Google’s Platform Wins and Losses
Why Chromecast matters and why Glass doesn’t
Like most of the tech world, my husband and I are early adopters. We were among the first of our friends to have iPads, Fitbits, OUYA, and have given probably too much money to Kickstarters ranging from a board game that teaches children how to code (in this case — a very early adoption, as we don’t even have kids) to bioluminescent plants.
5 minutes as a Glasshole
When Glass came out, I had to try it. I had some friends who were in a special development group, and got early access to Glass, so I basically bugged them until they let me try it on.
It was a resoundingly bad experience. The features were really limited, and the UI sucked. I wore Glass to a bar for about 5 minutes, until I realized how I looked, twitching my head and talking to myself. I stopped bugging my friends to borrow their Glasses. The product just had a much more limited use case than I had expected.
Casting call
This Christmas, we got a Chromecast. There was much less hype around the Chromecast launch, so I wasn’t exactly sure what we were getting into, and the packaging wasn’t exactly impressive. We’re going to put a USB stick into the back of the TV? Why?
OH. What a great experience. Plug-n-play casting of Netflix videos for our nieces and nephews from my iPad. Easy sharing of YouTube videos for the adults to laugh at. It made all of our other media devices extensible to the huge screen in our living room. We were hooked, and stayed up until 3am one night watching movies we’d already seen, just because we were blown away by how easy and frictionless the setup had been.
Strategic beauty
The best part about Chromecast for me is its strategic genius. Into a living room crammed with Xboxes, OUYAs, Rokus, and Peels comes a little USB stick that you shove into the back of your set and which is compatible with basically any device.
This is exactly the right play for a latecomer to a market like home-based media devices, which has strong network effects — adopt competitors’ standards, so consumers don’t have to give up the devices they love and developers don’t have to create something 100% new for your platform. It’s smart financially, and it’s really user-friendly.
The difference
It should have been harder to launch Chromecast than it was to launch Glass. Like I said, the living room is crowded. Wearables are a near-blue-ocean opportunity with few competitors. Why has Glass bombed so hard?
Positioning problems: F1RST!!
It’s a basic issue with marketing, and it has to do with positioning. When it comes to positioning, the company or product with the top spot in people’s minds for a given product category takes the lion’s share of market revenue. This brand is usually the first to have launched the most useful version of a product.
For example: What do you think of when I say the word “soda?” Coke. What about “painkillers?” Probably Tylenol. “Search engines?” The Big G (it wasn’t the first, but it was the first to satisfy users’ pain points around accurate search results).
Glass: Everyone’s second-favorite wearable camera
Glass was initially only useful as a wearable camera. One of those already existed, and it’s widely-beloved: GoPro. So Glass was always going to be #2, but it didn’t bother to market itself that way.
It was also really unclear what problem Glass was trying to solve. Is it a serious issue that I don’t have augmented reality in my life? Actually, no. We currently live in a state of constant information overload. Why do I need meta-data about every tree or person I look at? There was no focus on making Glass actually helpful to people.
Chromecast: A set-top box on a stick
On the other hand, Chromecast solves a big problem. I have a bunch of media — songs, videos, etc. — on various devices, and I want to share them with a bunch of people who happen to be in the same room with me. We’re not all going to gather around my iPhone. But we will sit in front of the TV.
Also, in terms of positioning, Chromecast was first. No other TV-extender came in the form of a USB stick. It’s ridiculously portable and easy, especially compared to clunky set-top boxes. And — oh — it just works. So Chromecast nabbed the coveted #1 spot in set-top boxes, even though it’s not even a set-top box. Bravo.
It’s not all bad
Glass may have real potential as an enterprise or professional product. Think about how great it would be for surgeons to have heads-up displays of a patient’s vital stats during surgery, or for an electrician to be able to get data on whether a line is hot. Glass might get there.
Chromecast, however, is there now. Google should focus on building out partnerships for this product (streaming Amazon video, for instance), and on getting it into families’ hands for the holiday season.
Lessons learned
The current best-practice in tech recruiting is to position your company as being engineering-led. The thought is that this will attract engineers and resolve the hiring bottleneck around tech talent that many companies experience today.
But, as Glass illustrates, the idea of being engineering-led at the expense of all else is a mirage. Don’t discount the importance of marketing, or you’re going to have massive flops like Glass on your hands. Flops cause serious morale problems among the engineers that you’ve worked so hard to recruit. They’re also expensive, and they make really smart people feel horrible.
The solution: A more collaborative culture
Tech companies need to be more collaborative. Letting engineers know that they can take a leadership role is great, but I guarantee you that every engineer you know would rather work on a successful technologically-sexy product than a failed technologically-sexy product. And engineering alone won’t get you there.
If you’re a PM, present the idea of your product to your marketing team before you start building. Ask them to craft positioning, and empower them to tell you that this product needs to be shelved. It might send you back to the drawing board, but it might also save your team’s morale, and your company a lot of time and money.
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