
Google signs agreement with HTC - maguay
https://www.blog.google/topics/hardware/google-signs-agreement-htc-continuing-our-big-bet-hardware/
======
EddieRingle
Important bit:

> That’s why we’ve signed an agreement with HTC, a leader in consumer
> electronics, that will fuel even more product innovation in the years ahead.
> With this agreement, a team of HTC talent will join Google as part of the
> hardware organization. These future fellow Googlers are amazing folks we’ve
> already been working with closely on the Pixel smartphone line, and we're
> excited to see what we can do together as one team. The deal also includes a
> non-exclusive license for HTC intellectual property.

~~~
grzm
Please don't use code blocks for text quoting. They cause side scrolling which
can be annoying in desktop browsers and nigh unreadable on mobile.

Common methods to quote text blocks on HN are to use a > prefix and/or
asterisks to italicize the quoted text.

Edit: Thanks for updating!

~~~
EddieRingle
Sorry - I used '>' first but instinctively changed it to a block since HN
didn't actually format it any differently. (And I use a Chrome extension to
restyle HN, so code blocks don't have the issues you described.)

~~~
gjm11
I also find quoting on HN annoying when I need to do it. But it occurs to me
that this may be (at least in part) a deliberate move to discourage quote-
heavy styles of discussion, which are always tempting but would probably not
be good for HN.

I'm thinking of this sort of thing, as found in the good ol' days on Usenet:

> > Sorry - I used '>' first

> You should have trusted your first instincts.

> > but instinctively changed it to a block

> So you tried the right thing and changed it to the wrong thing? What's wrong
> with you?

> > since HN didn't actually format it any differently.

> You didn't request any formatting and you're surprised HN didn't give you
> what you didn't ask for?

... and so on. (For the avoidance of doubt, the snarky tone of the above does
not reflect my actual opinions. It's just what tends to happen in the comment-
on-fragments kind of interaction, which is one reason why discouraging it here
might be wise.)

------
maguay
Random things that strike me about this deal:

\- HTC's stock price has been going down for the past 5 years, and EPS was
down sharply recently. Does this make HTC more or less viable on its own going
forward?

\- Apple finally made a VR push with the upcoming macOS High Sierra and iMac
Pro—along with the HTC Vive. Google didn't fully acquire HTC here, and HTC's
trajectory was already tied to Android, but still seems an interesting wrinkle
there.

\- Samsung continues to hedge their bets, most recently with Bixby. Really
wonder if Google's continued hardware investment will make them seek more of
their own path.

\- Why would Google acquire just a team from HTC? Seems like the oddest of
acquihires yet.

~~~
LiweiZ
Apple has to push something new (but iOS apps with AR were there as late as
around 2011) and major "next big thing" to play catching up. Apple as a
creature is done. It is just following the phenomenon momentum founded by Jobs
to maximize profit. Once the day it goes past the max profit tipping point,
what is real will show up. Money is the quantitive fact that few would go
against, once this fact changes, opinions will soon emerge. My personal
thoughts.

~~~
jjrrmm
Apple will bring out iVision or something like HoloLense/Google Glasses. Same
story as like the iPod.

~~~
LiweiZ
Hopefully so.

Apple under Jobs showed polished deliverables to customers. Without him, Apple
demoed prototypes more, talked about plans and fields they worked on more and
tried to pumped up confidence by giving out information more. It's been like
this for a few years. Not a short time in the tech world.

They did regroup and formed a new foundation that is quite strong. Positioning
at product and service for privacy alone has no competitors in the near
future. And they have everything needed to make customers believe in them (on
the other hand, do customers really have other quality and trustworthy
alternatives?).

The best product after Jobs from Apple, to me, is AirPods. That's the only
product makes me amazed and satisfied.

I'm actually a big fan of Apple's approach on making product and an iOS
developer myself.

~~~
fhood
I really really had hoped that somehow, magically, Jobs' death wouldn't hurt
Apple's trajectory, but things don't seem to be playing out that way.

~~~
simonh
Right. They only managed a pathetic trippling in market cap since he died and
have only dominated a single new industry (they're now the biggest watch
company in the world by revenue, just from watches). How disappointing.

~~~
fhood
Wasn't talking about financial trajectory.

~~~
simonh
Ok, what then, Technology? None of the other handset makers are even close. 3D
face recognition, computational photography, augmented reality, health, CPUs,
security, privacy,display and build quality, App ecosystem. They're ahead of
the pack across the board. The new multitasking, drag-and-drop and inter-app
communications stuff in iOS 11 is so far ahead of Android it's almost
cheating.

