It's easy to armchair quarterback this stuff after the fact, but this is where Glass should have started. The price point, social stigma/issues, and use cases all screamed "business applications!".
Consumer tech may be where the glamour and scale are, but it's not always the best market entry point.
Ha! I interviewed at google and told them glass was a horrible consumer product and that they should have started with a market that wouldn't mind looking stupid (or skiers who already wore goggles so they wouldn't look stupid at all). The point I made to them was that they engineered an incredible device but hadn't validated the market. I suggested it would have been better to start with something like skiers because they already wore goggles and helmets. So, you wouldn't need to get the product so small to see how people reacted to it.
Needless to say, I didn't get the job. It was really funny to watch Glass (which is a cool technology) totally fail because it's a stupid consumer product. And, I'm no Steve Jobs. It was absolutely predictable that Glass would never work as a consumer product.
And, if you want to make it work for manufacturing, I think you'll need to scale up the form factor. Why wouldn't you make it a safety goggle too? Think about all of the engineering effort that went into shrinking this into a small, completely impractical, package.
Anyway, I think that this was not only predictable but it also shows a company culture where people can't tell the emperor that he's naked. It's not like I was the only person that took one look at glass and knew you couldn't leave the house wearing one. But, that message was pretty actively suppressed at Google.
Xoogler here. You are very, very wrong if you think there is no dissent within Google. There's plenty.
That said, this is a company that has massively succeeded with other bets that were "absolutely predictable they would never work." So just because something looks questionable doesn't mean it gets shot down.
(Now, IMO, Glass was a mistake - but for entirely different reasons than you describe. An elite fashion product cuts against Google's reputation as something for everybody, even IF it had succeeded.)
I can't say whether you failed the interview because of that but Google is a company that believes that their superior technology validates itself.
Sometimes it's the pressure "if you can't sell them in millions, we don't want to do it at Google". This means Google is a great company to make acquisitions that they can scale e.g docs, maps, YouTube, Android.
Google has so much money than they know what to do with it. They can't experiment like a startup because failed products hurt their brand.
Their best bet is to invest in startups that use their stack and if successful, acquire and scale the shit out of them.
> Google is a company that believes that their superior technology validates itself.
This is a good point. I bet the team that made glass looks at what a technical achievement Glass is and rate the project as a complete success. I don't know how many millions they spent to get the form factor so small but I really would be surprised if anyone caught any flack for it.
Except for the parts where he claimed that his opinions were the reason for him failing the interview, or the fact that he failed the interview was indicative of some company culture.
Unless you believe that he's an omniscient psychic who somehow has insider knowledge of his hiring process.
That's what they did after it was clear it was done as a piece of consumer hardware.
It's easy to forget how hard Google pushed Glass to consumers. They parachuted people out of a helicopter onto the roof of the Moscone Center wearing them. They invested a vast amount of money building out massive floating barges to use as showrooms, which they quietly mothballed and sold. They allowed Robert Scoble to take a picture of himself in the shower with one (some might say this was the worst crime of all).
If Google wanted to "just put it out in the world" they wouldn't have invested so much money in their consumer push. Now that I think about it, that Google I/O in 2012 was a bit of a disaster all around for consumer hardware, because it had both the Glass and the Nexus Q. At least Glass actually shipped.
Promoting it to a room full of developers is not a "big push to consumers".
Robert Scoble is not really a consumer tech reporter either. He's more like a futurist. Most of the things he likes to talk about are things you can't buy.
Maybe because you got marketed to you are thinking it was consumer marketing, but consider that you were being marketed to as a developer not a consumer.
"If you followed the news at the time there was a ton of coverage in mainstream media with bold claims about how society was going to be transformed" You cannot control what the media decides to hype their purposes. It was not as if Google itself made those same claims - that wouldn't be confirmation that the goal of the product was to transform the lives of every consumer. If they were throwing a bunch of ideas around to see what sticks that is a far cry from a purportedly failed "massive consumer push"
They were marketing to developers, but they were marketing it as something that would be useful for consumer applications. They've admitted that that was a mistake, at least in the state Glass was in when it was introduced.
The king of successful consumer products, Apple, doesn't ship out public prototypes to developers to figure out what it can do. it's a terrible strategy for launching a consumer product and one reason Google sucks at consumer products.
And the glamor. If you started on the manufacturing side, it wouldn't have any caché when walking down the street. But if you started with a bunch of models on a runway wearing these, you would.
