That’s what Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidtessentially insisted today in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. Actually, he specifically said it was still very much alive following January’s announcement that the Glass Explorer program was ending and Glass work moving from secret lab Google X to Google itself, under Tony Fadell, who heads Google’s Nest connected home division. Schmidt added that Glass will be the basis of “a big and very fundamental platform.”
But given how much it’s likely to be changed, Schmidt might have been better off pronouncing it dead. If new versions of Google Glass are to succeed, they need to change in a whole host of ways that literally will make it unrecognizable compared with the $1,500 version it sold to bleeding-edge people like me. After using it only intermittently for a year now, I think Schmidt is right that Glass could become a compelling product, but only if:
1) Google hides Glass behind actual glasses. No matter how elegant Google made Glass, that little block of plastic that serves as the screen is simply too weird-looking. In its current form, the device screams, “I’m a Glasshole.” Instead, as rumors indicate, Google will have to incorporate that screen into existing eyewear.
There’s another reason to make Glass disappear. After privacy concerns fairly or not made Glass unwelcome in many public areas, Google took pains to note that it was pretty apparent thanks to a light beside the camera when Glass was being used to take videos and photos. Maybe so, but that just made things worse by drawing attention to it. Privacy advocates may squawk, but if video and image capture is going to remain a key application, it has to be hidden, or else it will always annoy too large a segment of the population.
Google cofounder Sergey Brin wearing Google Glass
2) Glass becomes less of a data capture device than a way to augment reality. Some folks make a good case that Google got this a bit backwards at least initially. Although Google’s ad business could certainly benefit from gathering more data this way, it may have given shorter shrift to its more fundamental mission to make the world’s information more accessible. Of course, a big component of Glass was the ability to get on the Web and use online services, but Glass would do well to offer many more ways to overlay the real world with useful contextual and location-based information such as turn-by-turn directions.
3) The price drops, by a lot. Sorry, but anything near $1,500 is far too much. Keeping costs down may well mean getting rid of some capabilities, even the video capabilities I personally found useful, or it may require dropping some rumored improvements, such as better sound. More likely, it will mean allying more deeply with makers of eyeglasses so Glass becomes an optional add-on to conventional glasses rather than a separate device.
