I still think this is the primary consideration in this acquisition. That being said, it will be interesting to see how it plays out. When I was at Google there was a lot of challenges to creating any sort of hardware (the most capable of the groups was the Enterprise group that made the appliance and they still had a hell of a time at it). It is a very different discipline than 'iterate rapidly and ship early.'
For Google's sake I hope they can successfully run this business, or recognize early enough that they can't. If it turns out that it isn't in their DNA to run a hardware biz then it is important to re-spin it out before it dies from mismanagement.
This is kind of what I was thinking. I've worked at a HW / Consumer Electronics (One of the big ones) and in many ways all of the comments around here about HW companies not really getting SW are 100% true. However, I don't think it's any less true that many of the SW folks around here have almost no understanding of how HW development works.
What do you think a SW person interested in creating hardware as well would be best served to learn? Is it just the results of the release cycles being so much longer, or is it deeper than that?
It's a lot more than that. Developing and maintaining a supply chain, shipping finished product, different testing strategies, different pre-release design and prototyping strategies, regulatory approval (for anything that has a radio, among other things)... and that's just a few things off the top of my head.
For Google's sake I hope they can successfully run this business, or recognize early enough that they can't. If it turns out that it isn't in their DNA to run a hardware biz then it is important to re-spin it out before it dies from mismanagement.