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.
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.
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