Was Google Glass a good product? Why?

What criteria can be used to determine whether a product is ‘good’ or ‘bad’? Is it the quality of the technology? How widely the product is used? Whether it is a commercial success? More broadly, though, how useful is the ‘good/bad technology’ dichotomy when evaluating a digital product, be it a wearable or a piece of software?

Although asking questions about a product’s tech, adoption and profitability could provide useful metrics, asking deeper questions is crucial to understanding its true value. What contributions has the product made to technology as a field? Has it influenced the way people work and live? Has it changed the way we interact socially? If yes, are these changes for the better or worse?

Google Glass - released in 2013 and shelved in 2015 - was the first version of a new head-mounted wearable device. It generated a lot of hype but failed to take off as a product. Google’s marketing campaign for the device focused squarely on the consumer market: well known names in the tech world as well as models in fashion shows sported the device.

Many product reviews acknowledged its potential. Some even called it a ‘sometimes brilliant product’ but the consensus was that the product was largely a failure. The reviews highlighted a number of design and technical issues: the battery was big and stuck out behind the right ear but it was not big enough to power the device for a full day’s use. Being quite literally ‘in-your-face’, social perceptions of the product were not something that could be easily ignored. One reviewer wrote: ‘It feels socially inappropriate much of the time – if not for the wearer, then for their audience’. Arguably a more important question - why choose Google Glass in the first place - was also raised. The device largely reproduced experiences already available on smartphones and lacked a killer app.

Shortcomings notwithstanding, the project generated several new and exciting tech ideas: unlocking a screen using eye tracking, blending images and the real world using AR, interacting with the device using gestures. Even in 2015, the year Glass was canned, benefits of a voice-controlled, hands-free device for industries such as medicine and manufacturing were apparent. No wonder, then, that in 2017 Google’s X Lab announced a new version of the product called Glass Enterprise Edition, which now boasts 33 enterprise clients.

The launch of Google Glass ushered in the first phase in wearable tech and paved the way for other gadgets. Apple Watch was launched in 2015. 2016 saw Snap release its Spectacles and Microsoft make its development edition of HoloLens available. Glass also inspired new use cases such as simultaneous translation. And who, when in a foreign country, wouldn’t want to have access to a simultaneous translator at a blink of an eye?!

If history is any guide, Google Glass finds itself in a very good company of digital products that, although viewed as failures, paved the way for significant advances in the world of tech. Would Google have existed without early search engines such as Yahoo! and AltaVista? Could anyone have imagined that a company called Justin TV, a guy no one had ever heard of streaming his life, would become a birthplace of life-streams as a pastime and evolve into a successful tech business that Twitch has become?

The early phase of the internet adoption can offer more insight into what the future might hold for Google Glass. Then many companies struggled to see the need for a website. However, some visionaries did see what the internet could become. Three years before the launch of Napster, the first online music sharing service, David Bowie released his song online in 1996 and the following year streamed his concert in Boston. In 1999 he remarked quite prophetically ‘What the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable.’

Now, while the adoption of wearables is in its infancy, we can only imagine how devices like Google Glass will be used in future. Like mobile phones, a lot of currently available wearables attempt to replicate computers. What is needed is a complete paradigm shift in operating systems, displays, apps etc. With time new use cases and business models for wearables will emerge.

It is safe to assume that Google Glass was not the success Google had hoped for. However, efforts to determine whether it was a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ product might prove futile. What is beyond doubt is that it was an important step in the development of wearable tech, whose significance is yet to be fully revealed.