but I also don't think Google is very invested in the Pixel branding either. Its more a "yeah we have something like that too." Had you told me that Surface would be driving feature / design decisions at Apple and Google a year ago I would have considered you ill informed :-) but here we are, Apple inventing using a pen type cover with your tablet and Google building "2 in 1" hardware. It just reinforces my experience with how dynamic technology trends can be.
- mtgx 11y ago
  Why not? Because everytime Google ships a failed product there's one more joke out there about how "Google sucks at making physical products". And it also reinforces that idea with each new product launch, as people stop being excited about a "new Google product", which they "know" it will fail. Remember that whole thing about "oh, I wonder when Google is going to kill this new service" after the Reader debacle? Yeah, it's like that. With Apple it's the other way around. Because it has reinforced the idea that each new product they launch will sell in millions in the first month, now everyone expects Apple to sell millions of whatever new product they launch - even if they don't like it personally (such as the Apple Watch). It's okay to experiment. For instance, maybe the Chromecast seems like genius idea in hindsight, but perhaps when they were first working on it they thought maybe it will succeed maybe it won't. However, some products are just dumb - like a $300 Google TV, or a $300 device that only streams music from your phone, or the n-th attempt to take the phone/tablet Android interface and try to put it on a notebook-like device. Google should've known better by now that that doesn't work, and not just because it failed with Android, but it also failed with Windows 8. I'm actually very much in favor of Android on PCs, but they need to actually optimize it for PCs because they push it like that.
golergka 11y ago
> It raises the question: why did this ship at all? Why waste marketing dollars, muddle your overall branding/product lines (Nexus vs. Pixel), and compete with your own existing products (Nexus 9)? From the standpoint of the whole company it doesn't make much sense. From the standpoint of an individual manager responsible for the product and his CV, however...
- drcross 11y ago
  Christmas.
  - masklinn 11y ago
    Better the project die the miserable unloved death of an unwanted product than miss the launch window.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

by mrpippy 11y ago

tdicola 11y ago

Perhaps there were contracts with manufacturers that would have been more expensive to back out of at the last minute. It's also hugely demoralizing to a team to work on something for a couple years and then see it never ship because of mismanagement many levels above them. They probably ran the numbers and saw it was cheaper to pay X million to ship a shoddy device vs. a greater Y million to back out of contracts, perhaps lose team members in frustration, etc. See also: Microsoft's Kin phone that actually shipped and was discontinued 48 days later.

r00fus 11y ago
Well the results are... this was likely the best way they could put a knife in ChromeOS as a platform.
- ossreality 11y ago
  Huh? In the AMA they hinted that the thing can boot other OSes. Whatever the convergence plan is, Pixel C is the test hardware. The bootloader bits are in the ChromeOS tree. It uses Coreboot. It's a ChromeOS device and I suspect it's future will include a return to its roots. ARC in Chrome will be a better way forward for Android than trying to fix all of Android's insidious problems on the "desktop" and making mobile Chrome more fully featured. It just seems painfully obvious that Chrome is going to win. It's better tech all around.
  - nextos 11y ago
    If so, I guess this would be a fantastic machine for running Linux ARM.
    - bch 11y ago
      This (well, *BSD) is what I'm interested in. It'll be interesting to hear from the Linux/BSD pioneers what the networking, gfx, and touchscreen support are. [edit: insertspace]
      - nextos 11y ago
        Except for the slightly odd keyboard (e.g. no Esc), this could be a fantastic machine for a keyboard driven setup. That's how I use my MBA 11''. XMonad, mutt and friends. But this one could be better.
        ant6n 11y ago
        At least the MBA is a clamshell. This I could not imagine working on.... Why didn't they just do a Nvidia X1 Chromebook.
blackguardx 11y ago
Speaking as a hardware engineer, I can't see it being more expensive to pay a breakup fee than to ship a product. Shippings products of that scale takes many people across many different organizations working together. There is a lot of pressure involved and many late nights. Hardware projects gets canceled all the time. People on the team would rather it get canceled than do all the extra work to see it ship and not sell. No one wants to work on a dud.
mrpippy 11y ago
These are all good points. Google clearly wants to build and maintain an internal hardware development team, and it might be easier to ship this not-ideal device rather than risk a mass exodus of the hardware team they've been building for years. The dichotomy between (Android phones/tablets->Nexus->outside OEMs) and (CrOS laptops/tablet->Pixel->internal) is very odd though, and I wonder how confident the Pixel team is in their place at Google. Chrome OS is finding success, but the future still looks like it'll be Android. As for the Pixel C specifically, the problems are all in the software--maybe rather than making another Nexus tablet for Android N, they'll build it for the Pixel C.
MrZipf 11y ago
I had the feeling several times at MSFT that sometimes projects go all the way to completion for the sanity of the team. Kin looks like an example of this. The Kin team were mostly from the SideKick acquisition and they worked really hard on it. Kin had the social angle and it would have been interesting if it had sold to the target audience (teenagers). WP7 picked up on the social aspects in Kin and that was probably final blow to it as a product (before it even shippet). It was ahead of it's time and pitched at completely the wrong price point.

