Don't Be A Glasshole

I'm always slightly skeptical whenever a new product is about to be launched which promises to change the world. From a marketing aspect I don't have a problem with it because you wouldn't expect anything less - it is not like a company is going to put out a press release and say something like, "Yeah, we have a new thing coming out. It's pretty good and we think you'll like it." Obviously, when it is time for a sale you go bigger than that. I just wonder if these companies are setting themselves up for automatic failure because these days it is nearly impossible to create a product which actually changes the world overnight. Sure, there have been plenty of technological advances that have made our lives much better, but I feel like they were under-sold and allowed to build a following at a natural pace. For example, I don't remember a big iPod campaign yet one day I looked up and everyone had one. It's always a more gradual shift and takes a few generations to get the bugs out. And that is if people even buy it. I think we all remember the hoopla surrounding the Segway scooters which were supposed to drastically change the way major cities did business as people predicted they would become the principle mode of transportation. Obviously, that didn't happen because the only time you see Segways these days is when tourists are on over-priced tours of a city and not looking at the attractions because they are too busy trying desperately not to fall. With that as my last frame of reference it is easy to see why I am not getting too excited about the product which has been getting all the buzz this week - Google Glasses.

In case you have missed the videos, Google Glasses are a mini-screen which goes a few inches in front of one of your eyes and is connected to the internet. The system is voice-controlled and you can make the program look up information on whatever you are looking at, give you turn-by-turn directions or shoot a video or picture of exactly what you are looking at. Trust me, if you have ever seen a spy movie in the last decade you have seen the inspiration for Google Glasses. They have been teasing its release for months, but they are clearly getting closer to the sale date at the end of the year because Google did the smartest of marketing ideas - they gave them to celebrities and journalists for free and released them into the wild to post a bunch of videos of themselves playing with the glasses and let them do all the work. It's actually very savvy because they are essentially infomercials that Google didn't have to produce. (You probably expect the celebrities to be the ones making all the videos, but the tech journalists are way worse. The only thing tech journalists love more than free stuff is being able to play with that free stuff before it is available to the general public and then gloat about having it under the guise of research.) By the end of the week it seemed like every site I visited had at least one Google Glasses video for you to look at. At first it was kind of cool. Again, that was at first.

The tutorial video available online shows the glasses can do a lot of really interesting things, but apparently all anyone wants to do is shoot first person-style videos. In the right hands it produced some very interesting snippets. A few professional athletes wore the glasses in practice to show people what it looks like when you take a penalty shot against an NHL goalie, some used them while performing extreme stunts, etc. The thing is it felt like a waste that this is what people decided to focus on, because it's not like we've never seen this before - the helmet cam is far from an original idea. I get that the glasses are smaller than a normal camera rig, but that actually made it worse since people felt like they could wear the glasses all the time. See, when you have this huge camera strapped to your head you feel the need to justify why it's there and that pressure doesn't exist if people can't tell you are filming. Once this dawned on the people wearing the glasses they kept them all while doing ordinary, mundane tasks, then filming it and showing it to people like it was supposed to be ground-breaking. In reality it immediately began to devalue the technology. I don't care how famous you may be, making toast looks the same for just about everyone. So, in a matter of a couple days Google Glasses went from being kind of cool to being the early days of Twitter, when people were using the social media site to announce they were going to the bathroom and what they had for lunch. You know, the days when Twitter sucked before all those people were shamed away.

Once again, just because you can film your life that doesn't mean you have to. There is also a privacy issue with the glasses, as along the way someone noticed that there is nothing on them which lets the person you are looking at know they are being filmed. Not only does that seem like a really shady invasion of personal rights it also means people who work with sensitive materials can't be allowed to use them. That seems like a pretty healthy chunk of businesses to be losing before the product even launches. The only good news is that since Google isn't planning to start selling the glasses until the end of the year there will be plenty of time to work out the bugs before then. Also, hopefully they can figure out a way to make them a little cheaper because the initial price of $1500 is going to prevent a lot of people from buying them, no matter how cool they are. I have to say that when only a few hundred people can afford your product you are going to have an uphill climb in trying to change the world. I'm not saying it can't be done, but if you think an expensive piece of unnecessary technology is truly about to shift the way the world operates I would ask you when was the last time you saw someone use the voice recognition software on their phone without becoming incredibly frustrated and just dialing like we always have. Sometimes it's ok to leave things as they are.