Google Glass is Dead & the Great Glass Pivot is Underway

I recently attended GGDevCon in San Francisco, a two-day geek-fest of all things Google Glass, with a strong focus on developing software for the device. As a Glassware developer myself, I found the event to be both educational and enlightening — though not, perhaps, in the ways that I expected.

I came away from GGDevCon with two strong impressions, and a clear conclusion to be drawn from their juxtaposition. First, the bad news.

Glass Is Dead…

There was a real sense among GGDevCon attendees that Glass, in its current form as a consumer device, is failing. Even the most ardent of Glass supporters speak of a “lull” or “slump”, and what might be needed to move beyond that. The less optimistic consider Glass to have already failed in this arena. But either way, the problems are generally recognized to fall into several areas.

Hardware

The first, broadly speaking, is hardware. Many Glass owners have experienced the dreaded foil delamination, frequently multiple times. I spoke with Explorers who are afraid to take their units outside, for fear of moisture. And although Google has been excellent about replacing units which suffer this failure, it’s clearly not acceptable for a consumer product to ship with a flaw like this. Yet there’s no word from Google of an actual solution anywhere on the horizon.

Battery life is another serious issue, and one that that affects all Explorers. The consumer market will not accept a wearable device which will not reliably last through a full day of use; the recent debacle surrounding the Moto 360 gives ample evidence of this. It’s another way in which Glass hardware is not ready for prime time.

Both of these have been evident from the early days of the Explorer program, yet today’s Glass devices are virtually unchanged from what Google showed at IO 2012, nearly two-and-a-half years ago. It’s expected that an early-stage device will have its share of issues, but it’s also expected that these will be addressed by later versions of the product.

Where are those later versions? When’s the last time you saw any consumer electronics product — much less a cutting-edge one — go two-and-a-half years without a significant hardware refresh? And what does that say about the manufacturer’s commitment to the product?

Which brings us to Glass’ forthcoming consumer release, which has been talked about so much that it’s attained near-mythical status. But notice, Google hasn’t mentioned a consumer version of Glass for a long, long time. What they have done — back in May 2014 — was open Glass sales to anyone in the USA with $1500 to spend. It’s out there right now (with all its consumer-focused accessories) on Google Play, right alongside the Nexus phones and Android Wear smartwatches.

In other words, Glass has been on the open consumer market for six months now. Folks, the Explorer Edition is the “consumer release” of the Glass hardware.

Software

The other side of a computing device is software, and here too, Glass is falling short. I’m not referring to Glass’ system software; it took some time, and many iterations from Mountain View, but the OS is now quite stable. No, I’m talking about the software that makes the device useful: the third-party apps which any modern computing platform needs to survive.

It’s not that Glass doesn’t have any apps – but it certainly doesn’t have very many of them. The official Glassware directory contains 98 apps as of this writing. It’s still at the stage where new app releases are news. Can you imagine an enthusiast publication writing an article every time a new app appears in iTunes or Google Play? It’s a ludicrous thought – but over a year after opening the directory to third-party devs, this is where we are.

This lack of apps means that only a few possible uses of the device have been explored. For the average Glass owner, this means that there just aren’t many compelling use cases for the device. And the public won’t buy a computing device which isn’t useful. That’s the real Glass software problem.

Image

Finally, as loathe as some supporters are to admit it, Glass has an image problem. At best, it’s seen as a geeky toy, and at worst, a privacy-invading tool of the Googleplex. Both of these perceptions stem from the lack of good use cases: Glass isn’t good for much (so the narrative goes) except a face-mounted camera. So all but the die-hards have virtually stopped wearing Glass — even Larry Page seems to have given it up.

Contrast this with smartwatches, which have been described as having most of the advantages of Glass without the social stigma. Glass fanatics might well howl at this characterization, but if this is the image in the tech press, what hope is there for the wider public?

I’d like to reiterate that these are not simply my opinions. These are views that I heard voiced over and over at GGDevCon, by people self-selected as some of those most interested in Glass. All of the above issues were mentioned repeatedly, everywhere from casual conversations over lunch to the official panel discussion. Glass has lost the support of all but its most ardent admirers.

Perhaps the most telling indication of this was the number of attendees at GGDevCon, unofficially reckoned to be about 80 people, only about three-quarters of whom had paid to be there. Contrast that with WearablesDevCon in March, hosted by the same organizers at the same venue. WDC was projected to have 500 attendees, and actually drew over 1200. Next year, they’re moving it to a bigger location. Wearables are hot — as long as they’re not Glass.

