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Comment by ivanplenty | Hacker News Reader

Agree on whole comment and about the need to connect with customers, but there is a subtlety with this line I would ask you caveat:

> Whatever they like doing, it's most likely not anything called "computing" and they just want more time to do that thing but find themselves too often distracted by "computing" to do it.

You're right, but unfortunately there are a lot of instances where the data initially shows otherwise. One naive way of looking at Google glass, for example, is that the early adopters did want wearable computing... and from that conclusion other electronics manufactures should make more types of wearables: watches, pedometers, shoes, etc. Surprise, surprise... many of the wearables have failed (looking at you Samsung) despite based heavily on the initial market research because they didn't actually do anything useful.

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Isn't that just failing to listen to the customers you talked to? As in, they got half of it right - they talked to customers. They just didn't get the listening part right.

In the case of wearable computing, customers didn't say they wanted to wear their phone on their arm or strap a phone to their heads. They wanted hands free, no fuss, error free access to information. Same market as stuff like Siri or Kinect. The problem is simply the implementation. Trying to tap on the little watch screen is god awful. Trying to get Siri to understand what you want as soon as you try to ask for something useful is almost impossible. The implementation falls down hard - hard enough to be unusable.

Same thing for mobile browsers. I remember really wanting a pocket version of internet explorer because of how useful it would be. Actually using it on the old Windows Mobile devices was basically impossible though because the implementation was terrible and unusable. Today however, I use my mobile phone's browser all the time because the implementation is good. There was nothing wrong with what I was asking for - quick pocket access to the web - but there was a lot wrong in what Microsoft thought I wanted - a handicapped version of their web browser that didn't work.

Talking is not listening or understanding. Wearable computing will definitely be a major hit once someone works out a good implementation.

I would upvote you, but alas new to posting here.

Yeah, agree that listening was the culprit. I guess what I'm saying is that many of the young people hear "I want a mobile version of my browser" and go off to build the windows CE version based on your literal desires. The fix to that doomed behavior isn't better listening, per se, because that connotes if you hear every word you understand what the customer really wants.

Most great products address an unarticulated need. In many ways, these unarticulated needs are NP Complete: They are hard to find solutions in polynomial time but are extremely easy to verify.

I'm not sure that's really any different. Google advertised Glass ahead of time with a very strong message: quicker and easier capturing of fleeting moments. You don't take out your phone, hit the power button, unlock the screen, find the camera app, wait for it to respond, focus, snap, tap the preview image, tap the share icon, scroll through the list of apps, tap the Facebook icon, tap "share". You say "take a picture". You say "share on Facebook". It's 100% "please, no, not more computing".

Glass' success is tied to delivering on that core premise. If Glass is currently not fulfilling it, then its popularity is strictly in being a status symbol, meaning it's ultimately a fad, a fashion statement (that's probably why you don't really see it on the east coast). Without fulfilling that promise, it's doomed in its own time as well.

Your examples absolutely will be failures and it is for this reason. Pedometers and wifi enabled shoes, the way I've seen them implemented, cause the user to have to do more work. The user can't just put them on and run and forget they are there and their running will improve. The user has to configure it with their system. Then they have to remember their login every time they want to look at their charts. Figure out how to make sense out of the chart. Should they be running farther, or would pushing faster be better? A graph of distance over time doesn't tell you that. The product creates distracting work for the user and THAT is why it fails.

Make that pedometer upload to a server and have a physical trainer email the user personalized instructions on how to improve their running every week and you have a pedometer that means something to users.

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