Rick Osterloh, Google’s SVP in charge of the Pixel and Hardware Division, spoke with Stratechery this week following the big Pixel 9 launch. One of the topics they touched on was the purpose of Pixel.
According to Osterloh, the purpose of the Pixel is to lead in AI innovation. Not so much to make tons of profit. However, Osterloh does explain that this is also a business, so they want to grow it and thus make money. Osterloh continues by talking about the smartphone market. Internally, they break it down into two markets essentially, sub-$400 and above $400 phones. The sub-$400 phone market is widely different than the above $400 market. The majority of Android’s market share is actually in the sub-$400 area because Apple has locked up a good option in the above $400 market.
One of the strengths of Android is that it “lets our OEMs project their brand the way they want it, and Samsung’s doing that with their brand and they have a lot of very loyal users like how they build their products, but we wanted to have a Google-branded experience too and make that another good choice for people looking for a premium phone”.
Many Pixel buyers come from iPhones
Perhaps surprisingly, Osterloh mentions that many people switching to Pixel, are not coming from Samsung. Instead they are those that left the market and “also from Apple“. Google’s not targeting any of its partners with Pixel, which is pretty obvious from the hardware choices they make, they are mostly targeting those that are using other platforms. Ultimately, Pixel is trying to gain overall share of Android.
Osterloh says that his “principal goal is to improve Android competitiveness, improve our innovation, improve the problems we’re able to solve for users at all tiers. But we’ve certainly had issues in the premium space that we want to try to address”.
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