How Google is going from mobile-first to AI-first while competition heats up

Google on Tuesday officially announced a major change in its strategy to go after the smartphone market, as the search giant unveiled a'family of products' -- Pixel, Daydream, Home, and WiFi -- to venture into a new category of products which have both'hardware and software made by Google'. Taking the stage at the event, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, noted that when Google was founded in 1998, there were about 300 million people using the internet, the vast majority of whom were sitting at desktop computers and looking for answers that came in the form of blue links. But today, the internet community is closer to three billion people, and users are searching for all kinds of help across different contexts and devices, from cars and your classrooms to homes and the phones in people's pockets. When I look at where computing is heading, I see how machine learning and artificial intelligence are unlocking capabilities that were unthinkable only a few years ago. This means that the power of the software -- the'smarts' -- really matter for hardware more than ever before.