Mat Honan has a great piece at Wired about his year as a Google Glass user. The basic take is that if you walk around wearing these funny glasses you get all kinds of terrible responses from other human beings, so you probably shouldn't wear Google Glass. Nonetheless, a heads-up display is pretty neat. And as he says, "Glass, and the other things like it, won’t always be ugly and awkward."Rico says he doesn't care what they look like, but how they work. (And Palm and Blackberry did, for awhile...)
But it really does make you wonder. Why is Glass so damn ugly? Compared to other things Google is doing, "make an attractive pair of glasses" is a pretty trivial problem. Would it be so hard to partner up with Warby Parker and make wearable devices that people would actually want to wear?
Google's strategy seems to be the idea that the first-mover advantage is so important that it's worth rushing to market with an obviously flawed product rather than waiting another year or two to really make it work. And maybe it's right. But, by that logic, Palm and Blackberry should be dominating the smartphone market.
03 January 2014
Google Glass, clever but ugly
Matthew Yglesias has a Slate article criticizing Google Glass:
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