There were big changes announced at Google this week as the company's "Google Hardware" team came out of hiding and announced a slew of products. The star of the show was definitely
the Google Pixel, Google's new pair of smartphones that the company is saying it designed while using HTC as a manufacturer. The advent of Pixel phones means Google is an Android OEM again, harkening back to
the days when it owned Motorola. This time, though, the company is serious about hardware and software integration.
Android, however, is the world's most popular operating system because of OEM partners like Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi, and LG. And if Google wants Android to continue to deliver Google services to billions of people, it will still need all those partners. Google once again has a delicate balancing act to pull off. The company must do its best to deliver a Google-y Android phone while not stealing the thunder from other OEMs or putting them at a serious competitive disadvantage.
To get to the bottom of how this new Google setup works, we sat down with Hiroshi Lockheimer, SVP of Android, Chrome OS, and Google Play. Lockheimer is basically the king of "platforms" (software-side of things) at Google, while former Motorola CEO Rick Osterloh now runs the hardware team. Like the old setup when Google owned Motorola, the two groups will be kept somewhat separate.
The return of "The Firewall"
Ars: So who is responsible for what now? You only run software?
Lockheimer: We were talking before that this is the year, in some ways, that Google has become an OEM. That's Rick [Osterloh's] team. My team is responsible for "Platforms"—that's Android, Chrome OS, and Google Play. Our job is to work with various partners, whether that's Samsung, LG, or now, Rick's team. He's a partner. It's kind of separated that way.
So did OEMs get a heads up that this was happening? Do you know how they feel about Google launching its own line of phones?
They get it, since the first phones launched in 2008, all OEMs knew there would be multiple OEMs. I work very closely with Samsung, but they know that I meet with LG, and LG knows that I meet with Samsung. There's a long list of OEMs that I meet with, and today we added one more to the list. That's how I think of it, and that's how the OEMs think of it as well. To answer your question directly, I did meet with a number of our partners and give them an update, and they were just "OK, business as usual." Everyone's focused on competing with each other and that's just 'The Android Way.'
Is the "Motorola firewall" back? Would you compare the Pixel situation to the Microsoft Surface?
The situations, obviously, are different, but we do have a firewall between [the Google Hardware team] and my team, just like we do with everyone else. I think this analogy would make the most sense: Samsung shares a lot of confidential information with us about their roadmaps, LG shares a lot of confidential information with us about their roadmaps. For the past eight years it's been like that, and there's never been a problem.
Later Lockheimer mentioned he feels the Pixel phones are additive to the Android ecosystem and shouldn't steal the thunder from OEMs:
Part of the philosophy of Android has been, first of all it's open source. The reason why it's open source is we thought manufacturers would want to differentiate and put their own twist on their devices. I think that's largely responsible for the scale that we've been able to achieve with Android. We have over 400 OEMs worldwide building various different devices. Google being able to have its own take on that, as represented through these Pixel phones, is a really good thing, certainly for Google and Google fans. But it doesn't take away anything from stuff that has existed. For instance, Samsung and the innovation put into their phones will continue. It just feels like a purely additive thing to an already thriving ecosystem.
