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Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

Hahaha I literally laughed out loud at this. Google making products. Have you seen how they make products? They have killed more physical products than they have delivered. They discontinue them more frequently than an average person throws out a napkin. Their first gen products are usually overpriced trash (Google Glass? Nexus Q?). If Google could pump out electronics with the speed and quality of someone like Anker or Amazon they’d be buying half of Europe for cash right now. I don’t pretend to know why they can’t but empirical evidence shows that it takes them several years and at least a product generation to put out something useful. For them to put out a fitness tracker or a smart watch in a few months that would be remotely competitive with the Apple Watch is just not in the cards.

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They have an entire hardware division that regularly churns out quite high quality consumer hardware: nest. They also have a pretty big hardware group that makes high performance servers and specialty hardware (TPU servers among other things). They have a few other hardware divisions as well.

Google would have absolutely no issue creating quality fitbit devices. Whether or not the market would be there for them to stay in long term, I don't know.

Nest was acquired and was already a mature and popular product. They by no means built it from scratch. And enterprise server products are probably outside the scope of what we are talking about, which is consumer electronics. I can build you a pretty decent server pretty quickly. I wouldn't know where to start to create a smart watch that had good battery life, great screen, great app ecosystem, great sensors, and didn't cost over $400. As far as I know, no consumer electronics Google product had launched and was an instant success. All the first product reviews I've ever read sounded like this: "it's a great first start and as a nerd who knows about these things I enjoyed some innovative parts of it, but it's not ready for prime time. Maybe next year they'll have a more polished product."

> Nest was acquired and was already a mature and popular product. They by no means built it from scratch.

Sure, but they did come in and add real innovation to the product; for example, adding a secret microphone that wasn't disclosed to the customer.

Wow is this real? Crazy Google!

Google's pixel phones were initially pretty well received, especially the camera

Nest was an acquisition so not the best example.

The same hardware division that came up with Brillo, sorry Android Things, never mind, it is gone now after 3 years anyway.

Or those wonderful Android Watches, sorry wearOS, never mind, they aren't getting proper updates for ages now.

Counter-example : Chromecast.

The device that overheats when playing 1080p videos ? Or the one that freezes when just launching Youtube ?

The Chromecast works well most of the time. The ways it fails is ridiculous.

Hmm, I did have minor issues, but IMHO it's much better than your average gadget (the first Chromecast at least). And it's dirt cheap, I think I got it for 4€ ? (though that's because Google subsidizes it).

I did have some issues recently with being unable to pair it with specific Samsung phones, but it's a combination of it getting old and I assume issues with Google killing software (I don't want your Google Home !).

In a way I have worse issues with my Pebble Time… which Google now owns, to my displeasure. (But it is probably more open, so I have better chances fixing the issues myself in the long term…)

They nailed the Nexus 7, but that was a while ago (2012 and 2013)

EDIT - never mind, Asus made both of those

Were you thinking of the 2012 Nexus 7 with the poor-quality NAND that went bad within a couple years, rendering the tablet useless? Or the 2013 that had phantom/unregistering input due to (IIRC) general build-quality and flex issues?

Asus did make both, but I'm not sure either was as good as you recall, sadly.

The Nexus 7 was way ahead of the competition at the time. It was fast, had a great display and cheap. I used mine for 6 years before it stopped working. Unfortunately google didn’t build on its success.

2012 Nexus 7 was the best tablet there was at that time. Yes it started working really slow after few years, but I still have it in my drawer, unfortunately something went wrong after 7 years and it either doesn't charge or the screen died.

All the Nexus devices were made by third parties, it's when they switched to Pixel branding that they started designing them in-house.

Glass was never a finished product. It was sold as a dev kit that non-devs snapped up.

Right. My point exactly. Google releases half baked consumer goods, then kills them later if they aren't a hugely important strategic line (like the Nexus/Pixel) or not a runaway success. The idea that Google could build a fitness tracker or smartwatch from scratch in a matter of months and it would be better than what FitBit currently has to offer just seems silly.

> Glass was never a finished product.

Seems to be a finished-ish enterprise product now.

https://www.google.com/glass/start/

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