Google's Foray Into Hardware Will Be A Total Disaster — Here's Why [Business Insider]

Excerpt from another Google magical-hardware reality check

Google has never successfully sold anything to consumers. Not a single thing.

Google is really good at building fast, useful, responsive software that runs at Internet scale, and at hooking up the users of that software with advertisers to make gobs of money.

That's a great business. Google utterly dominates it. There are untapped adjacent markets, too -- what about getting serious about Apps, taking its expertise in delivering online services and really applying them to the enterprise? (Is Google really going to cede that market to Box.net? Really?)

Or building YouTube into the cable TV system for the Internet?

Or even coming up with new forms of advertising for other kinds of media?

But adding a business in which it has demonstrated none of the characteristics necessary to succeed just seems utterly mad.

Google's Foray Into Hardware Will Be A Total Disaster — Here's Why