Enlarge / Google CEO Sundar Pichai testifies before the House Judiciary Committee in 2018. (credit: Xinhua/Liu Jie via Getty Images)
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 have 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.
With all of these shutdowns, it would not be totally crazy to worry about the future of the Pixel line. The Pixel 3 sold less than the Pixel 2. The Pixel 4 is selling less than the Pixel 3. The cheaper Pixel 3a and 4a were supposed to save Google's smartphone line, but now the "a" series faces very tough competition from Apple's new iPhone SE. For the Pixel 5, all indications are that Google is bowing out of the top-end of the market. Things are not going well.
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