The Big Software Company Hardware Push – Tech.pinions

Excerpt from a timely reality check:

"For all that, the early efforts from each of these companies have met with mixed success at best so far. Facebook’s phone push with HTC never went anywhere, leaving it entirely without a stake in mobile platforms, while Oculus hasn’t been a huge seller in the VR market and Oculus’s business is still formally immaterial to Facebook’s overall finances.

Google’s hardware has a mixed record too, with the Motorola acquisition a failure, the Pixel laptop and tablets also-rans in their respective markets, and the Pixel phone a modest seller in its first year thanks to limited supply and distribution channels. The Google Home seems to be selling decently well as the only real competition to the Amazon Echo, but it’s far from clear what its long-term business plan is here – advertising seems the obvious revenue model, but is fraught with risk and likely to encounter significant resistance from paying customers.

Microsoft’s Surface is arguably the big success story here, though even then it’s a tiny player in the overall PC market, it took several years of work to figure out the right model for the Surface Pro hardware and software, and it has of course recently seen blowback from last year’s reliability issues. The Nokia acquisition, meanwhile, may have become an inevitability by the time it happened, but certainly hasn’t panned out well either. And HoloLens has an interesting role in the enterprise and education markets, but is far from a mainstream AR or VR product."

The Big Software Company Hardware Push – Tech.pinions