“Google’s smartphone product strategy and sales are going from bad to worse, from one month to the next. As of this writing – December 20 – there is not a single Google smartphone available for purchase on Google’s own site for smartphone sales,” Anton Wahlman writes for Seeking Alpha. “You read that right. Not a single one. They are all listed as “out of stock” and have been so, in some cases, for over a month.”
“It became a critical problem already two months ago, but one would have thought that the problem would have been cured by now. For the dominant smartphone operating system, Android, with 80% worldwide market share, it’s highly curious to say the least, that Google can’t even make itself sell a single phone directly to the consumer anymore,” Wahlman writes. “This is Google’s own defined hardware, typically made in conjunction with a hardware maker such as Motorola, LG, Samsung or HTC in recent years.”
“The problem with the Nexus phone right now is that Google was offering the Nexus 5, built by LG, for $349 and up, but it is effectively discontinuing it in favor of the Nexus 6, made by Motorola, for $649 and up. The problem isn’t even the steep price increase – almost 100% – but that most people just don’t want to hold a 6-inch phone,” Wahlman writes. “It’s as if Google took the walking joke of a small portion of people actually liking these 6-inch “phablets” and thought that it was suddenly mainstream. It is not.”
“Just look at Apple, which knows what it’s doing,” Wahlman writes. “It was not foolish enough to place an exclusive bet on the 5.5-inch phone, let alone a 6.0-inch phone.”
Read more in the full article here.