Failure Is the Best Thing That Could Happen to Google Glass

 

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

Today, for one day only, Google Glass goes on sale to everyone in the U.S. Everyone, that is, with an extra $1,500 to spare and a desire to become a guinea pig in a hotly contested social experiment. It’s not a stretch to say that this little test, the first that hasn’t been geared to the already converted, could steer what Google ultimately decides to do with the entire project.

Until today, Google’s headwear has only been available in limited release through its Glass Explorer program. Making Glass widely available has ginned up predictable publicity that may give the impression of pent-up demand for Glass. But that demand is far from certain. People love to hate on Glass at least as much as users claim to love it.

If today’s sale fails, the future of Glass will be in doubt, and Google will have only itself to blame. The company hoped that through the sheer force of its awesomeness, it could circumvent the usual flow of novel technologies and bless the public with its grand design without being able to explain the need for it. Glass’ botched debut has created a brand stigma that may have already doomed the device.

But there’s another possibility: If Glass doesn’t sell today, maybe Google will take that as a sign to stop toying around and figure out how to make Glass really matter.

A Disastrous Roll-Out, to the Wrong People

Google has yet to make a convincing case that a wearable heads-up display is a necessity rather than a novelty. If today’s Glass sale flops, perhaps that could finally force an honest conversation about who and what the next generation of wearable tech is for, rather than simply trying to push a smartphone onto everyone’s face. It may mean that Glass’s future is more like that of a Taser than the iPad: That is, something geared to speciality, industrial use than mass-market ubiquity.

Since its release, the slow rollout of Glass has been a disaster, though not of the kind typically associated with new gadgets. By all accounts, Glass works as promised, and it brings a remarkable new kind of technology into the world. In the case of Glass, the failure has been social. Fairly or not, Glass has become an emblem of tech douchery before even leaving its testing phase. From a branding perspective, the rise of a derogatory nickname — “Glasshole” — for your new product’s users is a nightmare.

Aggrieved Glass lovers could play out the persecuted nerd narrative, or claim it’s a misunderstood work of genius ahead of its time. But such arguments miss a point that goes beyond Glass itself. While every big company believes it needs to move into wearables as the next big thing, no company has effectively defined the utility of devices like smartwatches and heads-up displays, at least for general consumer use. Because the need for a device like Glass hasn’t been well articulated, its use can come across all too often as gratuitously conspicuous consumption.

Yes, Glass fans might argue, but how are you supposed to know what it’s for until you take it out in the world and use it? The answer is that few digital technologies have really been put out into the world in as raw a form as Glass has. From smartphones to personal computers to the internet itself, the development of new computing technologies has almost always taken place in the realms of government, military, and business.

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

Users in those worlds find that new technologies improve their ability to do a specific task. Eventually someone tries to extrapolate that usefulness to make something easier in the life of the everyday consumer, a quasi-organic process in which the utility of a technology evolves from the specific to the general.

With Glass, Google has tried to forcibly reverse that chain of adoption. Glass is a general-purpose device looking for a specific uses, and so far those uses haven’t been found to any meaningful degree. In a report earlier this year, Forrester Research analyst J.P. Gownder diagnosed this problem to argue that it’s the world of work that will drive real innovation in wearables as industries discover a vast range of tasks that body-attached technologies make better. From surgery to toxic-spill cleanup to installing cable, he says, any business that discovers a job that wearables make easier will rush to adopt that new technology.

Too Late?

Perhaps that’s why just last week Google announced its Glass at Work program, through which the company is basically trying to connect with businesses that are genuinely figuring out ways to make Glass useful. In that light, maybe today’s Glass sale is more like the end of something than the beginning. The sale lets Google gauge Americans’ demand for Glass; if that demand isn’t there, Google could take that as a signal to move its focus to the business uses where Glass might really make sense.

That could be the first big step Google takes not just toward figuring out what Glass is actually good for, but toward removing the “Glasshole” stigma. In San Francisco today, as tensions over tech-fueled gentrification escalate, Glass has become a signifier of “preening techie,” a stereotype that some wearers claim have made them victims of violence. But that stereotype will start to crumble the more Google can focus attention on the device than the user as a tool.

In many ways, a heads-up display like Glass makes the most sense for traditionally blue-collar work that could be enhanced by cameras, sensors, and metadata but still requires you to keep your eyes and hands on what you’re doing — think the construction site, the auto-body shop, or the factory floor. The more wearing a computer on your face becomes like wearing a tool belt around your waist, the less self-important it seems.

One way or another, wearable tech is here to stay. The better a job Google can do at demonstrating ways Glass can actually be useful in the world, the better a chance we’ll all have at reaching that future without calling each other names.