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Google has devoted a lot of engineering work to products that no one buys
The unexpected end of Android tablets and now Chrome OS portable tablets
It's just a year since Google gave up the last of its eight years of initiatives on Android tablets. This period began with the official debut of Android 3.0 Honeycomb in 2011 and continued until the abrupt end of Google Pixel C support Android 8.0 Oreo last year.
This week, Nick Bastone wrote for Internal business that the search giant has begun reassigning engineers and program managers into its Create Hardware division, which builds its Pixelbook and Pixel State, both on Chrome OS.
Experts are constantly jostling about the future of Apple's iPads and MacBooks, deeply concerned about the risk of falling on a plateau where Apple is only serving the same group of a few hundred million dollars. Users who can afford high-end mobile devices.
However, nobody is worried about the fact that all of Google's attempts in the field of hardware computing over the last decade have failed with spectacular embarrassment, having not made any money and having even not yet established on the market of personal computer equipment. Microsoft Surface.
In the years when Google has struggled to find a netbook, tablet, slate, laptop or other form factor that it could sell with Android, Chrome OS or a combination of both, he only lost money and lost time. Yet no one has ever predicted that Google will end up giving up its experiences on tablets, netbooks or other hardware.
While Google has been praised for a decade of testing, Apple's Macs and iPads have generated sustainable revenues of around $ 400 billion since 2010. These funds have enabled Apple to create its own internal Intel by developing the last A12X Bionic. has funded a decade of consistent iOS development that has made Microsoft Windows the largest proprietary computing platform in the world.
iPad has actually changed the nature of mobile computing for millions of consumers, professionals and in the business, while Apple's MacBooks have given the entire industry the PC a model to follow closely. And experts continue to speculate that Apple may have to abandon its hardware and stop building computers to become a Netflix, while suggesting that Google's Chromebooks and Android tablets are elbow competitors to elbow.
Chrome OS aims to support the failures of the Android tablet
Last October AppleInsider Apart from phones, Google has distanced itself from Android and is increasingly using new strategies around Chrome OS: TV dongles, WiFi microphones, tablet computers, laptops and netbooks.
Chrome OS is not new at all; It was introduced in 2009 even before Android is attracting a lot of attention in smartphones. But the first Chromebooks were not even marketed until mid-2011. At that time, the netbook market that Google was trying to target with Chrome OS had been completely neutralized by the iPad's. # 39; Apple.
With demand for netbooks gone, Google has doubled its attempts to beat the Apple iPad via Android tablets, starting with an original idea of what Android tablets might be in partnership with Motorola; let's go back to making ultra-cheap low-end tablets with Asus; then turn around and try to sell imitations of iPad cheaply with HTC; then works on the creation of an original tablet product with Pixel C, developed within the Create group. But none of these has made any money.
This is partly because Android offers a poor tablet experience, as its applications are primarily aimed at smaller phone screens. In contrast, Apple has striven to make the iPad a separate platform running "tablet-optimized apps," rather than simply stretching iPhone titles, contributing to a functional platform that allows users developers create more powerful applications, giving buyers new reasons to buy iPads.
Observers in the technology sector knew this well, but they continued to talk about Android tablets as "winners" and after gaining "market share" simply because it appeared that large quantities were being sold. The hypothesis was that these sales would eventually create a tablet platform that supports the development of applications. However, Google and its partners have continued to destroy the existing Android tablet hardware base as quickly as possible.
This can be partly explained by their inability to support existing hardware with software updates and partly by the construction of low-end peripherals so badly that many of them could not last in usable form. beyond a year. So, while Android tablets were supposed to have impressive unit sales, they did not make money and never created an installed base of satisfied tablet users, with an appetite for apps or services. the same model as the Apple iPad.
Pixel C was also Google's latest Android tablet
Chrome OS fails to save Google's massive investment in hardware
As Google's hopes for Android tablets did not materialize, the company's Create group attempted to migrate to Chrome OS. It is widely accepted that the Pixel C was originally intended to ship with Chrome OS, but was replaced by Android at the last minute because Chrome OS was not ready yet, it was limited to running web applications .
