What HTC has here is experience, facilities and a supply chain. Recreating a hardware company from scratch is not an easy job. You don't get any prebuild packages that you can just reuse. You have to assemble your own design team. Build your own supply chain. Conduct R&D for years before getting a viable, marketable product. Even then there is no guarantee of everything going smoothly. Samsung has decades of experience and facilities. Yet the Note 7 went the way it did.

I doubt Google or any of these new age silicon valley companies have the attention span to do something like this.

As I have written upthread, Andy Rubin has launched a pretty damn successful mobile phone startup in just two years with a staff of 100 people. Seems like a better example to emulate than take over a failing company with 1% market share and ~14k employees.

You need to cite or qualify the phrase "pretty damn successful". Essential is not a success story yet.

Are you talking about Essential? Is it successful?

Like the new Nokia phones, Essential is an Foxconn supported project.

> HTC is not exactly a world leader or some unique innovator here

It used to be. There was a time, not so long ago, where HTC Desire and others were the Android phones to have. Their engineers are great, you can't deny that.

The question is: are any of them still working there?

They have the DNA.

HTC made the first Android phone (G1). They made the first 4.3" smartphone (Evo for Sprint). They made the first 4G (albeit WiMAX) phone sold in the United States (Evo again). Their newest phone the HTC U 11 is arguably one of the most aesthetically attractive personal computing devices in production today.

I use Apple products across the board, but there's no denying that HTC has some serious hardware chops.

Yes and they were making smartphones before that too. In fact they were the first phone manufacturer that only made smartphones.

I don't think HTC gets enough credit for their part in the smartphone revolution. Even when they were making windows CE devices they were pushing the UX and phone build quality forward, including making launchers that resemble what Android turned out to be.

The only piece they were missing was capacitive screens. With that they could have made history.

Then Motorola was threatening to sue other android phone makers if Google did not make a move. Google took strategic decision to acquire motorola. In 3 years patent war kind of subsided. Google saved a bunch of tax against big motorola losses, and avoided patent war among Android phone makers.

So in term of bigger goals it was not total failure. And now situation is different, patent wars are mostly gone. Google can use HTC hardware expertise quickly for newer devices. Also unlike last time Android/OS unit is far more integrated than Andy Rubin days, so better chance of success. I am thinking Google Fuschia OS project might also get hardware help from HTC acquisition.

OTOH, making mistakes is the best way to learn. Maybe they'll do it differently and knock it out of the park this time.

My bet is Google is also buying HTC VR/AR asset so that they can release an AR hardware before Apple’s AR Glass next year.

HTC has zero AR property. Vive is VR exclusively, tethered to a PC, and the tech is from Valve. HTC may have some research but it's either very secretive or not worth bidding for - which scenario is more likely?

They've already announced a standalone Vive in partnership with Google:

https://www.vive.com/us/product/standalone/

They haven't sold it as anything but VR for now, but it could have AR capabilities. (And HTC has some sort of AR apps like Vive Paper for the standalone Vive, it has a camera).

Google is releasing a standalone VR headset, built by HTC, this year.

Seriously...do these guys have short term memory loss?