Google squandered the Q - it was a great marketing opportunity, what with its unique form factor. They should've used it to create a first-party Google TV (with support for using Android phones and tablets to control it, particularly the Nexus 7) and released game controllers along with it, encouraging developers to create Android console games.
Then they should've made the Q the cable box for Google Fiber. That would've really made the headlines.
However, while it's easy for us to sit here and take potshots at Google, we have to remember that it's a logistical nightmare bringing together disparate divisions of a massive organization like Google and getting them to coordinate their efforts so that the company as a whole can present a united front to consumers.
Completely agree. Either buy OUYA, and improve the product if you can, and get even more partnerships for launch day, or build something similar (also for $99 - very important!), and release it a few months later at the next Google I/O with Tegra 4. Boom - crazy buzz around it.
The price is essential though. Screw everything else. Just make sure it's $99. And using a beefed up Tegra 4 (no regard for energy efficiency in a console), or some other next-gen GPU architecture with OpenGL ES 3.0 support (like Exynos 6/Mali T658), coupled with Cortex A15 CPU's, would be a huge bonus over OUYA, even if it arrives a few months later compared to OUYA.
But please - please - stop buying into that theory that says early adopter products need to be more expensive or whatever makes Google release such products at prices that everyone thinks are insane.
Just a few examples:
Xoom - $800
Google TV - $300
Chromebook $450
Nexus Q - $300
Google still hasn't learned that they need to introduce these new products at a "sweet spot" pricing point - much like the Nexus 7 actually! But it took Amazon to teach them that, so I don't have much faith in them repeating this, especially after seeing the Nexus Q pricing.
Google's problem regarding pricing is also that they keep putting components that are too expensive in those products, without receiving an equivalent value from it.
The Xoom was this expensive because of the 3g/4G chips and high MP cameras. The Chromebooks and Google TV were this expensive because of Intel's Atom chips. Nexus Q was too expensive because it had an amplifier (did anyone actually care about that?), and because it was "built in US". They need to stop making these kind of mistakes once and for all, if they want to be successful selling hardware.
Apple puts only the essential components in their products that 80% of the people would use, and make sure they are high quality. For example, the original iPad had a high-quality display, but had no cameras, and not even a GPS. This kind of thinking made the iPad cost "only" $500 at the time, when people thought it would be significantly more - maybe not $1000, but perhaps more expensive than an unlocked iPhone, thanks to the expected bigger screen, bigger battery, etc. Google needs to learn to do that as well.
Luckily the ouya is going to do just that, I wonder if Google will purchase them if they become profitable (or even without profits it'd be a smart acquisition for them and would give games companies more confidence in the console and building games for the Android platform in general) .
There's very little reason for anyone to have confidence in Ouya as a platform. From the developers' apparent inability to plan (still no dev documentation, still no SDK...and they're planning to release in the next eight months!) to their pimping of a port of the Android port of a DS game as the biggest thing that's happened to the platform. (I have the Android port of FF3 on my Nexus 7. It's ugly enough there. It's going to be really ugly at 40".)
I had really high hopes for this at first but this has been in meltdown mode pretty much from day one. I just hope that the hardware actually gets into users' hands, because frankly at this point I'm not even sure.
Good decision. There's nothing wrong with not releasing something you don't feel is up to par. I actually admire that. Ship it when it's ready, and not a moment sooner.
On the other hand, there is something wrong with releasing a product that turns out to be over-priced and under-featured. That worked for Google in the past where it was all Web products, the price was "free", you could just slap a "beta" label on it and iterate daily. But that doesn't work when something costs $300 dollars in a competitive marketplace with established leaders.
It makes Google look amateurish to announce a product with big fanfare and to cancel it later admitting that it does not do much... executive powerplays at work I guess...
Amerteurish would be to blindly carry on launching a product and then releaseing version 2.0 that fixed all the issues and making the 1.0 unsuported.
No, what google did was to listern to feedback and respond in the best possible way. Those who ordered get the product and there money back and those who havnt get a chance to wait for the improved version based upon feedback. Realy can't fault that and to call it amateurish is perhaps overly strong. No power plays at work at all, mearly good PR/marketing and activly listerning to feedback.
They may have made the best of a bad situation, but getting into this situation is still amateurish.
I'm all for listening to feedback. But there are ways of getting feedback on a product without doing a major product launch. Like, say, making 50 prototypes and trying them out on Google employees and external user testers. There's no way these problems wouldn't have surfaced in user tests. I suspect all the major issues would have shown up with just 5-10 testers.
