How soon we forget: Google Glass actually collaborated with Diane von Furstenberg (a famous fashion designer) and did a launch party at New York Fashion Week.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3001142/google-glass-hits-runway...
But Google positioned Glass as a platform for apps, meaning they had to get devs in the loop, while Spectacles are intended for precisely one thing: Snapchat.
Normally this wouldn't bother me, but I see so many early 'start ups' that are just experiments, but because we create benchmarks like this - they put on fronts to be more than they are and we get this ecosystem of show-and-tell.
Though yes, I agree they had to get devs in the loop 'because apps'.
Snapchat is almost proper consumer marketing company.
Google is a tech company - and they had absolutely no idea how to market and position those glasses to consumers.
wat.
1. G-glass != snapchat spectacles.
2. IMHO google tried to create new accessory - smart glasses, they first wanted to introduce it to developers to create apps for it.
3. Either:
3.1. Google saw that it was not worth it at that time. Google is in business of making money after all and not in business of making selfish and shameless teenagers happy.
3.2. The idea was burned down by privacy concerns. G-glass became recognizable enough that users won't use because public will dismiss them due to privacy reasons and vice versa.
I loathe 'startups' like snapchat (though I understand there's money when such big user base takes pictures/videos of everything around them), but IMHO it's a matter of time when teenagers will grab another new and hip service to scream their daily lives to the world and all 'genius of marketing' will disappear.
They still courted the tech press massively though, none of us remember that fashion week launch. But we all remember the guy screaming in the shower and Sergey on stage wearing Glass with Crocs.
I recognize that otherizing an inevitable technology (ubiquitous connected vision) is taking the wrong side of history, but I hope my grandchildren make fun of my children for it.
I think it's interesting that the article did not describe the device's capacities at all.
In the meantime, I think Snapchat's marketing angle is ingenious. They decided to build trust, but not in the community of makers as Google did, they built trust in the community of shameless consumers (I mean that non-perjoratively). Google's mistake is understandable when you think that they are also trying to be respected in the cloud/app maker/developer space. Snapchat does not have that problem.
IMHO it's not something very ingenious, they are shooting ideas - some of them stick to the wall.
> They <...> built trust in the community of shameless consumers
..and that's why the idea sticks (just like whole snapchat et al.). It's shameless and to put it more straight - frequently egoistic (and maybe arrogant as well?) users who use this and go crazy about it.
With google's glass the media raged about how it's a huge privacy problem [&]. Snapchat's spectacles? Genius!! Short memory.
[&] Though to be more critical, having a huge price point and available to few people was the problem as well, but IMHO the media sunk the ship before it was a float by labeling it as a huge privacy issue.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Ghost
"Tokyo Ghost is an ongoing American science fiction comics series written by Rick Remender, drawn by Sean Murphy and colored by Matt Hollingsworth, published since September 2015 by Image Comics.
The series is set in 2089, a time when humanity is addicted to technology and entertainment. It follows the story of constables Debbie Decay and Led Dent, working as peacekeepers in the Isles of Los Angeles. They are given a job that will take them to the last tech-free country on Earth: the garden nation of Tokyo."
I'm already experiencing this in the small with people who are glued to the Apple ecosystem (I'm a Mac user, I just don't use an iPhone or Facetime, etc). Some people are so into iMessage and not on WhatsApp/Snapchat/whatever, that it actually impedes communication with them.
I'm "otherizing" that technology because it's a fucked up, perverted version of what it should be. Instead of interconnected, interoperable tools we get shiny, vendor locked-in toys. Mostly useless, crippled by shitty apps and not working well with anything. I myself want to wear tech on my face, just not the kind of shit that companies want to make.
what? Can you explain what you mean here?
I know what "othering" means but I have no idea how you would do it to a technology, or what it means to write it with the "-ize" suffix.
hey, look, you can take a snap super-easily and unobtrusively with a much more intimate camera-angle.
google's mistake was...wtf was the point of glass? to look like a rich cyborg douchebag?
Maybe I'll feel that way about Spectacles in 2020.
IMO while it's more noticeable than Glass's single pixel it's still a concealed camera.
also, i'd say there's a general cultural trend of becoming more and more comfortable with less and less privacy.
Spectacles are big and loud, they're the fashion equivalent of your face chanting "WORLD STAR! WORLD STAR!". You're going to be noticed wearing them and people will know what they're in for.
Yes, thus: being filmed by a geek - creepy, being filmed by the cultural elite - you should be so lucky.
1) Artificial Scarcity
2) Geographic Clustering
3) Buying As An Experience
4) Identifying customers
Edit: Included 4)
A) The fashionable design of the glasses, which are a cross between 'very contemporary cool design' with a hint of 'tokyo bubble gum plastic irreverence'
B) Aesthetically and functionally perfectly and seamlessly consistent with their brand, and their product experience.
C) When you say 'geographic clustering' - the more important point is where. Santa Monica, Big Sur. 'Cool Kid venues'. No t downtown LA or Orange County.
D) The 'scarcity' ... because there are so very few glasses being sold right now, I don't think it's an economic issue so much, although that applies - right now, the 'popup' store is a brilliant PR move. Every day, there'll be a huge buzz over where it is, and the kids getting them will proudly wear them to school, brag about them, creating all sorts of local buzz.
Snapchat is acting like Nike or Starbucks, and not a tech company, which is very smart of them.
Funny they are in LA - there are almost zero Valley companies outside of apple that know how to do proper consumer marketing.
Also- did Snapchat really think those tiny ballons were enough to lift that snapbot vending machine off the ground? Don't make me laugh, Snapchat!
For the marketing purposes of driving mass adoption of your fashion product: yes, unquestionably. If tech people want to drive fashion, maybe they should stop looking down their noses at the industry and embrace it.
There's no doubt that tech people have mattered in driving a lot of products and services by being early adopters. However, there is a difference between "tech products" and fashion accessories, which I think this is, even if it happens to also be technical.
On a separate but related note, as a lifelong nerd I feel comfortable in saying this: There are few things I cringe more at than nerds getting rich and popular without handling that gracefully. If I were to market a product I would definitely market through "professional" famous people that are comfortable with that role, for good and bad.
And Snapchat is * not a tech company *
That's an important thing to get first :)
( it's kind of crazy how many aspects, technical and otherwise, one can come up with in which Snapchat spectacles and the Oculus Rift are exact opposites of each other, starting with one receives pixel streams from the outside, the other sends them to the inside)
Does anyone else get really tired of stuff like this? Why is it that every possible difference is celebrated except within liberal circles, with the exception that nerds are considered objectively bad. In fact the article comes across as body shaming.
I say "almost" glibly, a refusal to see the machinery at work is how political movements lie to themselves.
