This article is from the archive of our partner .
Google's hardware expansion plans into tablet world, like its social expansion plans into Facebook world, will probably fail. The plan, according to myserious unnamed sources quoted by The Wall Street Journal's Amir Efrati is that the company will sell Google-branded Android tablets. Lots of big, ginormous, red flags here. The search company hasn't done well in the gadget department, putting out a failed phone and a failed computer. This tablet thing feels like another one of those projects Google has taken on because it thinks it has to "get into the hardware business." It had this same mentality with the social game. And we've see how well that's worked out for them. Google, unless you've got some kickass tablet back there, don't do it.
The problem isn't the actual device, really. We don't get much info about it anyway from this anonymously-sourced report, other than the fact that Google will work with Motorola to manufacture the devices, co-brand them and sell them in their own Google store. But, it's the motivation that sounds suspect. "By selling tablets directly to consumers, Google is upping the ante against Apple, which debuted its market-leading iPad two years ago," writes Efrati. Google's getting into this tablet biz because it has to compete with Apple, not because it has some awesome life-changing product. It took that strategy with Google+."It turns out that there was one place where the Google innovation machine faltered and that one place mattered a lot: competing with Facebook," explained former Google engineer and current Microsoft employee James Whittaker after quitting the 'plex. The result of that strategy, so far, has been alienation.