Interesting, Google really really really doesn't want to be in the physical goods business, and yet they are buying robot companies. This is the first time I believe a large 'service' company is struggling with businesses in the "goods" side of the economy, we have seen many companies like IBM who started out all 'goods' and have been moving into all 'services'. Pretty good win for China as well.
"But the smartphone market is super competitive, and to thrive it helps to be all-in when it comes to making mobile devices. It’s why we believe that Motorola will be better served by Lenovo. (...) As a side note, this does not signal a larger shift for our other hardware efforts. The dynamics and maturity of the wearable and home markets, for example, are very different from that of the mobile industry. We’re excited by the opportunities to build amazing new products for users within these emerging ecosystems."
I read it like this: "smartphones are turning into commodities and though they are not as commoditized as PCs yet they're on their way, Lenovo is good at selling commoditized low margin computers already. We're focusing on wearable and robots where the potential for growth is much stronger for us." Just a wild guess.
Robotics is currently more about software (CV, ML, etc) than hardware. Mechanical engineers can really build one hell of a robot, electrical engineers can wire it beautifully, computer engineers can create an awesome processor for it, but software engineers are still catching up. That is where Google seems to be taking interest. Once machines are able to "see" and recognize the outside world then learning about it is simply more of a time constraint than anything.
Don't quite agree with you on that they don't want to be in goods business. They just bought Nest. It depends on Google's overall strategy to occupy the future market. Smart phone will have less margin and too much competitions.
But I agree that either way will not generate good results. Companies have to keep moving anyways.
