Nest was acquired and was already a mature and popular product. They by no means built it from scratch. And enterprise server products are probably outside the scope of what we are talking about, which is consumer electronics. I can build you a pretty decent server pretty quickly. I wouldn't know where to start to create a smart watch that had good battery life, great screen, great app ecosystem, great sensors, and didn't cost over $400. As far as I know, no consumer electronics Google product had launched and was an instant success. All the first product reviews I've ever read sounded like this: "it's a great first start and as a nerd who knows about these things I enjoyed some innovative parts of it, but it's not ready for prime time. Maybe next year they'll have a more polished product."

Nest was an acquisition so not the best example.

The same hardware division that came up with Brillo, sorry Android Things, never mind, it is gone now after 3 years anyway.

Or those wonderful Android Watches, sorry wearOS, never mind, they aren't getting proper updates for ages now.

The device that overheats when playing 1080p videos ? Or the one that freezes when just launching Youtube ?

The Chromecast works well most of the time. The ways it fails is ridiculous.

Were you thinking of the 2012 Nexus 7 with the poor-quality NAND that went bad within a couple years, rendering the tablet useless? Or the 2013 that had phantom/unregistering input due to (IIRC) general build-quality and flex issues?

Asus did make both, but I'm not sure either was as good as you recall, sadly.

All the Nexus devices were made by third parties, it's when they switched to Pixel branding that they started designing them in-house.

Right. My point exactly. Google releases half baked consumer goods, then kills them later if they aren't a hugely important strategic line (like the Nexus/Pixel) or not a runaway success. The idea that Google could build a fitness tracker or smartwatch from scratch in a matter of months and it would be better than what FitBit currently has to offer just seems silly.

> Glass was never a finished product.

Seems to be a finished-ish enterprise product now.

https://www.google.com/glass/start/

> Google's track record of buying technology and then doing something better with it is not encouraging at all.

Err...what? Earth, Maps, Docs, Waymo, Android, YouTube, WebRTC, Flights, Deepmind all come from acquisitions.[1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...