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Comment by portmanteaufu | Hacker News Reader

The first paragraph says it all.

> "Yesterday I made the call to return my Google Glass. After months of anticipation, a trip to New York, and several weeks with the device, after much deliberation I decided the device wasn't ready for prime time and my $1,500 would be better spent elsewhere."

He shelled out for a beta product and was disappointed when it was, well, a beta product. More than that, even -- it was a beta version of a product which is the very first of its kind. I'm glad he was able to get his money back, but I'm not sure why he was surprised.

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While I get this sentiment, in fairness, I think the reason we expect people not to be underwhelmed by beta testing is because it's beta testing. If you ask people to shell out $1500 for the privilege, you've now raised expectations - they're not just beta testing, they're buying a significant luxury good.

I get why G charged - when you get people to invest in an item, especially by weeding out the less-passionate, you bias them towards strong positive responses - but they did cross "beta testing" and "luxury goods" wires.

I don't get this. The current release is meant for developers, journalists and "technologists." Google was very up front about this. It's not intended to be a consumer product. Complaining about it at this point seems akin to someone getting a console devkit and complaining there's no games available and those cost 10s of thousands of dollars.

Really, the alternative is to not get access until the thing is done or to create some sort of secret selective list for early access.

Complaining about it did get his blog to (at least) the top 4 on hacker news.

Call it beta or whatnot... but Google was very up-front that this was the initial release of the product, and that they wanted to select a limited size team to get them out in the world, to people who would give them perspective. He wrote that he'd use it and blog/journal about it and whatnot.

If he wanted an end product that was polished, he mislead google and misled himself.

In some environments (e.g., hospitals, military, probably police and first responders), $1500 is fair market value if the utility is there. Consider the rise of pagers. In 1950, at introduction, they were the equivalent of $100/month in today's dollars.

The Catch-22 for Google was establishing the value adds for wider adoption. They did an amazing job of launching the beta, considering that challenge.

> they're not just beta testing, they're buying a significant luxury good.

I would disagree. I'd say they're paying to get early developer access which could give them a significant advantage in the market.

Is a $10,000 console devkit a luxury good?

If you want to find out if that console is fun to use? Yes.

Probably the 10k would be a bigger showstopper for people that are 'just curious' to even give it a try, but in this case this guy seems like someone interested in a sneak preview.

The devkit buyer hopefully plans to build stuff, _generate_ money with it. It should be an instrument to generate income, the money is spent on 'tools'.

Glass? That's a gadget. I said it elsewhere on the thread: I do like the comparison with a developer kit, but .. most people that seem to get one/use one (even the ones mentioned in the very article) look like end users, trying to get a sneak preview. Not 'I want to build my business on Glass apps' type of guys.

Yes it's a beta product, but it's a beta product that costs about 2200 bucks and a day+ of time in order to get to a Glass pickup center.

I just got mine, and I'm 50/50 on keeping it. I don't think anyone is faulting Google for the device, it's just that the value is negligible at its current price point.

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