Google has discovered hardware is, well, hard

The company best known for its search engine wasn't kidding around: It made hardware the centerpiece of its Google I/O developers conference here and later poached Amazon executive David Foster, who ran the lab responsible for Amazon's Kindle tablet and Echo smart speaker, to head hardware product development. Google CEO Sundar Pichai has referred to hardware as "our next big bet." A year later, Google has discovered that hardware can be, well, hard. As Google gets ready to lay out its vision at this year's I/O Wednesday, it's still making that hardware bet pay off. Pixel phones are in short supply and relatively few have sold.