Yes, I am breaking one of my own unwritten rules: putting two question marks in a post title. But this story warrants it, particularly since what I am writing about won’t get much play.
Rick Osterloh, the former head of Motorola, left Lenovo a month ago, the owner of the brand. Google, you may recall, had acquired Moto and kept a pile of patents and an advanced technology group, and spun the rest off to Lenovo. Apparently, Sundar Pinchai, Google’s CEO, thinks that Osterloh is the one to make sense of the many, many hardware efforts that Google has found itself running.
So Osterloh will be overseeing Google’s Nexus, Chromecast, laptops and tablets (Chromebooks and the Pixel C tablet), OnHub (the home router that is the camel’s nose under the tent flap of the living room), ATAP (the advanced technology and projects group, with efforts like Project Ara), and (drumroll) Glass.
Yes, Glass. Remember Glass? I have said that putting Glass under Tony Fadell (CEO of Nest) would lead to its re-release as a formidable player in what is likely to be the next platform: augmented reality. Fadell is having a lot of trouble since Google acquired Nest, and Glass has remained in the shadows.
Google is still best-positioned to bring AR to prominence with something derived from Glass. Maybe Osterloh is the one who’ll make it happen. But sooner or later, the next era of computing will arrive, and after that day all of us will be wearing Google Goggles — or something very like — and nothing will ever be the same.
