Consumer tech may be where the glamour and scale are, but it's not always the best market entry point.
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.
Unless you believe that he's an omniscient psychic who somehow has insider knowledge of his hiring process.
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.
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.
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.)
"We have this cool thing, but we're not sure were it's most applicable. Lets just put it out in the world and see what people do with it!"
Which is what they did. The data they gained from that experiment no doubt led to this.
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.
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.
Similarly:
http://www.vogue.com/article/the-final-frontier-google-glass... http://www.vogue.com/article/fka-twigs-throughglass-google-g...
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/25/technology/biggest-eyewea...
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.
As they say, you can spot the pioneers because they're the ones with the arrows sticking out of their backs.
- 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
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.
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.
I do agree that ubiquitous smartphones are just as bad.
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.
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.
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 think they saw the difference between Apple and Blackberry and believed that penetrating the consumer market first would drive demand within the business market.