It's extremely hard to create new markets out of thin air. While we correctly heap all kinds of praise on the chosen few that succeed in bringing amazing new inventions into our lives, we also ignore the thousands of new products that never quite find their footing. Many of those lesser lights were excellent ideas on their own. For whatever reason, they may not have captured the imagination of enough customers to sustain themselves in the marketplace.
We often think of the giant technology companies as if they are invincible. They toss around their mighty power and we simply react. But even the largest and most successful companies sometimes have a difficult time sustaining innovation.
One example of that is Google. While they dominate search and have other really great products like Google Analytics, Maps, and Documents, they do not enjoy complete success at all of their inititives. They were unable to make Google Health work properly. Google Wave had promise but never caught fire. Even Google Glass, once so highly prized that there was a lottery for the right to pay $1500 to acquire one, has now been downgraded to a much lower profile. This article explains some of the reasons why:
On Thursday, Google announced that it would stop selling its much ridiculed Google Glass smart glasses, and that the product would no longer be developed in Google X, the company’s research division.
In a blog post on the Google Plus social network, Google said Glass was graduating from X. It will still be available to “certified partners” and for commercial trials in places like hospitals and factories. But the Explorer program, in which software developers and gadget nerds could buy a test version of the product, is over.
The article continues by pointing out that only two years ago, Glass was the star at Google's developers conference. It showcased some of the incredible future possibilities of the platform. Yet all of that promise also held some of the same reasons why it hasn't been successful:
Today, Glass is more like a case study in the perils of developing hardware whose purpose isn’t clear. Unlike, say, the iPhone — which cleverly combined products people already understood and used — consumers weren’t quite sure what to make of Glass. That creeped some people out.
The device was pre-emptively banned by bars and large parts of Las Vegas. Legislators in West Virginia tried to make it illegal to use the gadget while driving.
“There’s no vision for why people actually need this device,” Mr. Gownder said. “That’s a problem. When you don’t have that, people fill that in with their own assumptions, and right now the assumption is that this is a device for recording people.”
That last issue probably doomed the product. The article closes:
“From the privacy perspective, we are of course pleased to see Google drop this product,” Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, wrote in an email. “And it is a very big deal when Google backs down, particularly after its big push.”
He continued: “But it is also speaks to a larger issue in tech design about privacy. Eyeglass-mounted web display and phone for those who wanted it? Not really a problem. Surveillance and recording of those around the user? Yeah, that’s a problem.”
Here is the link to the full article: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/18/a-retreat-for-google-glass-and-a-case-study-in-the-perils-of-making-hardware/?_…
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