ick Osterloh has been on the job as the senior vice president of hardware at Google for just over 17 months now. In that time, he's had to repeatedly answer the same questions from reporters like me: just how serious is Google about making its own hardware? Is it a hobby or is it going to genuinely affect Google's financial bottom line? Is the company sure it won't repeat the same mistakes it made with its ill-fated Motorola acquisition and subsequent sale years ago?
He's heard it all before: Osterloh was actually the president of Motorola for a time under Google. In an hour-long interview, his answers to those questions haven't changed since last April. They might not stop us from asking them over and over, but the consistency of the answers is important. And if there was any doubt about Google's ambitions in hardware, the company definitively put it to rest by acquiring 2,000 or so phone engineers from HTC last month, along with some IP and equipment.
Google's hardware announcements last October were a kind of coming-out party, where Google wanted to show it was serious about hardware. But Osterloh had just started a few months earlier, so he acted as more of a master of ceremonies for products than the original architect of them.
This year, everything Google is announcing was created under his watch. It’s our first real look at Osterloh's vision for what Google hardware should be. His vision includes no fewer than eight products, two of which are in completely new product categories for the company.
Last year was a coming-out party for Google hardware. This year is something different. It's a statement that Google is very serious about turning hardware into a real business on a massive scale — just maybe not this year.
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