RIP Buzz
Google Glass is back! Don’t run! I can hear you running. It was never a bad idea, as such.
On the whole, Google doesn’t throw money at bad ideas, except maybe Buzz. Anybody remember Buzz? Just me? Cool.
Google glass round two
Glass, alas, is memorable. Google Glass incarnated the classic Silicon Valley fail: good tech wedded to a good idea, then presented, marketed and used incredibly badly. The argument against the tech was never that it didn’t work. It was that it looked stupid, did very little that couldn’t be done with other, better tech, and – big one – the few new things it could do were often deeply troubling. I mean, I find CCTV sorta creepy, and that’s limited to private property.
I don’t know about y’all, but for my money people strapping cameras to their actual heads, ready to stream my #iwokeuplikedis scruff self to the actual Internet, is a giant step further into satirical dystopia than I’m prepared to roll with.
So how do you save a trainwreck that public? Easy.
Enterprise.
That was the basic failing of the glasses, way back in the planning stages. It was meant to be a leap forward in wearable tech, maybe even into augmented reality, rather than to do a job of any kind. They wanted it to be something, as opposed to designing it to do anything, and the result was a $1500 robot stalker/nerd toy. Neither of those things is worth fifteen hundred dollars.
Augmented reality for engineering and manufacturing absolutely is, and that’s X Company’s new paradigm. Well, one of them. They’re also marketing it as a supply chain tracker for logistics and to record patient histories for healthcare workers. Used wisely, that previously creepy always-on recording capacity could literally save lives.
Bright future
That’s brilliant, and it’s only the beginning. Glass Enterprise Edition’s solutions are all custom, built for the customer’s needs. It’s addressing the problem with Glass at its source: instead of creating a solution without a problem, which Glass should be in the Geek Dictionary for, they’re establishing exactly what problems exist for their customers, then building exactly the right solutions for them.
That’s how you fix a screwup.
#GoogleGlass
