Alphabet is breaking up Nest, its standalone smart-home gadgets company, and moving Nest’s software group back into Google.

enerally speaking, Google has very limited interest in making hardware in the first place. The cost of building things is high, the margins are low, and Google’s real specialty is in web services like Gmail and search anyway.

Google started signaling that Android, the most popular operating system in the world, and Chrome OS, its more niche operating system for laptops, were going to get smashed together. The result, ideally, will be a version of Android that can extend its smartphone dominance to tablets and laptops…which is why Android 7.0, the most recent release, makes split-screen multitasking such a tentpole feature.

the real business opportunity for Google is to compel a broad range of companies to create gadgets and home appliances using its software. The hardware is secondary. In fact, building its own hardware can even work against Google: The more successful Google is at selling its own hardware, the less likely other hardware makers want to use its software, since they view Google as a competitor.

Putting all its efforts behind expanding and extending Android has made Google a top player in the smartphone market, even after its late start against Apple and the iPhone.