Google has now made it abundantly clear that the company has no interest in throwing the towel in its repeated attempts at becoming a hardware player. Google is a giant when it comes to software, and everybody knows this; but the company’s efforts to become a hardware player in the mould of Apple has failed repeatedly.
The much hyped Google Glass never took off. The inorganic push to become a smartphone manufacturer by buying Motorola for $12.5 billion was an even bigger failure, and Google always remained a marginal player in the smartphone manufacturing market since then.
Until now, perhaps?
Yesterday, the company puts all doubts to rest by unveiling their new smartphone, Google Pixel, which the company touted as the best product yet in the merger of hardware and software. To date, such a marriage has only happened in Apple heaven, and how the market responds to the new product will play a huge role in Google’s future efforts in that direction.
It has become customary for companies to boast at product launches that their product is the best ever made, or that’s the best thing to happen to the world. But unless people start accepting the products on a large scale, those words are meaningless.
One major announcement during the launch did catch my attention, though. Google’s Pixel offers unlimited storage for photos and videos, a huge move and a veiled dig at Apple, which charges iCloud users $2.99 monthly for 200 GB storage and $9.99 for 1TB. The rate at which we are watching videos these days clearly means that the free tier that Apple offers (5GB) is essentially pointless, so most users have to pay up for their storage or else get ready to keep seeing the “Storage is Full” message.
Source: Apple iCloud Storage Plans
Google is sort of exploiting its own strengths in the cloud. The company has made it amply clear that it wants to be a serious player in the cloud industry, which means they are going to keep building data centers around the world. In turn, this will give them huge amounts of storage space whenever they need it.
Even if Google Pixel were to become the number one smartphone in the world with millions of users adding 4k videos by the thousands every day, the company does have the muscle to handle that need. And Apple doesn’t come anywhere close in terms of cloud capability. So why not take a swipe at your competitor’s weakness while you’re challenging their strongest product?