Rick Osterloh, former Motorola CEO, is now heading up Google’s hardware division

Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen a whole series of shake-ups involving Motorola, Lenovo and Google. Now there’s another piece at play. Just weeks after leaving Lenovo, former Motorola CEO Rick Osterloh is headed to Google as a new Senior Vice President who is tasked with leading Google’s new hardware division. Osterloh previously worked for Google when the company owned Motorola, but stayed with Motorola when it was purchased by Lenovo. Now, he is headed back to Google after Lenovo restructured its leadership positions and Osterloh left the company.

As head of hardware at Google, Osterloh will oversee a number of different divisions. These include Nexus devices, Google’s Chromecast products, consumer hardware including Chromebooks and the Pixel C tablet, OnHub wireless router, Google Glass and ATAP, which is Google’s experimental team that handles devices such as Project Ara, Google’s modular phone.

Osterloh has been highly praised for his work at Motorola and it’s no surprise that he’s being given far more responsibility at Google now than he previously had. The move comes amid a concentrated effort at Google to streamline and unify the company’s various hardware projects. Google has had its share of struggles with hardware in the past, relying on numerous partnerships with manufacturers for products and occasionally facing major product flops, such as the Nexus Q. With Osterloh as the new head of hardware, we should see improvement.

What’s your reaction this latest move at Google? Will it improve the company’s hardware efforts?


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