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Comment by hosh | Hacker News Reader

Ok, if we're using this framework, here are some interesting thought experiments:

(1) What is Google Glass disrupting? What are the faulty assumptions about it? ("iPhone was a pocket Mac, not a better phone. Google Glasses is a ____, not a ?")

(2) What are the AI / Machine Learning disrupting? (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, IBM, MS) ("AI is a ____, not a ?")

(3) What are the Kiva Systems robots disrupting? ("Kiva System robots is a ____, not warehouse automation? Not ?")

(4) What are 3D Printers disrupting? Certainly not mass-production factories.

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What is Google Glass disrupting?

Everything. There's never been a portable computing platform as aggressive in integrating with the physical (albeit visual) environment before. It will make what mobile disruption did to desktop computing look like what electronic typewriters did to their mechanical predecessors.

Anything that people currently use their eyes for can and probably will be disrupted.

Shopping: price comparisons in physical shops will be automatic, and no longer make you look like a dick.

Sports: Any team sports will be changed by the immediate knowledge of where all your team is. Any endurance sport will change with the zero-effort monitoring of your vital statistics[1].

Dating: All those "mobile dating apps" that work in theory but kind of fail in the real world might actually have a chance (assuming people get used to people wearing Glass and no longer laugh at them)

[1] No more http://chrisfroomelookingatstems.tumblr.com/

Ok, if you had to fill in the blank, what would fill in? "Google Glasses are not better smartphones, they are ____ "?

By its very nature that question constrains the possibilities of Glass by attempting to label it. Falling into that trap leads to less insight, not more.

By way of analogy, one could say a car was a faster horse-and-buggy, but an airplane was something new & different. A telegram was a faster form of mail, but a telephone was new & different.

A good example of the lack of insight that kind of question leads to is the apocryphal quote[1] by IBM's CEO Thomas J. Watson: I think there is a world market for maybe five computers. Even if he didn't say it, the point was that those who shared that view had labelled computers as "massive calculating machines". That was true, but missed the bigger picture.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Watson#Famous_misquot...

"By its very nature that question constrains the possibilities of Glass by attempting to label it. Falling into that trap leads to less insight, not more."

Haha, that's a nice piece of rhetorical sophistry.

It is good to keep an open mind on the different possibilities. However, the art of strategic thinking requires you to make decisions in the face of uncertainty. Until you can fill in that blank, you can't make decisions right now and place your bets.

That is the point of this exercise. There is a key insight in the article, and it can be applied to something like the Google Glasses. If you cannot discern it, you're more likely to be running off of unexamined emotions instead of a vision of what's to come.

1) I'm not smart enough to guess on that one.

2) Education and reference resources. I now longer have to spend hours and hours looking up information and synthesizing it myself, I can get an AI to do it for me. (crossing fingers that it synthesizes it like I want it to)

3) Thieving, lazy, sloppy warehouse workers (no offense). The amount of stuff that gets stolen and "missing" out of fulfillment centers is astronomical. Plus, it's basically a a task that doesn't require human level intelligence. What do I need to ship? Where is it? Is it in stock?

4) Service Bureaus and Machine Shops. Prototyping physical things is expensive and time consuming and requires lots of skill to do. When making any kind of physical thing, the equivalent of compiling and debugging, is to run off a prototype at a Bureau. It's so onerous a problem that very few organizations even bother to make more than half a dozen physical prototypes of an item before committing to production. In the end, it'll probably just mean more variety of cheap junk we can buy off of Amazon.

(2) and (3) are interesting responses. But I don't think it is actually using the key insight described in this article. That key insight being that people compare it to what's come before, and that comparison becomes a blinder for it's actual advantages.

(4) will happen, but I think the scope is far too small; again it also has the blinders that does not take advantage of the key insight from the article. With 3D printers, you wouldn't buy products off of Amazon so much as buy licenses to fabrication blueprints to print out a product in your garage, similar to the way you can now buy ebooks, digital music, and digital movies from Amazon without the physical product.

4 - I...somewhat disagree. I spent a few weeks looking into current and future 3d printing tech, and outside of some very limited use-cases would I consider that the output quality and materials mix from any 3d printing tech to be a threat to traditional manufacturing.

It's a nice idea, but it's just very very far away from happening.

Even relatively simple items right now are not something that are even close to being duplicable in any current or emerging 3d printing tech.

For example, there is nothing on the horizon that will enable me to 3d print the equivalent of a working $5 104-key keyboard.

Now if I want to buy all the electronics and internals and spend a few hours printing and assembling a custom keyboard (because my time is free right?) then yeah, I might be able to 3d print something of use.

I'm actually looking around my office now and every thing I see fits into 1 of two categories

a) Not feasible to 3d print the item e.g. a keyboard

b) Cheaper to buy it and get it some other way e.g. the red Solo cup I'm drinking some water out of

That's a great point, and illustrates that blinder effect discussed in the article. The Blackberry executives and engineers also did not think that the iphone would sell well at a higher price point and a lower battery life.

My point in bring up all of this is that the key insight in this article is not about disruption, but about refactoring your base assumptions. When you see 3D printers as to what is really is, but has not yet been, then you start to see other technologies that are coming together to be able to fabricate things in your garage. Yes, that does include being able to print circuitry directly into the printer -- and yes, there are people working on that right now.

This is a lot closer to happening than you think it is :-)

I think the disruption potential is easy to see, but predicting it's success impossible, because it depends almost entirely on the company's execution over the course of many years.

For example tons of people were super excited in 2007 because they had a full unix computer in their pockets. Some had the iPhone and some had a Nokia N810. The difference of course is that Apple remained focused and executed very well over the next 5 years whereas Nokia...

To use Glass as an example, it's simple: it wants to be the primary UI to your data and apps. Today you look at the output on the screen and feed it input via voice and the touch thingy, in a decade it reads your brainwaves. People aren't wed to tapping on flat rectangles any more than they were wed to keyboards and styluses.

But whether it's successful or not? No one knows, because it depends entirely on what Google does over the next 5-10 years.

Google Glass is, ideally, the new smartphone. In the sense that it could change how people interact with the world in much the same way that smartphones did, but at the next level. A more personal, immediate level.

It's not just a smartphone stuck on your face. It's your constant link to all the information you need.

Isn't the point of using this frame of thought that one needs to look beyond? Just as, "iphones are not better phones, they are computing devices", then wouldn't it be, "Google glasses are not better smartphones, they are ____ ?"

Launched products are disruptive when they start taking over functionality that other products were once doing. Google Glass is, for now, a publicity vehicle to show that Google is forward thinking.

Only when the product is launched will we learn whether it is disruptive.

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