A Show-and-Tell With Google’s Hardware

Meet Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s traveling salesman.

Mr. Schmidt, the executive chairman of the search giant, began a fireside chat with the media on Thursday at the Allen & Company conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, with a brief show-and-tell.

Standing in front of a group of reporters, he carefully unboxed Google’s Nexus Q, a home entertainment device. And beaming like a proud father, he described the black orb as cute. Next, he displayed the slim Nexus 7, Google’s new, affordable tablet.

It was as if Mr. Schmidt was saying: If there was any confusion before, Google is definitely in the hardware business.

Not that he would call Google a “hardware company.” Mr. Schmidt used more encompassing language on Thursday, saying Google was “in the information business,” a label roomy enough to fit its giant search business, a new line of gadgets and everything in between.

It has been more than a year since Mr. Schmidt was Google’s chief executive, a title he officially relinquished last April when Larry Page, who founded the company with Sergey Brin, took that role. But he still has a pulse on Google’s future, which has taken some twists since Mr. Schmidt’s fireside chat at last year’s Sun Valley conference.

In 2011, Google’s hardware ambitions were barely mentioned. Instead, he spent more time answering questions on regulatory issues and the company’s then newfangled social network, Google Plus.

Much has changed in a year. For one, Google, which typically makes small acquisitions, bought Motorola Mobility, the hulking mobile device maker, for $12.5 billion. While Mr. Schmidt acknowledged that Google purchased the company and its patents, in part, as a reaction to rival “Apple’s behavior,” he said its hardware business was a real draw. Mr. Schmidt was tight-lipped about Google’s plans for Motorola but he promised that a new batch of products were nearly ready for prime time.

“We always wanted to be in the hardware business,” he said. “Larry and Sergey have always wanted to do hardware in one form or another. This was a way to get into it quickly.”

The nearly 14-year-old company, which is trying to combat a perception that it is losing its youthful scrappiness, has also begun to invest heavily in more out-of-the-box hardware solutions, like Google’s Glass Project, wearable glasses that transmit and capture information and images. The company spared little expense when it showed off the product at its recent developer conference by employing the use of sky divers, a blimp, bicycles and plenty of Hollywood-like stunts.

Though the glasses will not be available to consumers for quite some time, Mr. Brin has been proudly strutting around Sun Valley with his prototype this week. Mr. Schmidt says he’s never seen his colleague without them lately.

Mr. Brin, he added with a hint of pride, was not present at Thursday’s fireside chat, because he was on his way to the airport to tend to important Google Glass business.

For Google, hardware represents its best bet to reinvigorate the brand and meaningfully grow the company beyond its search-advertising business. Advertising still makes up nearly all of Google’s sales. At its core, Google is still more software than hardware, but the company is now placing greater value on the vehicles that connect consumer to software.

At a time when Apple is beginning to favor its own applications over Google’s on its devices (last month, for instance, it introduced its replacement for Google Maps), hardware becomes more critical.

As Google gets deeper into hardware, few expect the technology giant to grow through big acquisitions, like the Motorola purchase. Mr. Schmidt reminded the reporters on Thursday that the company specializes in small acquisitions that are largely made for talent. He said the company plans to make dozens of these types of acquisitions each year.

Then again, he said the same thing last year, one month before the Motorola deal was announced.