"Android is ubiquitous now, but as people shift into these new patterns for interacting with the Web, Google has less and less reach," said Benedict Evans, partner at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. "They have you for Web search, but not for the other things that you increasingly do. This is both an existential and a strategic problem for Google."
The launch of the Pixel - which was to be heralded this week by prime-time television ads during "Monday Night Football" and "The Voice," as well as billboards and installations in London, Sydney, Berlin and New York - will test Google's mettle in a new kind of business. The shift toward hardware also puts the company on a collision course with Apple, Amazon and Facebook, and with partners such as Samsung that have used Google's free Android software to build their own global smartphone empires. Samsung's Galaxy phones are the most popular high-end smartphones in the United States after Apple's iPhone.
Samsung and Google have engaged in a tug of war in recent years, each trying to shake free of its dependence on the other, said people familiar with the situation. Google in recent years has tested the hardware market, with a spotty record, including limited efforts to sell its own line of smartphones, its purchase (and later sale) of Motorola and release of other troubled products such as Google Glass. Samsung, meanwhile, has gone so far as building its own mobile operating system and app marketplace, Tizen, as a hedge against the company's dependence on Android.
Samsung declined to comment.
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