“I've worked on a number of high-profile failures”

> The theme here is that the cultures that arise around products, methods, and inventions often grow to exclude discussion of their fatal flaws, and instead find elaborate ways to paper over them -- to find more and more clever ways to pretend they don't exist.

While it may seem that way in hindsight, I am not sure this is a valid way of finding good projects. I am sure that the designers of the iPhone were nervous people would not accept a phone without a physical keyboard, but they found a way to make it useful and preferable, and today no phones have physical keyboards.

In my opinion, "papering" over issues is often how we build new exciting things. All technologies have shortcomings, but finding ways to integrate those shortcomings with human behavior or even making them strengths can lead to really interesting products. Sometimes it fails, and that is okay. I'd still rather have people trying though!

Google glass wasn't/isn't a failure as a whole. It very much exists today, as an enterprise product for niche use cases.

As a personal wearable, the energy density of the battery and/or compute power is not there.

TL;DR: if this guy is on your team, you're hosed.

At a place I worked a Colonel came in to give a pep talk about the IED work we were doing. He was talking about his time in Iraq/Afghanistan: he was in a jeep and his driver was killed by an IED. A few years later his jeep was again blown up by an IED, and his driver was killed.

My takeaway was: don't drive with this guy.

There was an article a few years ago about people that buy products that fail. They bought an IBM PC Jr, a Coleco Adam, the Zune, etc. They are like toxic customers...not that they're bad customers, just they choose products that die in the market. They're basically negative influencers.

I never thought there'd be employees like that, but I'm wrong.