Google makes a $1 billion bet on hardware

In the everything old is new again department, Google is betting big on hardware. The company already bought and sold Motorola in the past five years and now Google’s announced it’ll pay $1.1 billion for a chunk of HTC. To be clear Google’s not acquiring the company here. It’s acqui-hiring pretty much the entire engineering department of the Taiwanese phone maker. So what’s the strategy here?

Click the audio player above to hear the full story.