Popular products are almost always difficult to get around Christmas, with high demand causing stores to run out of bestsellers. Unfortunately for a certain search giant, it’s starting to sound like a lot of items incorporating Google TV tech were allowed to collect dust. Rumors indicate Logitech even asked a supplier to stop shipping Revue units.
Fair warning: that may or may not be the case. The first outfit to report the alleged delay claimed it was due to everyone waiting on a software update, and there’s no obvious reason why Google couldn’t just deliver the update on an over-the-air basis to new owners.
Also, Google’s gone on the record stating that it didn’t order any halt in production.
But that’s where the theory involving poor sales and overstock enters the equation, because Monica Chen and Steve Shen wrote after talking to "industry sources," "Logitech has reportedly informed Gigabyte Technology to temporarily suspend shipments of Revue set-top boxes (STBs) for the period from December 2010 to January 2011 . . ."
That would represent a real embarrassment for Google, which planned to take the world by storm with its "smarter" TV experience.
Another, more concrete, source of embarrassment: John Paczkowski reported this afternoon, "Last Tuesday Apple said it expected sales of its next generation Apple TV to top one million units before Christmas. Today the company confirmed to me that they did just that."
