Why Google Glass Failed: Technical Leadership Does Not Guarantee Product Success

Google is arguably one of the world’s most technologically advanced companies. Yet even its technology does not guarantee smooth product development. Many products have ended abruptly: Google Glass, the Google+ social platform, the Google Trip travel tool, and others abandoned along the way. Google has launched and subsequently killed more than a hundred products. Let us analyze Google Glass as an example. In 2012, Google unveiled a Google Glass prototype at its I/O developer conference. On the large screen behind cofounder Sergey Brin, two Google engineers were talking live aboard an aircraft. Suddenly, one jumped out with a parachute and landed on the venue’s roof. His Google Glass livestreamed the entire jump to the screen. You may remember the attention, praise, and controversy. But Glass soon developed a series of problems, attracting doubts, ridicule, and eventually indifference. What happened? ---- 1. High price At US$1,500, almost no mainstream consumers were willing to pay. Presale quantity limits also meant some who wanted one could not buy it. For a long time, buyers were largely wealthy technology specialists and devoted fans. 2. Excessive expectations Marketing around Glass, including the I/O keynote and fashion-week appearances, created high expectations for a product still at the prototype stage. Yet after release, many features shown in demonstration videos, including video conferencing and voice replies to text messages, remained in development and unavailable. Expectations were disappointed, and its reputation suffered. 3. Poor experience Glass had to connect to an Android phone through Bluetooth. It also frequently suffered from battery depletion and various other quality problems, large and small. 4. Users had not developed the habits People were not accustomed to this new augmented-reality device. Its camera and video features were seen as intrusive. When someone wearing Glass looked at you, it felt as though they were pointing a phone at your face. 5. Unclear use cases For a long time, Google failed to offer a clear use case or a killer app demonstrating the new platform’s potential—like Instagram for the iPhone 4 or Happy Farm for Facebook. Its ultimate failure was therefore inevitable. ----- Explaining a product’s failure afterward is easy. Most people are geniuses in hindsight and fools beforehand. From another perspective, why was Glass destined to fail? The team behind it consisted of very experienced, very cool engineers with extensive wearable-computing experience. Coinventor Astro Teller had developed a wristband tracking exercise and sleep. Another leader, Babak Parviz, was the head of Google X and had integrated digital displays into contact lenses. Technically, they were stars. Development proceeded fairly smoothly: they solved interface problems, then optimized the hardware to make the glasses lighter. Halfway through, however, an argument arose: who was the target audience? Some saw an everyday consumer device; others thought Glass should provide “professional tool functions.” The issue reached Google cofounder Brin. Remarkably, his view was that the debate would settle itself when Glass launched. Google would iterate based on feedback and take Glass wherever user demand led. What was the real cause of failure? Google applied its established strategy and culture: use the best engineers and technology to build a product with a huge potential audience—Glass was positioned as the next platform after smartphones—then iterate furiously after release until a billion people use it. Several successful Google products followed that approach. Search goes without saying. Before Gmail launched, internal arguments never stopped: was 1GB too much storage when most services offered 20–100MB? Should it be free or paid? Should Google even launch email, which seemed unrelated to search? Many websites that expanded sideways into “portals” had fared badly. And launching email meant declaring war on Microsoft, the industry giant, because Hotmail dominated then. Ultimately, the two founders decided: launch it and see. Combined with furious iteration—1GB at launch in 2004, 2GB in 2005, 6GB in 2006, and so on—it eventually brought Google billions of users. Chrome, Google Docs, and even the acquired YouTube followed similar stories. But this model carries enormous risks in hardware. First, hardware cannot be offered free. The barrier to trying it is high, unlike Google’s other products. More importantly, Google’s top leaders overlooked an apparently simple point that even we might understand: hardware iterates much, much more slowly than software. Once the product launched and sentiment turned, reversing Glass’s fortunes became difficult. That is the enormous inertia of company culture. Fundamentally, it is also a major difference between hardware and software companies. When we discuss corporate “DNA” and “culture,” this inertia is often at work. ---- #得到 (Dedao) #張瀟雨商業經典案例課 (Zhang Xiaoyu’s classic business case course)