Killing some products makes a lot of sense, or is at least has a plausible rationale. Now that video Chromecast devices can do audio casting, it may not make sense to make separate audio products.
Other things, like Google's utter botch of tablet software and hardware points toward senior management treating those businesses like hobbies. Hardware partners and customers are indeed victimized. Getting tablets right requires product management discipline across APIs (i.e. Fragment) app frameworks that have to use Fragment correctly, UI design that doesn't promote an "it's a big phone" approach to app designers, hardware specs, and the OS. Nothing that came after the Fragment API really handled tablet cases very well.
In their latest move in tablets Google seems to have surrendered to the Windows tablet idea of a hybrid laptop/tablet OS, except Samsung, who vastly outsell Google's hardware, is still making their variants on Google's old laptop OS. WTF? If I were at Samsung I'd be pissed as hell at Google for muddying up their only successful tablet hardware partner's technology position. One could hardly do worse.
Other things, like Google's utter botch of tablet software and hardware points toward senior management treating those businesses like hobbies. Hardware partners and customers are indeed victimized. Getting tablets right requires product management discipline across APIs (i.e. Fragment) app frameworks that have to use Fragment correctly, UI design that doesn't promote an "it's a big phone" approach to app designers, hardware specs, and the OS. Nothing that came after the Fragment API really handled tablet cases very well.
In their latest move in tablets Google seems to have surrendered to the Windows tablet idea of a hybrid laptop/tablet OS, except Samsung, who vastly outsell Google's hardware, is still making their variants on Google's old laptop OS. WTF? If I were at Samsung I'd be pissed as hell at Google for muddying up their only successful tablet hardware partner's technology position. One could hardly do worse.