------
scottlegrand2
So this is like an acqui-hire except that the employees don't see any benefit
from it except that they are now Google employees?

Meanwhile, HTC Executives pocket a huge wad of cash? Great.

~~~
s73ver_
Isn't that any acqui-hire? The people who do the work are traded like cattle
and usually don't get anything out of it. Worse, sometimes they did have
equity in the company, but that's now traded for equity in the new company,
but with a reset on the vesting time period.

~~~
scottlegrand2
Not if you just say no to startup equity offers for less than 1% of the
company, but sadly there's one born every millisecond...

------
tanilama
TL;DR, Google doesn't acquire HTC, they bought a team.

~~~
gvb
From the other side of the coin, HTC sold their "seed corn[1]." Without their
(premier?) phone development team, did they sell off their path to regaining
phone market share?

[1]
[http://www.thefreedictionary.com/To+eat+the+seed+corn](http://www.thefreedictionary.com/To+eat+the+seed+corn)

------
maruhan2
So confused. So in essence, Google bought a team from HTC?

~~~
ytch
Yeah, from announcement of HTC to Taiwan's stock exchange,

Google buys HTC's Pixel team, license to HTC's IP, and a RF lab (Subsidiary of
HTC) for 1.1 billion USD.

~~~
bitmapbrother
Where is the RF Lab announcement?

~~~
daburninatorrr
A simple Google search failed me, maybe I don't know what I am looking for,
but now I am at the mercy of the internet when I ask...

What is a RF Lab?

~~~
ytch
It's a Lab for Testing about radio, something like TRP, TIS, LTE OTA test and
so on.

------
bcatanzaro
"It’s still early days for Google’s hardware business."

Why no mention of Motorola in 2011? Google bought it for $12.5B, and sold it
2014 for $3B.

I think it would have made the blog post better to give some explanation for
why Things Are Different This Time.

~~~
sangnoir
Google bought Motorola patents that came with hardware businesses attached for
defense purposes, not because they wanted in on the hardware business. This
was after they found themselves unarmed during a thermonuclear patent war.

Google dropped the hardware businesses and kept the patents. The patent market
was notably frothy at the time, and conventional wisdom then valued Motorola's
patent chest at $4.0-4.5 billion (Apple + MS consortium bought the comparable
Nortel trove for a price in that ballpark). If that value is correct, then
Google made a profit on buying and selling Motorola (patents + Moto Home +
Moto Mobile).

~~~
justicezyx
Typical forced intention after fact.

To say Google not interested in hardware when they purchased Motorola is plain
baseless.

~~~
nl
That is what all the coverage at the time pointed out.

They missed out on the Nortel patent portfolio earlier that year I think.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Coverage at the time, and since, in the apple-centric web focused on how
Google tried to compete in hardware with Apple and failed and how they "lost"
billions on the deal.

So that may be where this confusion arises.

------
spacehunt
HTC's press release raises even more questions -- they claim they will
continue to develop the next flagship phone?

> HTC will continue to have best-in-class engineering talent, which is
> currently working on the next flagship phone, following the successful
> launch of the HTC U11 earlier this year. HTC will also continue to build the
> virtual reality ecosystem to grow its VIVE business, while investing in
> other next-generation technologies, including the Internet of Things,
> augmented reality and artificial intelligence.

[http://www.htc.com/us/about/newsroom/2017/2017-09-21-htc-
goo...](http://www.htc.com/us/about/newsroom/2017/2017-09-21-htc-google/)

~~~
desdiv
I read it as:

HTC will continue to develop HTC's next flagship phone.

Google will continue to use the HTC Pixel team they just brought to develop
Google's next Pixel flagship phone.

------
thasaleni
I think this is great for HTC, HTC is really good on hardware, and are only
really struggling with marketing their phones, partnering with Google is
almost a no brainer

~~~
taoufix
But Google is not good at marketing either :/

~~~
aedron
Google's strategy is to make something so good that they don't need to market
it. This harkens back to when Google won search. I think they've done alright
with this strategy, whereas whenever they try to 'go mainstream' with glitzy
marketing and big vision (thinking of Google+ here) they usually botch it
bigtime.

------
CrunchGo
I'm very excited about google's future plans. Anyone else feel like this is
their path towards competing with apple and samsung in the long run?

~~~
blocked_again
As long as you don't give a fuck to your privacy you should be very excited.

------
atomicnumber1
So, a billion dollars for about a 100 engineers.

~~~
cloudwalking
A lot cheaper than Instagram.

~~~
dgaaaaaaaaaa
Or whatsapp. But then those were complete acquisitions

------
dmitriid
Google has desperately needed its own hardware for several years now.

