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upstart writes:

All your favorite dead products from the past are back:

Google held its I/O conference earlier this month, and for longtime Google watchers, the event felt like a seance. Google CEO Sundar Pichai stepped on stage for his keynote address and channeled the spirits of long-dead Google products. "I'm hearing... something about an Android tablet? And a smartwatch?" he seemed to say.

By my count, "resurrecting the past" accounted for around half of the company's major announcements. In all of these cases, Google would be in a much stronger position if it had committed to a long-term plan and continuously iterated on that plan.

Unfortunately, the company doesn't have that kind of top-down direction. Instead, for most of the resurrected products, Google is trying to catch up to competitors after years of standing still. There's a question we have to ask for every announcement: "Will things be different this time?"

[...] Some of the biggest tablet news coming from the show was that Google is truly committing to tablet app development again. The company announced it would bring tablet interfaces to over 20 Google apps, and it showed off screenshots for most of them.

[...] Google also announced a new tablet, the Pixel Tablet, with a release scheduled for the very distant date of "sometime in 2023." It's a widescreen, large-looking tablet, and regular phone apps will not look good on it. [...]

Google has been working on a resurrection of Wear OS, with Samsung in tow as a major partner. As part of this new partnership, Samsung is dumping its Tizen OS and bringing its hardware to Wear OS, starting with the Galaxy Watch 4 launch in August 2021. [...]

With I/O came the next part of this plan: the Pixel Watch is real. This is Google's first smartwatch hardware despite the company technically making a smartwatch OS for the past eight years. [...]

Google Wallet is back! Google's payment system is deep into the Google failure cycle and is now running on rebrand No. 4 after previously being known as "Google Pay." It's only natural to run out of ideas for your fourth rebrand, so this is the second time Google has used "Google Wallet" as a product name. [...]

Google also showed off an augmented reality headset at I/O. It was explicitly not a product, but rather a sneak preview of a prototype the company is working on. Of course, Google started this whole AR goggles idea a decade ago with the launch of Google Glass in 2012. [...]

Like most Google products in the Sundar Pichai era, what will really matter for all of these resurrections is if Google continues to care about them for several years. Way too many Google products seem to have a one-year roadmap. The company pins 100 percent of its hopes on a project's initial launch, and the product is canceled if it isn't an overnight success. [...]

So what's the likelihood that your new Pixel Watch will be still getting software updates five years from now?

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