Google android executive Hugo Barra joins a chinese company Xiaomi

Xiaomi, the smartphone maker that outsells Apple in China, said it hired Google vice president Hugo Barra as part of a push to find growth opportunities outside its home market. Barra, who helped oversee Google's Android product management, will join Xiaomi — which is called "China's Apple" - in October as head of international business development, Lei Jun, founder and chief executive officer of the Beijingbased company, said in a post on Weibo microblog. His post was confirmed by Raine Zhang, a Xiaomi spokeswoman.

Xiaomi takes Google's Android software and heavily modifies it, stripping out most of Google's services and its app store. It's very similar to the way Amazon modifies Android in its Kindle Fire tablets to sell you Amazon apps and services instead of Google stuff.

Xiaomi puts that software on a bunch of high-quality devices. The phones are very well designed and feature some of the most advanced internal hardware available. The kicker: Xiaomi sells those phones for hundreds of dollars less than phones with similar specs from Samsung, Apple, HTC, etc. They usually sell out online within minutes.

Mr. Barra said in a statement posted on Google Plus that he intended to help Xiaomi “expand their incredible product portfolio and business globally.”
“I’m really looking forward to this new challenge, and am particularly excited about the opportunity to continue to help drive the Android ecosystem,” he wrote.

“The phones are not necessarily superior, but they have created a lot of buzz,” said Tom Kang, an analyst at Counterpoint. “They’ve realized that the differentiation you can do now with hardware or software is very marginal, and that the future will be about marketing.”