Time for Google to have consumer-facing customer service

A version of this essay was originally published at Tech.pinions, a website dedicated to informed opinions, insight and perspective on the tech industry. One of the themes coming out of the recent Google I/O conference was that Google plans to make a more aggressive push into the consumer hardware business. The company announced the Home product, an AI-oriented service to compete with Amazon Echo; a VR headset; and a new smartphone division that will build and ship its modular Ara phones. Former Motorola CEO Rick Osterloh will lead the new hardware division. In a Recode post last week, Mark Bergen argued that one of the key unanswered questions coming out of I/O is how these exciting new products are going to be distributed. Getting products such as Nexus and Chromecast into consumers' hands is something Google has "never done well," Bergen wrote, further suggesting that if Google wants to more directly compete with Apple, the company will also need to think about its retail strategy.