Except that they have spent over a decade culling the world for the smartest and most accomplished employees.

Google has some of the world's smartest software engineers.

Whether or not they have world-class supply chain, fulfillment, and retailing people is far from sure - in fact evidence suggests they do not.

Heck, up until not so long ago, Google didn't even have a very good design team.

Google's competencies are surprisingly narrow.

Having worked at Amazon before I'll say this: retailing is really, really hard, and it takes a lot more than being smart. It takes years of experience. People who try to go toe to toe with Amazon don't often realize this.

Just because you're a genius with search algorithms doesn't mean you know how to run a successful, physical, product launch

This. But, not everyone at Google is a search engineer. Many many engineers at Google work on one of our other products. We should, and probably do, have experts on online retail scale-ability somewhere

(disclaimer: i am a search engineer at Google)

It isn't just a scale-ability issue, though. Well, it kinda-sorta is, but not in the strictly technical sense.

Every interaction I've had with buying physical goods from Play was far more painful than my average online buying experience, even when buying items that are readily available. Once you place a Play order for hardware it basically goes into a black hole where you're never quite sure if the order was actually processed or not and you usually get no indication from Google of the actual status until after the device arrives at your doorstop. Attempts to get information about the order results in robo-emails that manage to appear even stupider than your average "reading from a script" custom service drone. If you keep replying to these robo-emails, sometimes a real person will email you like 2 days later, but not always. Using the phone is nearly as bad, the whole system is clearly designed to stop your from ever talking to a real human, and while I understand the cost reasons for doing this, as a customer it totally sucks, especially compared to companies like Amazon and Newegg who totally nail this stuff (IME).

Play customer service is just busted from top to bottom and woe unto anyone for whom the default process doesn't operate as expected the first time. I love Google for many things but I hate buying hardware from them.

I was being a little ridiculous but only because rhizome seemed to be implying that Google shouldn't have hiccups like this because they've been hiring intelligent people.

Am I supposed to believe that they've been selling cellphones for almost three years without putting their recruitment strategies toward their fulfillment chain?

Yes. People fuck up all the time. My employer has been in the eCommerce for almost 12 years and we still have feature launches that destroy our website. I'd say I work with some of the brightest people I've ever had the chance to work with, but we're still just human and we sometimes underestimate demand and over estimate our hardware. Just because Google is Google doesn't mean they are infallible, they are perhaps overly arrogant due to their culture.

I call BS.

How long do we give Google the benefit of the doubt? How long do we let them off the hook? This isn't their first phone or device launch.

They know how to sell product by now.