Google has been dabbling in gadgets for several years now but the company's new full-court press into hardware should be enough to worry the likes of Apple and Samsung.
The search company unveiled a host of products at a press event in San Francisco on Tuesday, including its own branded Pixel smartphones, Daydream View virtual reality headset, 4K Chromecast, Wi-Fi router and Home speaker.
Taken together, it’s a comprehensive suite of physical goods from a company better known for software-based internet services. In this coming out party for its recently formed hardware division, Google acknowledged what some gadget makers – notably Apple – have known for a while: that tight integration of hardware and the software that powers it makes for better products overall.
More to the point, Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, also suggested the world is in the middle of a new epoch in computing.
First there were simple computers, which were followed by the web, which in turn led to smartphones and mobility. Through each shift, the power of computers spread exponentially, both in terms of their capabilities and how many people could access them.
The next phase, according to Mr Pichai, is artificial intelligence – where computers can process information received from users and environments and then relay it back in useful ways. This new epoch has the possibility to once again transform how society benefits from technology.
If these two assertions are in fact true, then Google isn’t just uniquely positioned to be a major player in gadgets – it could become the pre-eminent force in hardware.
Case in point: most of the company’s new products feature integration with the new Google Assistant. Like its previous Google Now or Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa, it’s a verbally activated AI that can answer questions, provide answers and even quip the occasional joke.
Pixel or Home users can, for example, ask the Google Assistant to find a nearby restaurant that they might like, then have it make reservations and send invitations to friends or loved ones. The AI can then also suggest a route to take to the restaurant and advise on traffic conditions.
It's approaching the sort of wizardry that used to be the domain of Star Trek and other science fiction, where computers are able to instantly and intelligently serve the whims of their users.
Siri and Alexa can do some of this, but they’re seriously underpowered and outgunned. Google has been investing in the various technological parts that make such capabilities possible for more than a decade.
Natural language and image recognition, machine learning, translation and mapping are all areas the company got into many years ago – and now they’re combining into a comprehensive whole.
Apple, Samsung and Amazon are relative newcomers by comparison. All three have been busily scarfing up AI companies in an effort to catch up. Just this year, Amazon acquired the image analysis company Orbeus, Samsung bought the cloud-computing provider Joyent and Apple took over the machine learning start-up Turi.
Unfortunately for them, AI is a technology that relies on scale – the more data it has to work with, the better it is. Google has a huge head start in that respect. And, moreover, it will probably always have a big lead because of that scale. Competitors’ AI may improve but so too will Google’s, by exponential leaps and bounds.
One pertinent question that does arise from Google’s deep dive into gadgets is why the company even wants to be in hardware, a notoriously low-margin business. The company has been doing all right, after all, by sticking to software and the advertising dollars it brings in. The answer, probably, hearkens back to that first truism – that hardware and software, when working together, create better products.
Google’s suite of hardware products is yet another way in which the company will maintain its software lead over competitors. All of that data being hoovered up by Pixel and Home – whether it’s photos, map directions or voice samples – will further feed the AI beast, giving it a well of exponentially expanding information on which to draw.
In other words, the hardware will serve to make the software better and vice versa – a Mobius loop of ever-improving capability. It’s something Google appears to have been planning for some time – and something that its competitors are only waking up to now.
Winner of the Week: Disney. Rumours have emerged that Disney is interested in buying Netflix, just days after the company was also reported to be in the running to acquire Twitter. Even if neither deal happens, the House of Mouse is acquiring a forward-looking image by association.
Loser of the Week: Fitness wearables. Microsoft pulled references to its Band fitness device from its online store this week. While the Band was poorly received by reviewers and consumers, the company's move is the latest illustration of the decline of fitness trackers.
Peter Nowak is a veteran technology writer and the author of Humans 3.0: The Upgrading of the Species.
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* Video courtesy CNBC