Report: Google ‘doubles down’ Pixel hardware, cuts support for Google Assistant

Google is going through turbulent times due to CEO Sundar Pichai’s decision to cut costs across the company. We first became aware of this belt-tightening in August, and since then we’ve seen the Zone 120 incubation lab halved, a by-product of what’s left of Project Loon, the death of the Pixel laptop division, and the abrupt shutdown of Google Stadia. A new report from The Information details other changes related to Pichai’s budget cuts across the company, with some divisions surviving and others receiving ominous resource cuts. There is a lot to go through.

Additional Resources for Google Hardware

First, we have news that the hardware department, aside from the loss of laptops, seems to be mostly safe. Google’s biggest Android partner, Samsung, is experiencing a downturn in many established markets, with Apple’s US market share reaching an all-time high last quarter. The report says Google is seeing Apple as more of a problem than in the past due to concerns that regulators could shut down Google and Apple’s usual multi-billion dollar deal to put Google Search on the iPhone. If the iPhone stops running Google ads, the rise of Apple and the fall of Samsung will be one of the few things that could actually be a major problem for Google’s revenue.

According to the report, Google sees itself as the solution to this problem. As insurance against what the report calls Samsung’s “further downturn”, Google is “doubling down”on its investment in Pixel hardware. Google apparently does this by “moving product and software development employees working on features for non-Google hardware to run on Google-branded devices.”The goal here is not to spend more money, which is why Google is apparently sacrificing partner devices to focus on the Pixel division. (If you make your business a Google partner, you’ll feel like you’re asking for trouble, right?)

Pichai’s cost-cutting funds are approaching

So which projects are being cut? One of them is Google TV, the report says, “Executives also discussed moving some of the product managers working on the Google TV software for TVs”to Wear OS and the Pixel Tablet. This is the only OS that has received less development.

It appears that most of this report is focused on reducing Google Assistant support for certain form factors, which is odd since Google Assistant is more or less the same on every platform. The whole point of an assistant is one reliable, predictable voice assistant that lives everywhere, and it’s not clear what platform-specific support needs to be done other than building an app that can receive sound and read the results. However, the report states that Google is going to “invest less in developing Google Assistant voice search for non-Google cars and devices, including TVs, headphones, smart home speakers, smart glasses and smartwatches that use Google technology.”. Carry the OS software.”It sounds like a combination of more Pixel exclusive software features and less software development exclusively for partner devices. In this list, Google makes TV dongles, headphones, smart home speakers, and watches, but it doesn’t make cars.

To be honest, Google Assistant seems to be the most affected project in this report. On the one hand, it’s hard to believe since the Assistant is basically just “Google Voice Search”and search is Google’s second most popular product (after ads). On the other hand, it was never clear that Google Assistant was making money. Google Assistant never reads you an audio ad, and you never see an ad from the response it returns. You can only see ads if the product crashes and you get thrown to the Google search results screen. Google has used Assistant monetization options in the past, but I don’t think any of them ever worked.

Are some hardware companies still in demand?

While Google is going to focus on its own hardware, the report says it’s not completely shutting down existing hardware manufacturers either. The report states that “Google has singled out Samsung and Chinese brands OnePlus and Xiaomi as premium partners for Android phones, for which it should develop the best Google services. But there remains a long list of other manufacturers that may not get the same attention from Google groups. as a team of helpers.

The choice of favorite hardware manufacturers is very similar to the recent release of Wear OS 3. The OS has been exclusive to Samsung for a year, with smaller OEMs like fashion brand Fossil left out. When it came time to launch the Pixel Watch, Google created a Fitbit-exclusive app for itself and never ported its public Google Fit fitness project to the new Wear OS 3. This week, the new Fossil Gen 6 watch finally launches with Wear OS. 3, but now it doesn’t have a fitness solution from Google. The watch also no longer has the Google Assistant because Google didn’t prioritize developing Wear OS 3 Assistant on the slower Wear 4100 SoC that the Fossil watch ships with.

We’ll be watching the actual practical results of these changes, but Wear OS is already showing a focus on Google hardware, prioritizing some partners, and dropping Google Assistant support for others. Everything in this report is already happening. The biggest downside to Google’s hardware is probably the very small list of supported countries, but that’s increased a bit with the launch of the Pixel 7.