Sometimes when you're wildly successful as Google is with Android and Search, you start doing things that don't make a lot of sense.
Microsoft has done this many, many times as has Apple. With Microsoft you can see the ill fated Kin/Kin 2, Windows Media Center, Windows Tablet, Windows UMPC's, etc. that for various reasons just weren't good ideas, weren't priced right, etc. Apple had the G4 cube, iPod Hi-Fi, and the Motorolla ROKR (with iTunes).
When you have billions of dollars in profit, you tend to throw money around at ideas that might not be ready yet, or just might not be very good ideas yet. Google has a history of doing this in software, but now that they're moving into hardware the problems seem more glaring.
The Moto ROKR was Apple's iPhone stalking-horse - the project was likely doomed to fail commercially, but Apple gets valuable industry experience in rolling working on a cell phone.
With most of those products you mentioned, I can see some sense with them. I would say the Windows Media Center is the most successful of those examples.
The Kin is only one I can say made no sense for the same reason the nexus Q doesn't make sense. It's really locked, not easy for the user put there own content on the device and relies too much on the cloud.
> The Kin is only one I can say made no sense for the same reason the nexus Q doesn't make sense.
From the articles I read at the time, the Kin did make sense, initially. All MS had to do was make a decent HipTop successor and get it out on time, and they'd had a decently successful product. Instead, internal politics wound up producing a wholly reworked, incredibly late product that missed the market window and earned boatloads of carrier ill will.
The HipTop was very popular, and MS should've been able to capitalize on that; instead, they totally biff'd it and it cost them boatloads. To me, having watched large companies make massive screw-ups due to internal politics, the whole debacle was just too familiar and understandable.
Microsoft has done this many, many times as has Apple. With Microsoft you can see the ill fated Kin/Kin 2, Windows Media Center, Windows Tablet, Windows UMPC's, etc. that for various reasons just weren't good ideas, weren't priced right, etc. Apple had the G4 cube, iPod Hi-Fi, and the Motorolla ROKR (with iTunes).
When you have billions of dollars in profit, you tend to throw money around at ideas that might not be ready yet, or just might not be very good ideas yet. Google has a history of doing this in software, but now that they're moving into hardware the problems seem more glaring.