Google Glass was a flop because it wasn’t ready for consumers
Google Glass was neither fashionable nor seamless
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Despite Google’s best marketing efforts, which even included a live demo featuring skydivers, stunt bikers, and wall scalers, and a promotional stint at New York Fashion Week, Glass simply couldn’t summon sustained interest from consumers.“It just wasn’t cool” enough, according to Harvard Business Review, which suggested that Google had attempted to “buy cool” through product placements in fashion magazines, on runways, and via influencers rather than earning it organically. In fact, Forbes accused Glass of “literally [making people] look like cyborgs.”It also didn’t integrate as seamlessly into the lives of the early adopters as Google’s marketing suggested it would. At a TED event, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said that Glass was motivated by a desire to “make something that frees your hands, your eyes, and ears.” He added his vision when he started Google was “that eventually you wouldn’t have to have a search query at all. You’d just have information come to you as you needed it.”While the Glass prototype simply wasn’t advanced enough to fulfill Brin’s vision, society also pushed back against the product that seemed to be fraught with privacy concerns. A bar in Seattle banned Google Glass, saying that it violated their policy of not allowing patrons to film and taking photos without consent.
Google argues Glass wasn’t a total flop
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Despite what seems like a clear failure, Brin said that over the lifetime of the project “we’ve learned an amazing amount.” This was echoed by Tony Fadell, Google Glass project lead, who added that “early Glass efforts have broken ground and allowed us to learn what’s important to consumers and enterprises alike,” according to the New York Times.
Speaking with the NYT, Designer Diane von Furstenberg, who collaborated on the prototype design, added that she didn’t have regrets because “Google Glass was nothing short of revolutionary. This was the first time that people talked about wearable technology. Technology moves on faster and faster, and Google Glass will always be part of history.”
Wearable technology is ubiquitous today, as von Furstenberg predicted – although not in the form of smart glasses. However, Glass isn’t actually dead. It lives on as Glass Enterprise Technology, which focuses on making hands-on and frontline jobs safer and easier by offering on-the-job training and instructions, along with real-time collaboration.
This may seem like a consolidated prize, but even the early versions of Glass showed industrial promise, according to Mark Frydenberg, a senior lecturer at Bentley University. Some surgeons used it to record operations, consult medical information, and contact other medical experts. It’s encouraging to see that those years of development and user feedback have resulted in a better, more practical iteration of the original device – because isn’t that how innovation improves the world, after all?