Abstract – Product marketing defines the “value of existence” for a product. Bad product marketing usually leads to a product failure measured by performance, industrial design and/or customer adoption rate. Google engineers made a marvelous hardware, the Pixel, with no marketing IQ inside. The result is a beautiful hardware that few consumers want to pay for.
Google just announced a high-end Chromebook that costs $1299USD as a “base” model. From an industrial design perspective, this notebook is well made. Looking at the hardware, the Chromebook Pixel is a strong contender to Apple’s Macbook Pro. Yet, I believe the Pixel will sell even less units than the Microsoft Surface. This is NOT just because the Pixel costs $1299 as a starting price – every product has a price tag, high or low, what matters is if the product’s price justifies the values it brings to the customer. This is a fundamental question when a product is defined – what is the product’s value proposition? The Pixel is good example of Google’s Product Marketing failure – as an engineering-driven company, I felt good product marketing practices was not applied to the Pixel’s definition. Someone inside Google had the ego of making a beautiful Chromebook to compete against Apple, only to forget the purpose of existence or a Chrome, and who the product was made for.
Chromebook’s “product philosophy” is to let users live in the Cloud – reducing the overhead for a localized computing system and run everything off a browser or a simple operation system. This results a much simplified hardware system with fast bootup, higher mobility and even longer battery life. The Chromebook’s value proposition is much stronger than a Netbook because a Netbook relies on localized computation power, which is never enough when the Netbook wave was high. A Chromebook is simply a hardware user interface. To some extent, the Chromebook hardware is disposable – the hardware facilitates tasks, but it has “no value” as a standalone unit. The damage of losing a Chromebook is little, as the user’s data all sits in the Cloud – grab a new Chromebook, and off you go.
If you believe this product value proposition stated above, then you would also realize and agree that the Google Pixel is on the wrong path. Using an analogy, if a Chromebook is a facilitator, like a taxi that hauls people around and is disposable (i.e. you don’t have to always ride the same taxi), then why would you need a taxi that is based off a Ferrari or Lamborghini?
If we ditch the “philosophy” and consider the Pixel as a laptop computer, we then need another candidate to compare to, the Apple Macbook Pro. Imagine you are given the budget to choose only one device, the Pixel or the Macbook Pro, and the purpose of selecting one of these devices is to use it for both work and personal leisure, which one would you select? I believe a “logical” person would choose the Macbook Pro. Being “logical”, that person chooses Macbook Pro because it is more useful than the Pixel, not because that the Macbook Pro is made by Apple. The Macbook Pro is a real personal computer with a complete operating system. There are many productivity software designed for this operating system. It is well construction, relatively light weight (thus mobility), and has a good battery life. The Macbook Pro does NOT rely on Internet connection and the Cloud to “survive”, and is a fully functional standalone unit. On the other hand, the Pixel or most Chromebook require Internet connections to work, and try that when you travel to a region with slow or no Internet connectivity.
I should point out that a Macbook Pro is not cheap. There are many alternatives (Windows or Mac OS) that deliver comparable usefulness at lower prices. So the Macbook Pro is certainly targeted at “power users” that has the budget and need the performances it can deliver. If the Macbook Pro is stripped to its operation system with few compatible software to choose from (e.g. Adobe Photoshop), there will be very few people buy the Macbook Pro, no matter how beautiful it is – Does this sound like a Google Pixel?
Forget about philosophy and productivity, how about “cool factor”? Sure, the Pixel is very well made. It has a display resolution higher than the Macbook Pro’s Retina display. It has a good hinge (try to impress your girlfriend with that – “honey, check out this Pixel’s hinge”) and a fancy blink color LED one the back of its lid – would you buy it if you are again given the choice of a Google Pixel or the Macbook Pro. I think if you want a date picked up at a local Starbucks, carrying a Macbook Pro would give you higher chance.
So who will use the Google Pixel, on a daily basis? In my opinion, those are Google employees – they make a lot of money, and they get the Chromebook for free. After all, they don’t want to carry a Macbook Pro in their office, they hate the $299 Chromebook products that do not deliver enough computation performance and sex appeals, and they do not need to pony up $1299 from their pockets to get a well-made hardware (the company pays for your PC, right?). Indeed, I believe if Google asks their employees to pay for their computers, most people would select a Windows or Mac PC – only those developed the Pixel might choose the Pixel. There you have it – Google employs 37,544 employees at the end of Q4 2014, and that’s the total number of Pixel that Google will “sell” in my opinion. Of course, not everyone working at Google will use the Pixel, so the difference is made up by some Nerds who don’t work at Google but have enough spare money to pay for it.
In a nutshell, for $1299, the Pixel is a well-made laptop hardware that is only productive with an Internet connection. For true mobility, the user needs to pay more for a LTE-enabled device, in addition to the monthly fees charged by the carriers. At this price, the Pixel is arguably the most expensive laptop in the market today, measured by productivity or mobility or even sex appeal.
Imagine you’re the product marketing manager for Pixel, how will you justify the above to a group of audiences that review your business case? Wait, this is Google, maybe they don’t need product marketing or business case.
