Why Google Glass will fail and why this will not stop the success of smart glasses

Original author: Victor Haydin
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Smart glasses are arguably the most promising family of wearable devices available on the market. Google Glass is the most interesting gadget among them. Yes, Google Glass is a beautiful and cool device. They have a great design. They are small and futuristic. After all, Google Glass is a typical Google product, simple and cool at the same time. Despite this, I think that Glass will not be successful as a product and fail sooner or later.
Disclaimer: all of the following is my personal opinion and does not express the official position of the company in which I work or the R&D team that I lead. Honestly, some of my employees argue with me that Google Glass is a great device that will conquer the world, etc. Of course, I'm exaggerating a bit in this article, but still it seems to me that Glass will fail sooner or later.
So what's wrong with him? I see two problems:
1. The device itself. I will describe its main shortcomings below.
2. Its positioning and market. Next, I will try to draw some interesting historical analogies and project them into the future.

Five reasons why Google Glass sucks



So what's wrong with Google Glass? When you watch ads or listen to Google employees who promote Glass, the device looks so futuristic and cool that you begin to believe that this is the future, and you are looking for an order button. But your attitude can change a lot when you finally get the device at your disposal. We bought a couple of pieces for our R&D team a couple of months ago and ... well, I would not say that it was a big disappointment, but the device is very far from being considered ready to enter the market. Here is a list of the five things that most disappoint Google Glass:

1. Battery. 4 hours of work in standard mode or 40 minutes of watching YouTube. And this according to the official specification, in reality - even worse. Really, Google? You made a wearable device that dies before lunch, even if the charge was 100% when you drank coffee in the morning. Compared to this, even my Nexus 4, which barely lasts 24 hours, looks like a very energy-efficient device.
2. Overheating. Google Glass overheats like an iron if you shoot a video for longer than 10 seconds or use a heavy application like World Lens for at least a minute. Sooner or later you will see the message “Glass must cool down to run smoothly” and you will not be able to use the device for some time. My staff often place the device on the windowsill to cool it when debugging or testing heavy code. It’s good that it’s winter.
3. Voice recognition . It just sucks. Perhaps if you are a native English speaker and live in Caliphony or the UK, it works for you in most cases. At least until you try to google some non-English word or send a message to your Polish friend named Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz(I want to say right away that I have nothing against the Poles, this is nothing more than an example). By the way, it would also be interesting to hear feedback from Scottish users . In fact, the worst in this situation is that you cannot edit what the device recognized using the keyboard on your smartphone, for example. Seriously, was it really so difficult to implement such functionality?
4. Reliability . The screen on our first device died in less than three months from the date of purchase. Other users also complain of similar problems . It is clear that the technology is new and not run-in, but still it is a little disappointing if you take into account all the noise around the device.
5. Price. Google Glass should cost $ 300, not 1500. Given all the problems described above, 1500 is too much for this gadget.
I must admit that issues 3, 4, and 5 are likely to be resolved in the next version of Google Glass. But 1 and 2 are much tighter nuts, even for the giant level Google.
Despite these significant problems, I still do not think that they are the main reason why this gadget is waiting for oblivion.
Here I want to make a very short historical digression in order to try to draw an analogy with a slightly different market.

A very short history of smartphones


Today, many people believe that the smartphone was invented by Apple when it launched the iPhone. I think that this does not apply to Habr’s readers, but nevertheless I’ll try to recall what happened to this market before the iPhone was launched. Despite the fact that Apple made a huge breakthrough and brought smartphones to the mass consumer market, smartphones appeared long before the iPhone announcement.

It is enough to recall four of them:
1. IBM Simon - the first smartphone in the world. A $ 899 brick-like device with a built-in phone, PDA, and even a touchscreen. It's hard to believe that it was released in 1992, 17 years before the iPhone, but that's true.
2. Some of you may remember Palm devices- They were cool, had almost all the features of modern smartphones and were widely used in the 90s and early 2000s.
3. Nokia's communicators were generally incredibly popular at that time - I personally dreamed about this when I was a student.
4. And, of course, Blackberry - it's hard to imagine a 2000s manager without him in your pocket.
What unites all these devices? They were not mass devices for the consumer market, they were positioned as devices for business. At that stage of technology development, it was much easier to make the device sharpened for several professional use scenarios than to make it for everyone. And, just as importantly, it’s much easier to educate and inspire business users to use a new device for them, especially if they see how it improves their productivity.
But even despite the fact that smartphones of the era before the iPhone were much less common, they actually made it possible to make a little more fun, which predetermined the subsequent success of smartphones in the mass consumer market:
1. They helped develop technologies - size, energy efficiency, screens, batteries, wireless technologies, etc.
2. They prepared the market for a new type of device - similar to your business communicator, only better and more useful in everyday life.
3. Classic smartphones were not so bad and still occupy a significant part of niche markets. I do not mean the wide market of business communicators, it is too large to be ignored by new players, but in specific scenarios, for example, when a user needs non-standard sensors or improved features, you can still see similar devices.
Why am I writing about smartphones, because an article about smart glasses? Because, in my opinion, Google Glass is not the iPhone of the smart glasses market, but rather something between IBM Simon and Palm Pilot.

Oh good


What is good about Google Glass is that they created a huge movement in the market, inspired a lot of people to work on their version of smart glasses, and drew investors' attention to this type of device.

Many interesting concepts have appeared in the world, including those that use Google Glass. For example, our experiment with Google Glass - we created it to demonstrate how the game looked in real life with Google Glass. I must admit that this is nothing more than a prototype and in practice it can be very difficult to bring it to mind, given the limitations, some of which I mentioned above. Other great examples include the New York Police experiment , the use of Google Glass in surgery , and logistics.and many other scenarios. What is bad in all these examples is that Google itself does not position Glass as a device for business, so most likely all these experiments will either die or switch to other devices that are more tailored for business.
There are some promising startups that make their own smart glasses. Personally, I really like Lumus , but there are many other examples: Meta SpaceGlasses , GlassUp , Recon Jet and others. And, of course, corporations such as Sony , Samsung , SAP and even BMW have already joined this race.
It is important to understand that most of these organizations are not working on “smart” glasses for any occasion that should take over the world. Their attempts are more focused and focused on specific business needs. And, unlike Google Glass, they have a very good chance of being successful. All these products will slowly but surely capture the business device market and lay the foundation for the future capture of the mass consumer market. People will get used to seeing cops and doctors wearing smart glasses. And then some corporation will come and make the device for the mass market, as Apple did with the iPhone. It could even be Google itself if they are still in this market.

Conclusion


Again, I exaggerate a bit in this article. Google Glass may have a bright future. But it may not. What I believe in is that in the next 5-10 years we will see many examples of how smart glasses will change business, people and, ultimately, the world. The only question is will it be Google Glass or some other device? In any case, the future is already here.

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