The question is: why didn't they do that? Plenty of people know how. Since I can't believe that all their executives, designers, and engineers are that clueless/arrogant, I think it's reasonable to suspect that the problem is one clueless executive exerting power.
I'd say DNF is the opposite situation - their delays weren't due to having a product but not releasing it because it wasn't up to par, their delays were about not finishing the product at all. Then, last year, they released something they knew wasn't up to par.
Kind of true, but the root cause wasn't "well we could release, but it isn't good enough", it was "we've taken so long to get here that nobody would buy it because it's already so old before even being released, we'll have to start again". The rewrites were cause by the delays - and sure, they caused more delays themselves, but not as much as the original delays.
And in the end, they put out a product that they knew wasn't good enough. Literally knew it.
Google now has five boxes hooked up in living rooms of Google fans. They amplified the problem they should be solving. Seriously, a Logitech Google TV, a Nexus Q and 3 boxes for Google fiber.
Edit: They also managed a pointless keyboard with the boxes.
I think google are handerling this extremly well. They had a product that was about to launch and pretty much good to go. Go some feedback that they thought, hmmm maybe we should look at this again and are doing it.
Then ontop of that they are not only honouring all preorders with the product they were advertised, but also doing it for free with full refunds as well.
That is how you do marketing and deal with feedback.
I still think if they'd removed the HDMI out, it would have got better reviews. The inbuilt amp and connecting to a TV are pretty much mutually exclusive, and everyone focused on the latter then wondered why it cost 3x as much as something that connected to a tv but didn't have an amp in it.
Nexus Q should have been considered a house-wide Android extender appliance; a compute node accessible by any and all authorized Android devices. It could be used to supplement the resource demands of phone apps, to serve as an autoconfigured caching HTTP proxy, etc. There are a lot of possibilities for an appliance like that (w1ntermute's suggestion that it double as Google Fiber's cable box is awesome) and I think it's sad that they felt it needed to be marketed as a $300 collaborative jukebox.
Right, but they'll understand it when their tower defense game says "Get a Nexus Q for cooler auto-generated maps", "Get a Nexus Q for faster load times", or "Get a Nexus Q for LAN multiplayer with all other Android users in range".
I believe you have nailed the shortcommings just right. It has half-way step to what you suggest and in that it realy should have those features. Also given the price of this and the ouya (also not released yet) I'd say some people were asking some questions about price also.
This and the opertunity to add google tv to the device from the start would of been to good a opertunity to miss that I feel that could be the main reason there stepping abck a bit and doing a rethink now instead of carrying on a unstable path.
I'm confused. Why would you get one of these instead of an Android TV?
My Android TV running ICS was only 135 $NZ and I got a wireless keyboard for 70 $NZ. Now my kids play Angry Birds Space and Justin Bieber videos on TV!
The device itself plugs into the TV's HDMI slot and looks like an oversize memory stick. I then put in my home wifi details just like you would on a phone. Then with apps like kies you can link to any other android phone or vice versa. The family windows box isn't turned on most days and when it is it just continuously downloads updates and spins the hard disk.
There is a bunch of such devices on dx.com, but I wouldn't be wondered if they start appearing in large department stores all over the world by now, similar to all those cheap Android based tablets you can buy everywhere now. This is essentially the same thing, only minus the display and plus the HDMI.
The confusing part is them announcing something that was so bad that it wasn't worth releasing. Why waste the marketing opportunity? Why take it so far along the production path? Why give themselves all of the bad press?
I've said it before, but to make the Nexus Q awesome: give it Google Now, and have multiple users able to set up their own Google accounts on it.
I don't want an Android console, I don't need something else to stream content to my TV, but what I do want is a couple of glowing orbs in my house that will remind me over speakers that I have an appointment at 10am but heavy traffic means I should leave at 9:15am. Or, using built-in mics or connected Android devices, ask it Now-style questions and receive Star Trek style responses.
Sensationalist title, as usual. I don't see any evidence showing poor reviews. The only people who got it are people at IO anyway, so that's kind of a small sample. I'd say they delayed it so they could add more features before a real launch, just so it lives up to Google's standards.
To be honest, Google doesn't have a great track record when it comes to initial product releases. They get by with it because they release early, iterate often, and eventually develop a winner (a good strategy). But rarely are they winners out of the gate.
If your comment were about Apple, then absolutely you'd have a point about high standards.
Then they should've made the Q the cable box for Google Fiber. That would've really made the headlines.
However, while it's easy for us to sit here and take potshots at Google, we have to remember that it's a logistical nightmare bringing together disparate divisions of a massive organization like Google and getting them to coordinate their efforts so that the company as a whole can present a united front to consumers.