On the one hand, you have the CEO apparently all in on Gemini and subscriptions which should push for some kind of Office 365 "we don't care where you use it as long as you subscribe" and strong gestures towards their hardware partners.
On the other hand, you have Osterloh who won the tug of war and is now trying to turn the hardware division and Android into some kind of Apple vertically integrated machine like if he was still at Motorola while their SoC is lagging behind one to two generations and they don't seem to have the volume to sustain this kind of investment. Plus, they have regulatory pressure on the competition side from both the USA and the EU.
Google strategy is still as unreadable as ever. It's frankly a miracle this company is still standing. They are living testimony to the power of having a monopoly on a large market.
Interestingly I now view the Motorola acquisition as a massive mistake, not because of the assets, but because the culture it brought in is actively damaging to the overall company. It's so weird trying to emulate Apple exactly when the regulatory environment is focused on tearing down this model.
Honestly, Apple is getting gifts and gifts from all sides (though with the huge blunder that has been *OS 26), Google doesn't know how to make ecosystems and has never known to do so. Android is great as a single device, but the whole integration, even with their own devices is horrible (Near Share, setting their 'Find My' ecosystem as opt-in instead of opt-out...).
It's another example of EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish), as they finally succeeded with Chrome. And there is likely quite a lot of political interference.
And no, it has nothing to do with the lack of vertical integration. Microsoft, despite all the millions of issues with the platform, has succeeded in making an ecosystem on the enterprise side despite having very little to say in the PC hardware.
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I don't understand what Google is doing.
On the one hand, you have the CEO apparently all in on Gemini and subscriptions which should push for some kind of Office 365 "we don't care where you use it as long as you subscribe" and strong gestures towards their hardware partners.
On the other hand, you have Osterloh who won the tug of war and is now trying to turn the hardware division and Android into some kind of Apple vertically integrated machine like if he was still at Motorola while their SoC is lagging behind one to two generations and they don't seem to have the volume to sustain this kind of investment. Plus, they have regulatory pressure on the competition side from both the USA and the EU.
Google strategy is still as unreadable as ever. It's frankly a miracle this company is still standing. They are living testimony to the power of having a monopoly on a large market.
Interestingly I now view the Motorola acquisition as a massive mistake, not because of the assets, but because the culture it brought in is actively damaging to the overall company. It's so weird trying to emulate Apple exactly when the regulatory environment is focused on tearing down this model.
Honestly, Apple is getting gifts and gifts from all sides (though with the huge blunder that has been *OS 26), Google doesn't know how to make ecosystems and has never known to do so. Android is great as a single device, but the whole integration, even with their own devices is horrible (Near Share, setting their 'Find My' ecosystem as opt-in instead of opt-out...).
It's another example of EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish), as they finally succeeded with Chrome. And there is likely quite a lot of political interference.
And no, it has nothing to do with the lack of vertical integration. Microsoft, despite all the millions of issues with the platform, has succeeded in making an ecosystem on the enterprise side despite having very little to say in the PC hardware.