Monday, December 27, 2010

Logitech halts manufacturing of its Google TV-based Revue: The question is, will it ever resume?

This one slipped past me on Christmas Eve, but DigiTimes reported that Logitech has told the manufacturer of the Google TV-based Revue, Gigabyte, to halt manufacturing until the beginning of February, 2011 at the earliest. Google has asked its partners not to show new Google TV devices at January's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, because it's working on improved software.

Update, 27 December: In response to the DigiTimes article, Logitech issued a very nuanced statement to Barron's, a daily financial newspaper owned by the Wall Street Journal. Logitech said that Google did not ask the company to suspend its shipments of the Revue. It says that it is continuing to ship "products" to its customers (although the statement doesn't name the Revue as one of the products), and that it doesn't comment on specific production plans for any of its products. In other words, Logitech doesn't deny the DigiTimes report, nor does it confirm that it's specifically fulfilling new orders of the Revue to anyone.

I anticipated all of this when Google TV was first demonstrated. It was clearly rushed to market, with little to no coordination with other product teams within Google, no third-party apps and little third-party content. The question now is, even if Google improves the Google TV software platform, will Logitech restart production, and will the other companies (including Toshiba, LG Electronics, Sharp and Vizio) that were working on Google TV products follow through with their plans?
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