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Only Google doesn’t have a marketing problem. The real challenge is strategic: Google Glass should be a mirror for users to superimpose Internet data on the world around them — it’s called augmented reality — and not serve as a data capture tool for them, or for Google. This fundamental mix-up will doom any future iterations of the product, no matter how sleek or fashionable they appear.
Augmented reality is already a fact, insomuch that every time people check their smartphones for directions, reviews, or background on one another, they’re adding that information to their experience of the moment. The idea that they’d like to do it faster, easier, and get info integrated and presented more seamlessly than stopping, typing into their phones, and then waiting/reading the results (or hearing them read aloud a la Siri), is so powerful that it isn’t just reasonable, but feels kinda inevitable.
It’s not hard to imagine real-time reviews and wait times appearing virtually over restaurants, or somebody’s job history or search highlights popping up over their heads at a conference. Maybe that info doesn’t need to be visual at all, but gets transmitted via voice in your ear, just as it could be accessed with a voice command (or head/eye gesture). Think of upcoming road condition warnings sounding in real-time in your car during a storm, or the entire Internet getting trolled to give surgeons hands-free updates on the progress of their surgeries. Everyone could be empowered to be smarter and make better decisions.
Instead, Google Glass turned individuals into pedestrian versions of the cars it hired for its street mapping project, and it seemed plausible that its purpose was to encourage users to upload data on place, time, and activity (remember, content from Google Glass users would capture the people and circumstances around them, providing endless opportunities to triangulate insights).
It was a real-world, real-time mapping project that came across as a bold next front in the broader war on privacy, unintended or otherwise, and it was unnecessary.
Internet search is one gigantic social medium — people create and vet its content in real-time — and it’s also a resource and functionality that Google all but owns, for now. It’s under pressure from Facebook and other overt social platforms that promise similar, if not equally robust information utilities, not to mention competing services from other tech giants.
Mapping this strategic asset into an endless list of new moments and applications could be the killer app that keeps Google ahead/apart from the rest, not to mention qualifying as the coolest innovation of the century so far. The company could still collect the data it wanted, only it would be an outcome of people happily using its product to lead better lives. It would be a win-win, assuming folks wanted to opt-in to join this platinum-level membership in The Collective.
In this context, the idea that users would want to upload images to their social media sites seems almost silly, doesn’t it?
Maybe a camera would be necessary, but maybe not. Maybe the product's output should be Google Ear, not something visual. More importantly, the utility of augmenting reality should guide its overall design, not surveillance, and its marketing could start with a focus on must-have applications, such as first responders and medicine (thereby building the case for how it improves lives, instead of recording them). Consumer applications would likely come last, not first.
But getting there requires a 180 degree shift of business strategy before even reconsidering the product. First time out of the box, Google got it backwards.