This is especially apparent this year. Just to name a few things:

\- Apple is much later to the AR game than Google, yet can push AR to ~200
million devices at the push of a button. Google has had Tango for a while now,
and can only push it to a very small number of phones (compared to Apple's)

\- A11 bionic chip is so far ahead, it's not even funny anymore, _and_ is
married to all other parts of the hardware and software. Google has nothing
that's even close to this.

\- "Kinect-in-a-phone" sensor strip of iPhone X. Even if Google has the know-
how, it can never provide the same features, because they don't have their own
hardware.

"Owning the stack: The legal war to control the smartphone platform" by
Arstechnica remains as relevant as ever, [https://arstechnica.com/tech-
policy/2011/09/owning-the-stack...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-
policy/2011/09/owning-the-stack-the-legal-war-for-control-of-the-smartphone-
platform/)

~~~
Zigurd
Google's fundamental need is a coherent and competitive OEM ecosystem. It so
happens that making hardware, like Microsoft makes Surface products, is one
way to help that along. It used to be accepted wisdom that when a platform
provider competes with their ecosystem partners, that's a bad thing. Now it's
"complicated."

For example, let's suppose Android One takes off and all the cheaper-tier OEMs
let Google handle the OS updates, and let's suppose that lights a fire under
Samsung and other upper-tier OEMs to provide more-timely updates for longer.
Does Google still need to make 3% of the hardware market share?

~~~
dmitriid
> Google's fundamental need is a coherent and competitive OEM ecosystem.

Nope, it doesn't. Because it means it has no means to control OS distribution,
updates, and hardware improvements. Google is now entirely dependent on OEMs
to deliver Google's software.

Let's say, Google comes up with a great new idea. A true competitor to Apple's
AR (well, Google had it a year and half ago), Face ID, camera tech etc. Right
now it may take anywhere from a year to five years to get this into the hands
of consumers.

The only way to get anything coherent out of the Android ecosystem is to
either impose extremely tight controls on major OEMs (Samsung will definitely
not agree to that), or become an OEM.

~~~
Zigurd
They are working on it. Currently several OEMs including Moto, Xiaomi, and
Sharp are making AndroidOne phones. Project Treble further streamlines both
AndroidOne and every OEM's porting.

Absorbing significant market share from OEM partners isn't going to happen on
the basis of a another couple of Pixel phones. It may come from rationalizing
the platforms and porting requirements for Android.

~~~
dmitriid
> They are working on it.

The've been working on it for several years now. The result? Nothing is really
happening.

Let's take AR as an example. Google had Tango ~1.5 years before Apple
announced their AR. Tango had rationalisation and platform requirements for
Android devices.

End result?

\- Tango was moving nowhere. There were ~0 devices supporting it.

\- Apple announces AR. It will be immediately available on ~200 million
devices within a few months of iOS 11's release

\- Google scrambles to remove some of the requirements from Tango and launch
it ... for the two top devices on the market only. Running Nougat and up. That
is, ~14% of ~10% of the Android market.

And the same goes for any other initiative that Google may have in the Android
space.

------
nath12
No one else hears this and thinks vertically integrated monopoly? What if
Google advantages their own hardware over competitors, which in turn will
decrease market competition and hurt consumers

~~~
nolok
You mean, do what Apple does, what Samsung tried with Tizen, and what pretty
much everyone has done for mobiles outside Android / Windows mobile ?

~~~
lmm
Even if it's common practice, it's still worth asking whether it's good for
customers.

~~~
kentt
Given how horrible non-(Nexus|Pixel) phones have been, I'd consider this to be
better in practice. I agree with you that in an ideal world, other Android
device makers would be on a level playing field and not do a shit job.

------
xbmcuser
I was really hoping they would at least take the HTC distribution and
servicing channels to sell pixel phones more widely instead of just a few
countries like currently.

~~~
KGIII
I'm not seeing anything on the blog that says the will or won't do that. So, I
guess you can keep hoping, for now at least.

Edit: specifically, I don't see anything that indicates they won't distribute
it more widely. Sorry for being unclear.

------
kitd
OT, but but I find really irksome Veep-type blog posts that jump
indistinguishably between what 'I' did and what 'we' or 'our team' did, as if
there's no difference.

------
sidcool
So is this an acquisition or a recruitment drive?

~~~
ytch
More leak from HTC's internal mail to Pixel team:

[https://i.imgur.com/krONzs1.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/krONzs1.jpg)

Rick Osterloh will come to Taiwan for detailing the next step to them.

~~~
foobaw
doesn't HTC also have a US R&D division (most likely they do to work with
North American carriers and Qualcomm).

