Google CEO Sundar Pichai defends Pixel team, says “hardware is hard”
Google's hardware division has been getting beat up in the press recently. A report of internal strife over the Google Pixel 4 made the group look pretty bad, with hardware lead Rick Osterloh reportedly internally criticizing the Pixel 4 just before launch and two key executives leaving the division in the past year. Apparently, all that dissent was enough to make Google CEO Sundar Pichai come out and publicly defend the hardware group, which he did during a guest appearance on The Verge's Vergecast podcast.
Google is a huge company with billions of users, and lately (especially under Pichai's watch), it has been willing to suddenly kill any product that doesn't reach this "billions of users" benchmark. On the software side of things, we've recently seen the company execute Google Inbox, Google+, Google Hangouts, Google Music, Google Allo, YouTube Gaming, and Google Cloud Print. On the hardware side of things, we recently witnessed the death of Google Daydream VR headsets, the Google Clips camera, Chromecast Audio, Pixel tablets, and mergers that are effectively killing Nest as a standalone company.