PhantomGremlin 11y ago

the product is so odd and rushed Google (Alphabet?) mostly does "fail fast", where they are funding a plethora of products in a myriad of different fields. So it's not surprising that some products appear to be half-baked. So they threw this one out there. If it gets traction, then fine. If it doesn't, it will be terminated quite quickly. This is a strategy adopted by many other companies. It's the antithesis of the oft quoted Steve Jobs philosophy: “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”

ChuckMcM 11y ago

Perhaps the question was "Why not?" After all they had the hardware in a state where it could be shipped, so maybe pushing OS updates to make it better was a way forward out of a deadlocked product marketing group. In a completely unrelated company the Lenovo Intel tablets were a lot like this. They came out too early, Lenvo discounted the hell out of them (with Intel's help) to get them into people's hands, and then it took a year of Android on x86 updates to get them into something resembling a usable product. I don't think it was very confidence building in the Lenovo tablet brand but I also don't think Google is very invested in the Pixel branding either. Its more a "yeah we have something like that too." Had you told me that Surface would be driving feature / design decisions at Apple and Google a year ago I would have considered you ill informed :-) but here we are, Apple inventing using a pen type cover with your tablet and Google building "2 in 1" hardware. It just reinforces my experience with how dynamic technology trends can be.

mtgx 11y ago
Why not? Because everytime Google ships a failed product there's one more joke out there about how "Google sucks at making physical products". And it also reinforces that idea with each new product launch, as people stop being excited about a "new Google product", which they "know" it will fail. Remember that whole thing about "oh, I wonder when Google is going to kill this new service" after the Reader debacle? Yeah, it's like that. With Apple it's the other way around. Because it has reinforced the idea that each new product they launch will sell in millions in the first month, now everyone expects Apple to sell millions of whatever new product they launch - even if they don't like it personally (such as the Apple Watch). It's okay to experiment. For instance, maybe the Chromecast seems like genius idea in hindsight, but perhaps when they were first working on it they thought maybe it will succeed maybe it won't. However, some products are just dumb - like a $300 Google TV, or a $300 device that only streams music from your phone, or the n-th attempt to take the phone/tablet Android interface and try to put it on a notebook-like device. Google should've known better by now that that doesn't work, and not just because it failed with Android, but it also failed with Windows 8. I'm actually very much in favor of Android on PCs, but they need to actually optimize it for PCs because they push it like that.

golergka 11y ago

> It raises the question: why did this ship at all? Why waste marketing dollars, muddle your overall branding/product lines (Nexus vs. Pixel), and compete with your own existing products (Nexus 9)? From the standpoint of the whole company it doesn't make much sense. From the standpoint of an individual manager responsible for the product and his CV, however...

drcross 11y ago
Christmas.
- masklinn 11y ago
  Better the project die the miserable unloved death of an unwanted product than miss the launch window.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]