The Rise and Fall of Google Glass (a reply to Dave Cullen's post)

Ever since the inception of this type of product, I considered that Google Glass has had limited appeal within a domestic consumer market and if pushed towards this demographic, Google Glass would have limited impact and small amount of sales (and as we have seen by the amount of purchases of this product, I think that my assumptions were proven to be correct).

However, In the past I have frequently suggested that if this hardware where to be paired with suitable software and infrastructure / frameworks, this type of hardware would be suitable within various other industries (such as sectors that mainly deal with logistics, auditing and stock control / inventory management).

As an example, if Google Glass (and similar products) used good QR / barcode scanning software incorporated with the internal camera and the head-up-display viewer had access to some form of inventory management framework (products such as SAP Extended Warehouse Management, Anchanto, Wasp Inventory Control, Zoho Inventory, Agiliron Inventory Management or 3PL Warehouse Manager) then this sort of hardware would be an extremely suitable tool for medium / large size organisations and companies.

I have seen a number of similar devices being used within this context (such as the Picavi range of devices, Vuzix smart glasses, Generix group range of devices and other similar SAP based devices) and still believe that the Google Glass project was push towards the wrong consumer base / demographic market. I suspect that Google's marketing department and middle / upper tier management needed to push this product out to market as quickly as was possible, and did not do sufficient market place (focus group) research.

As far as Dave Cullen's assumption that this type of device has failed (URL provided below), I again believe that he is looking from the point of view of a domestic consumer and has not considered alternative usages for this type of product.

As stated above, I believe that the Google Glass project was marketed towards the wrong user base and if this type of product where to be pushed more heavily towards the SAP (Systems, Applications and Products) demographic and was marketed as a BI (Business Intelligence) solution then this product would have been more successful (therefore, I partially disagree with Dave's assumptions that Google Glass was as much of a failure as he has suggested within this video).

References & Other Resources:
* Dave Cullen’s Original Post and Video
* Technology and Open Source Blog