Is Google Glass a Failure?
It’s all a matter of perspective
There are a lot of articles going around right now on Google Glass. Is it fashionable? Is it fair to kick someone out of a movie theatre/restaurant for wearing them? Does it have mass appeal? Is it the form factor that hinders consumer adoption, or is it the lack of unique utility?
Say what you want about Glass, but at least it invites conversation. So maybe we’re looking at Glass all wrong (no pun intended). Maybe Glass is more like art than a product.
Art, by definition, pushes boundaries. John Maeda, previously president of the Rhode Island School of Design and a design thought leader, summarizes it nicely:
“Art makes questions”. Maeda argues, if you don’t know what you feel/think about it, perfect — art is doing its job.
From this perspective then, does it matter if Glass is not widely adopted? Glass challenges the way we think about connected devices and was the bulky snowflake that triggered the avalanche of conversations around the “Internet of Things”, hurling it into the stadium of mainstream thought like a hard packed snowball in a snowball fight.
If we think Google Glass is like art then, we can argue it’s a success because we’re not sure what to think of it, and it pushes boundaries.
Or maybe Glass is a stopgap. If there’s anything I’ve learned from observing how Google evolves their products, it’s that they are willing to put their betas out in the wild, learn, pull it back, incorporate learnings and drop a v-deuce that is tenfold better than the initial version. (Ready for contact lenses anyone?)
But why would Google put out a stopgap product? To understand this, we’d have to go back to a little thing called the iPad. When the iPad first came out, there was a lot of criticism that it was just a giant iPhone. Later, I realized why the iPad needed to be a microevolution of the iPhone.
People adopt products they can understand enough to believe in its utility in their lives. If the gap between the consumer’s comprehension of the product and the product itself is too wide, adoption isn’t even an option and it’s deemed “before its time”. Need proof? Look up any of the following:
NetRadio → Pandora
WebTV → Roku, Apple TV
Nintendo Power Glove → Wiimote
The IXI System → iPod
Anything and everything by Nikola Tesla
On the flip side, if the innovation gap is too small, adoption can occur, but it’s likely not a game changer. Examples of this are product evolutions that merely increase features, or decrease cost or bugs. Guy Kawasaki describes this as the “better, faster, cheaper” model of product development. Nothing significant or memorable comes out of this model.
The trick to launching an innovative but market-viable product is to find the gap that “early adopters” can manage. Why focus on early adopters? Because they have the biggest gait. Stay with me for a minute while we back up.
According to Everett M. Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations, there are 5 kinds of potential customers: Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, and Laggards. You may have heard these terms popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point.
Early Adopters pave the way for the Early Majority, and the Early Majority paves the way for the Late Majority, and so on. I picture this like a canyon.
Imagine that you are on the left side of the canyon, trying to reach the right side. The distance in the chasm is initially filled by the Innovators, who minimizes the gap for Early Adopters. Now the Early Adopters come, and do the same for the Early Majority. Every group that comes before closes the chasm a little bit for the next group and contributes to the collective “technicultural” (yes, I made this up) understanding that we all share. Think back on how the iPad infiltrated the market, eventually reaching the hands of your grandparents.
Steve Jobs was the master of finding the exact distance in the chasm — just wide enough for the Early Adopters to reach and comprehend, but not fall through. He didn’t go after your grandmother first because that’s not the direction adoption flows.
This leads me back to Google Glass and why I think it’s a stopgap product. If so much of the conversations around Glass are about form factor and the Internet of Things, then with every blog, every coffee shop chat, we’re closing the chasm. Maybe Google is setting itself up for that perfect distance. From that perspective then, Glass again cannot be seen as a failure, but as a necessary rung on the ladder of an inevitable product evolution.
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References and Resources:
“How art, technology and design inform creative leaders” by John Maeda http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAuDCOl9qrk
“10 Brilliant Startups That Failed Because They Were Ahead Of Their Time” http://www.businessinsider.com/startup-failures-2011-5?op=1
“Technology Before Its Time: 9 Products That Were Too Early to Market” http://www.techspot.com/article/723-tech-ahead-of-its-time
“10 Inventions That Were Ahead of Their Time” http://www.technewsdaily.com/3651-10-inventions-time.html
“12 Lessons Steve Jobs Taught Guy Kawasaki” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DR_wX0EwOMM
“Early adopters” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_adopter
“Diffusion of innovations” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations
