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So not only do you have to ship a new one every year, hit your targets for timing, hit your targets for cost and price points, but you also have to nail quality and you have to be innovative enough at the same time that people are interested. It’s really, really, really hard to be in that space, it’s why there’s only a handful of people that can do it, and why the people that have risen to the top in the premium end are folks that have done this very well repeatedly forever.”-Ric Osterloh, Google Senior Vice President of Devices & Services
Trying to take the Pixel line from a proof-of-concept for Android to a flagship smartphone line that competes with Apple and Samsung is still a work in progress. The Pixel line does not make the top five global smartphone brands. Osterloh was asked whether Pixel buyers are coming over over from Samsung and he surprisingly said that very few are switching to a Pixel from a Galaxy device.
Well frankly, this is another great aspect of Pixel. That’s not a billion user product, so we can make these kinds of trade-offs and really for the first rollout of Gemini, it was a choice. The user could decide to stay with Google system or switch to the Gemini App, there were some trade-offs, a lot of people elected to switch to the Gemini App. Some people were unhappy at first, quite frankly, that helped us make it better and we quickly followed up with improvements to the capability and obviously we’re still trying to make it as good as we possibly can. Right now, it’s now got a pretty high rating.”-Ric Osterloh, Google Senior Vice President of Devices & Services
He did say that it is easier not to have to work on a product with a large install base which includes the Pixel. “Well, I think, generically, it has both pros and cons to be a challenger and a new entrant versus someone that has a really large install base and has to be careful,” Osterloh stated. “Various aspects of Google have this dynamic too. It’s very, very difficult to change things at a billion-user scale versus a much smaller scale for our newer products.”
This means that the Pixel team can deliver more innovations and changes every year without having to worry that these changes are affecting a billion users who are used to using their phones in a certain way.