After the failure of Google's latest Android tablet, its Create unit was focused entirely on Chrome OS, delivering a Pixelbook at $ 999 in 2017, intended directly for the iPad Pro, then at Pixel Slate's 39; last year, a device with an Intel processor from 600 to 1600 USD more like a Microsoft. Area.
Google's newest Chrome OS tablet PCs were to combine the platform's native web applications with the new ability to also manage Android mobile applications, even though one of the main reasons for the failure Android tablets was that Android apps were so poorly suited to tablet hardware.
Last year, even the Edge called Google's new state "half-cooked" and "slapdash", stating that its usable hardware was "defeated by a hundred small software indignities".
When Google reduced the price of its most expensive $ 450 Pixelbook Chrome OS, no one described it as a harbinger of hardware that no one wanted. Instead, the Edge simply called a "good deal".
Compare the the Wall Street newspaper Falsely claiming around the same time as Apple's best-selling iPhone XR was "a failure for Apple" and a product "that Apple can not sell". This happened after Bloomberg insisted that Apple was offering the iPhone XR "$ 300 less than the real cost" because Apple was proposing to accept exchanges to encourage sales of its new open iPhones and at the full price.
Apple accepted the exchanges while Google reduced prices
You could not create such a desperate scenario in a movie script and hope that all viewers believe that such an easy nonsense could be printed by real newspapers. Yet, over the last decade, a huge advertising giant has been right not to be able to sell any of its tablets, netbooks, hybrid slates or any other invention, nor to have significantly reduced the price of several hundred dollars. its brand new material.
The illusion of success for Chrome OS
After the liquidation of unsold Pixelbooks, it's not hard to understand why Google is dissociating its engineering skills from the Create group, which was designed to find new ways to sell Chrome OS with Android apps via custom-designed hardware .
Chrome OS does not generate enough high-end hardware sales from Google or anyone. Designing and supporting all of these models also represents a costly use of engineering talent that Google could devote to an activity that earns money. Still, the illusion remains that Chrome OS is still a functional business.
This is largely due to a series of puff pieces initiated by Bloomberg, which gave the impression that Chrome OS had "succeeded" in selling netbooks to K12 schools in the United States. It does not matter if this market is very small and the low-end Chromebooks sold have not been profitable.
In response to news that the Google group Google Create was putting an end to its Chrome OS ambitions and plans for future hardware, Ben Bajarin tweeted, "The Chromebook is the only growing category in the PC segment, not the price / ASP charged by Google, but no reason Google can not [b]e more competitive price as a strategy. "
This thinking is focused entirely on unit sales – noting that some vendors still deliver low-end Chromebook volumes – but does not understand that Chrome OS, like Android, fails to create a resilient and durable installed user base satisfied.
Chromebooks do not last, are not supported long, and need to be replaced with new inexpensive hardware at a standard location. As a recurring business model, replacing Chromebooks could make sense if hardware manufacturers made money with their low-end hardware. However, inexpensive Chromebooks are less profitable than personal computers, whether they increase slightly or not. Note that PC sales have dropped significantly since the iPad appeared, so "growing faster than conventional PCs" is no feat.
Source: Statistica.com
Moreover, apart from K12 education, Chromebooks have not attracted the attention of consumers or businesses – as Google once hoped. And of course, if Google can not earn money at the prices it currently charges for its Pixel premium brand Chrome OS devices, there is clearly a "reason" why Google simply can not lower prices "as a strategy" to position itself in the extremely unattractive commodity market for K12 Chromebooks.
Oddly enough, although Chrome OS does not generate any real income for Google and can not even support future generations of courtesy material, it's hardly hard to demand that the company stop wasting money on this. which has been a decade of failure. And yet, at the same time, media experts have often suggested that Apple's Mac and iPad markets, each generating about $ 20 billion a year, are declining struggling businesses that Apple may simply need to address. renounce.
Apple may refresh the iPad or Mac hardware during this month's event, but the focus seems to be on the new services offered by Apple to its vast installed base of Mac and iOS users . It's something that sellers focused only on quarterly unit sales can not do. After a lost decade, there is no real installed base of Chrome OS devices to sell anything to.
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