Back at GGDevCon, it was hard to escape the conclusion that Glass — in its current form, as a consumer device — is stumbling, and badly.

…Long Live Glass

Google’s response to this situation is fascinating. There’s very little sign that it’s trying to address the issues directly. Instead, the strategy seems to be to reinvent Glass for business use.

It started in the very first minutes of GGDevCon, at the keynote delivered by Steven Willinger, a Business Development Manager at Google. Entitled Glass At Work: Hands-Free Computing for Hands-on Work, it gave compelling arguments for why and how Glass is finding a new home in a business setting.

Willinger’s talking points were centered around return on investment (ROI), a subject near and dear to any business manager. Essentially, they boiled down to an argument that Glass can increase productivity and efficiency in many areas of the workplace, and thus is a net win for business.

Toward this end, he outlined four key areas of functionality:

Task completion and verification. These are checklists, essentially, but in an industrial environment they can be quite complex, and important for compliance. Almost anytime you see an employee with a clipboard, imagine replacing it with a purpose-built Glass app, which will offer more functionality while keeping the operator’s hands free. Real-time training. This is the ability for a worker to get additional instructions on-demand, either from a formal instructor, a supervisor, or simply a more experienced colleague. When this interaction is available on Glass, costly downtime and errors can both be reduced at a single stroke. Instant communication. This can be thought of as the inverse of the previous point, relaying information up the organizational ladder instead. Issues that arise on the front line of business, be that an assembly line or a customer contact, can immediately be escalated to a supervisor or troubleshooter — and with instant feedback. Business intelligence and notifications. This refers to contextual data, essentially a targeted, enterprise-level “Google Now” experience. In Willinger’s words, it is “information that’s hidden in some analyst’s workbench, which can be surfaced for an enterprise worker.” A good example is delivering a patient’s vitals to a surgeon in a heads-up display, rather than on a less-visible monitor.

All of these are general areas in which businesses have found Glass to be useful. But Willinger also emphasized that such solutions need to be tailor-made. To make this work, developers need to understand the customer and the business, in addition to Glass.

Toward this end, Google is awarding a status called Glass at Work Certified to enterprise software partners. These are developer consultants trained to provide the connection between Glass and industry, to create the specialized Glassware that makes this possible. Currently, there are only ten official Certified partners, but Google is working hard to bring more development firms into the fold.

This focus on the workplace is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it’s ramping up fast: Google only announced the Glass at Work program in June, but it’s already their main focus at an event like GGDevCon. Beyond the keynote, Google’s Jenny Tong delivered a class entitled Tips and Tricks for Glass in the Enterprise, cementing the impression that Glass now means business. And even beyond Google’s sessions, there was a strong B2B focus in many of the other presentations.

But second, I couldn’t help noticing that business-centric use neatly sidesteps many of the problems that Glass is facing on the consumer side:

The Glassware catalog becomes a non-issue when partners are developing custom apps for individual clients.

When Glass is only worn in the workplace, there’s no social stigma to worry about.

The $1500 price tag won’t scare off big businesses, especially if a compelling ROI argument can be made.

Since workers often carry a lot of gear, Glass’ battery life can be addressed with an external pack.

Even the foil delamination problem can be mooted by having a rotating stock of Glass for employees to tap into — though Google unquestionably still needs to address this.

To me, it looks suspiciously like Google is addressing Glass’ many issues by changing the playing field. There appears to be little question that the workplace is where Glass is going; and reading between the lines, the consumer space is likely being left behind.

The Long Road Ahead

So, is Glass (as a consumer product) really dead? Maybe for now, but probably not permanently.

One analogy that I heard a couple of times at GGDevCon likened the Glass of today with the personal computer circa 1980. PCs started as expensive, hobbyist devices. Enthusiasts loved them, and thought they could change the world, but ordinary people looked at them as weird, overpriced, geeky toys. “What can you actually do with it?”

Sound familiar?

Then PCs found their way into the workplace, and a quiet revolution began. Businesses discovered that they really could be useful, could make employees more efficient and productive. Specialized, industry-specific applications came first, then generalized software (like spreadsheets and databases). It didn’t take long before PCs were a common sight at work … and naturally, people started to find them useful at home, too.

Eventually, what had started in the consumer space (as a hobbyist’s plaything) found its way back. But this time it was mainstream. The software had matured, the usefulness was unquestioned. It’s not out of the question that Glass, or the head-mounted wearables which follow it, might follow a similar course.

The consumer release of Glass may still be coming, but don’t be surprised if it takes a detour along the way.