They tried going lux consumer and failed. But if they went the manufacturing route first, they would've burned any chance of the other.
They could've used the manufacturing side to enhance the tech, get the components to a cheaper price point, maybe even slim down the whole thing and then when they felt ready to enter the consumer market, spin it off as something new under another consumer-only brand.
Or they could have let someone else take all of the "glasshole" flak, then arrived after that with a trusted, safe, Google product that addressed the concerns.
As they say, you can spot the pioneers because they're the ones with the arrows sticking out of their backs.
Except you don't really know that. Hindsight 20/20 means that the current place seems inevitable. Here's an alternate future:
- People were initially apprehensive of the high price, but a small dedicated fan base bought it up
- Shortly after launch, Google drops the price by a $200
- People deride it's feature set, commenting on the things it "should" have included
- Despite that, the interface is very good
- A year later, the next version is released, fixing all the missing problems people complained about
- The item becomes a must-have tech, front page of Wired articles are written about it, etc, etc
The difference is the original iPhone was actually useful for things people actually wanted to do, and reasonably priced for those uses. They sold 1M units in the first quarter, making it one of the most popular phones in the world at launch.
Apple spent many years creating the iphone. First they created a tablet computer, Jobs rejected it as not ready, not good enough. They then built a phone based on ipod touch wheel. Jobs rejected it as not good enough. He let the tablet team try to build a phone and eventually after much work and improvements, finally shipped it because it actually worked well for consumers, and could do many things consumers wanted (phone, texts, music, web, etc)
Google got glass working and said, what's will consumers use it for? We don't know, so let's dump prototypes on developers and have them figure it out!
Eventually some company, probably Apple, will build something like Glass that consumers will want, but it won't be Google. They don't get consumers (except for high functioning types) and their product development/approval process is a mess.
Yeah. I really don't get why they focused on its gargoyle feature, which (rightly so) raised serious concerns about privacy, and downplayed AR. The obvious target market, other than geeks, would have been bikers. They'd find both gargoyle and AR very useful for swarm coordination. And military, of course. Perfect for infantry. But that's probably in quiet development.
> which (rightly so) raised serious concerns about privacy
I always thought the privacy concerns were overblown:
If it's about users surreptitiously recording others, wearing the really conspicuous gadget known to contain a camera on your head is a really ineffectual way to do that. A smartphone in a shirt pocket would be better, and surveillance devices intended to be concealed better (and cheaper) still.
If it's about Google or app makers getting recordings, that doesn't seem nearly as bad as the various always-listening voice recognition tech in popular use today. Perhaps it might if people were wearing them 24/7, but they don't have the battery life for that.
It was never about secretly taking photos. It was all about having an obvious contraption on your head that might not be recording or not. That makes people a) uncomfortable and b) conclude that you either don't care or just lack the social skills to realize that. It's not like recording secretly with a concealed cellphone, it's like overtly aiming your cellphone camera at someone while interacting with them, whether it's actually recording or not.
One might argue that people should get used to that, and at some point they probably will, but turns out it's a somewhat more difficult task trying to adapt people to your product than vice versa.
It has a light on the front that comes on if the camera is active. Do you think most of the people who were uncomfortable were unaware of that, or didn't trust that people using it wouldn't disable the light?
The former would make a lot of sense to me. That it has a camera is obvious, and knowing how the light works requires a modicum of research. The latter, not so much, as we're back in the realm of secret recording.
I agree in principle, but I would personally never return to a doctor who had one of these things on their face (like the one in the article photo). I see all the use cases for field operators, but it remains (to me) as creepy in any interpersonal setting as it did with the consumer launch.
> this is where Glass should have started. The price point, social stigma/issues, and use cases all screamed "business applications!".
You've put the cart before the horse. The price point is not fixed. You don't make something and then look around for a convenient market. Google glass was also designed backwards, they maximized screen quality and watched it fail in the market due to high price and shit battery life when what they should have done is designed up from a 12+ hour battery life.
I agree that this is the better starting market for Glass.
I think they saw the difference between Apple and Blackberry and believed that penetrating the consumer market first would drive demand within the business market.
Many people said this on the initial run/introduction of Glass. Industrial applications are definitely where they should have started. I'm just glad they've made a comeback and will hopefully get broader use in the medical field and military as well.
Consumer tech may be where the glamour and scale are, but it's not always the best market entry point.