It’s early in the morning on October 4, 2016, and in a few seconds, Rick Osterloh will present Google’s latest gadget portfolio to the world. He’s not even six months into his new job, creating and running the company’s ambitious new hardware division. In April, CEO Sundar Pichai had tasked Osterloh with turning the software giant into a gadget maker that can compete with Apple. Osterloh has barely had enough time to sample all the snacks in the mini-kitchen, much less conceive of and ship a bunch of products. Yet here he is, tall and broad, clad in a gray short-sleeved Henley top, visibly nervous as he enters stage left and greets a roomful of reporters and analysts in a converted chocolate factory at the top of a San Francisco hill.

It can’t help Osterloh’s nerves that minutes earlier, Pichai was out on the same stage making a grand case for the historical significance of this day. “We’re at a seminal moment in computing,” Pichai told the audience, as he explained how artificial intelligence would create a revolution on the scale of the internet or the smartphone. Google’s efforts centered on Google Assistant, a virtual helper that Pichai had first announced a few months earlier. Assistant promised to create a “personal Google” for everyone on earth that would help them find information, get things done, and live life more efficiently and enjoyably. Pichai made clear that Assistant was a bet-the-company kind of product, and that Google was deeply invested in building the gadgets that would put Assistant in people’s hands. Then he introduced the new guy, Osterloh, who was going to make it happen.

Over the next hour, Osterloh and his new coworkers introduce a half-dozen products, including the Pixel phone, the Home smart speaker, and the Daydream View VR headset. None of them were Osterloh’s idea—the folks in Mountain View had been building hardware long before his arrival. It’s just that most of it wasn’t very good or successful.

Google could no longer afford to make ho-hum gadgets. Alphabet, its parent company, had become the world’s second-largest corporation by building software that worked for everyone, everywhere, delivered through apps and websites. But the nature of computing is changing, and its next phase won’t revolve around app stores and smartphones. It will center instead on artificially intelligent devices that fit seamlessly into their owners’ everyday lives. It will feature voice assistants, simple wearables, smart appliances in homes, and augmented-reality gadgets on your face and in your brain.

In other words, the future involves a whole lot more hardware, and for Google that shift represents an existential threat. Users won’t go to Google.com to search for things; they’ll just ask their Echo because it’s within earshot, and they won’t care what algorithms it uses to answer the question. Or they’ll use Siri, because it’s right there in a button on their iPhone. Google needed to figure out, once and for all, how to compete with the beautiful gadgets made by Amazon, Apple, and everyone else in tech. Especially the ones coming out of Cupertino.

Google does have some huge advantages—its software and AI capabilities are unrivaled. But the company has tried over and over to build hardware the same way it builds software and learned every time that that’s simply not how it works. Its supposedly innovative streaming device, the Nexus Q, flopped dramatically. Its “best in class” Nexus phones were eclipsed by competitors—and even its own hardware partners—within months. And Google Glass, well, you know what happened with Google Glass.