Google has announced a primary internal reorganization that will bureaucracy the “Platform and Devices” team that, under the leadership of Rick Osterloh, will oversee Pixel, Nest, Android, Chrome and more.
As announced by The Verge, Google will revamp its Android, Chrome, ChromeOS, Photos, and other groups to be under the same roof as Pixel, Nest, and other hardware efforts. Rick Osterloh will lead the new Platform & Devices team.
Hiroshi Lockheimer, longtime head of the Android team, will move on to “other undisclosed projects” within Google and Alphabet.
This update may not break the “firewall” that existed between Pixel and Android as a whole, Osterloh says. Google’s Sameer Samat will take on the role of “President of the Android Ecosystem,” who will continue to work with third-party Android efforts.
Osterloh says the reason for the upgrade is to advance the company’s AI efforts.
Having Android, Pixel, and more under the same roof will allow for faster adoption of AI in Google’s products, especially with Android in mind. A given example of how this will power AI products is that of Jay Yagnik, an engineer on Google’s AI team. , will join the Osterloh team to facilitate the delivery of DeepMind’s newest AI models to product groups. Apparently, the new design will allow Google to move groups faster to build product apps with the newest AI models Google is running.
For the end consumer, it turns out that the tweaks made through this design won’t necessarily be reflected in the final product, at least for the time being, but in the speed at which those updates and tweaks will occur.
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