As part of a cutback policy, Google has made the decision to cancel the next Pixelbook laptop and disband the team responsible of its design and construction. Members of that part of the company have been transferred to other places within the same organization, so we understand that they have not been laid off.
For those who are lost, Pixelbook is or was the line of Chromebooks promoted by Google. Introduced in 2013 as the Chromebook Pixel, it was initially focused on the high-end, but over the years models with configurations at more affordable prices appeared.
The Pixelbook laptops came to play a role similar to that of the Android Pixel smartphones, which are a way of indicating to the rest of the manufacturers how things have to be done. However, Rick Osterloh, head of hardware at Google, acknowledged in 2017, after the launch of the first Pixelbook, that “the good thing about the category is that it has matured”, which was interpreted by some as ChromeOS no longer needed such an active role on the part of the corporation.
On the other hand, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet (formerly parent Google), has been saying during the last few months that the company is reducing the pace of hiring and that they will put an end to some projectsso the dissolution of the team responsible for Pixelbook should not be so surprising, especially if we take into account that Pichai himself stated in the memorandum last July that the purpose of the policy he has promoted is the following: “In some cases, that means consolidating where investments overlap and streamlining processes. In other cases, that means pausing development and redistributing resources to higher priority areas.”.
On the reasons for the end of the Pixelbook, focusing on the high-end turned these teams into very niche products with prices tending to be high. Added to this is the fact that ChromeOS, at least for now, is not perceived as a production system like Windows, macOS and even “traditional” Linux distributions, so in the end, its sales have probably been low.
And it cannot be said that Google has not tried to add value to its Chromebooks if we see that it came to market convertible models and a digital pen, the Pixelbook Pen, but if the search engine giant has made the decision to dissolve the responsible team, one arrives to think that the results at the sales level have not been satisfactory, something that cannot be known for sure due to the lack of public numbers in this regard.
We cannot leave the Pixel Slate in the inkwell, a detachable with ChromeOS that was marketed in 2018 in order to rival Apple’s iPad and Microsoft’s Surface devices. By then, Google was already showing signs of not knowing quite where to direct its personal computers as it tried to adhere to whatever trend seemed to be the next big thing in consumer computing.
The good stuff for Chromebooks possibly started in 2019, when companies mainstream like Acer, ASUS, Dell, Lenovo and HP began to bet very seriously on ChromeOS. This translated to Chromebooks leading the revival of the PC in the first quarter of 2021, increasing sales by 275%. This huge increase in sales has piqued Valve’s interest in bringing Steam to ChromeOS through a port of the client available for Linux.
In short, everything seems to indicate that Google has discontinued, at least for now, the Pixelbook laptops and other lines of its own with ChromeOS. The future is not written, but seeing that the system has begun to take off through the OEMs, the logical thing is to think that the search engine giant will continue betting on them to expand the user base of its operating system aimed at the desktop.