Do you know what's happening to them?

~~~
ytch
No news about them currently.

The mail only says he will go to HTC's Taoyuan and Taipei office today. and
almost all announcements specified the "Pixel team".

Maybe the team is located at the two office only.

------
patryn20
When any company gets large enough they become a repository of technical
failures and an acquirer of the same.

Unfortunately that ultimately matters little to stock value and market share.

------
AbeEstrada
I think Google wants the VR (HTV Vive) team.

~~~
microcolonel
It'd be great to have a trilateral collaboration between Valve, Google, and
HTC on that. Google would have the mobile platform stake, Valve the high end
stake, and HTC the hardware stake.

However, they bought an RF lab from HTC, so it's probably a mobile product,
not the VR product.

~~~
maldeh
The notion of such a collaboration sounds interesting. For most industries, it
would healthier for consumers in the long run if the major stakeholders
competed, rather than collaborated, at this early stage. But in the short
term, it means framework fragmentation, publishing pains for indie app
developers as the big guns vie for exclusive contracts. Not to mention
potentially delaying technological progress in the space, what with all the
R&D occurring within isolated silos keeping their trade secrets close to the
vest.

~~~
microcolonel
> _For most industries, it would healthier for consumers in the long run if
> the major stakeholders competed, rather than collaborated, at this early
> stage._

For what it's worth, I figure they have lots of competition in terms of
Samsung, Oculus, and Microsoft.

------
tkubacki
ads money will feed engineers - good news

------
thrillgore
I did a literal spit take when I saw this. Are they doing this for phone
production or for the Vive/VR?

~~~
theduncan
It sounds like the HTC Pixel Team, minus the management people.

------
SeoxyS
Didn't quite work out for them last time… why will this be any different than
Motorola?

~~~
Zigurd
For all the reasons: Did not double Google's headcount, did not cost over
$10B, did not distract management, did not make Samsung queasy...

------
slatercharles
Good news for HTC

------
maxpert
Is it me or do you also see another Motorola in making?

------
Abishek_Muthian
Good win-win.

------
jimjimjim
more acquisitions

another nexus 7

god, i hope so.

~~~
gjm11
You might want to make the last line "o god, i hope so" or "god, i do hope so"
or "god, i hope it is" if you were aiming for five syllables there.

[EDITED to add:] Hmm, no, the last of those doesn't work. Maybe "god, I hope
there is".

~~~
jimjimjim
thanks. no more drunk haikuing for me

------
0xbear
Guaranteed in the top 10 on Google's internal Memegen: "WTF are you doing cat"
gif.

------
jaypaulynice
Google bought Motorola for $12.5 billion and sold it at a discount...Google
just doesn't get user experience. Google bought so many user experience
startups and yet they have nothing to show after so many years...

~~~
KGIII
While I have complaints about Google, UX isn't one of them. I can't think of a
Google product that is really all that unintuitive, undiscoverable, or
difficult to use.

Am I missing something? I guess it can be rather subjective, but I don't have
any complaints about UX or UI.

I should add that I've been told I'm too forgiving of bad design, so this is a
legitimate question. I really don't see anything wrong with the UX from any of
their products that are in common use.

I did have occasion to use one of their search appliances and the UX wasn't
bad, but the results were pretty terrible. Terrible results might qualify as
bad UX, I guess?

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Try showing a senior how to use Gmail versus how to use Comcast or AOL. You'd
be surprised how well the current generation of tech savvy folks are trained
on Google's UI patterns... and how little sense they make for everyone else.

I've worked with a _lot_ of seniors with home computer help, and Google
software is practically a non-starter.

~~~
mirimir
What in particular?

My wife is happy enough with it. Sometimes, I hear her complaining about
Gmail, that she can't add attachments. But otherwise, it seems to work for
her.

We're both seniors, by the way :)

~~~
ocdtrekkie
The two biggest issues I come across regularly is icons people don't
understand the meaning of, and the fact that the UI changes frequently. I've
found a lot of the people I work with learn how to do things, and then expect
them to remain that way. Moving a button over two inches or putting it in a
menu will send people calling me to come back because they don't know how to
do something.

I have a lot of people literally ask me to repeat a process several times so
they can write each step in doing things like attaching a file or forwarding
an email down on paper. So when a button gets renamed or moved or even just
has an icon instead of text, it throws people.

~~~
mirimir
Thanks. I'll ask her about the icons issue. But she uses an Android phone, so
enigmatic icons aren't unusual for her.

She does have that habit about writing each step, though. It frustrates me
when I'm showing her how to do stuff. But it's not a new thing for her.

