re: Google Glass essentially flopped...

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This gets a giggle out of me. You said they were taking wearables where they always wanted to go. Why didn't they take them there in the first place? Why would they need to pause and reset in order to do so? To me-and I'd like to think I'm reasonable-a "pause and reset" would mean you aren't going where you want to, and you need to "pause and reset" in order to do it.

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Where they want to go is not a particular product or a particular version of a product. For the third time, they are taking wearables toward profit. Is this sinking in yet?

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I'll mention like the Cad fella here that it's not just me calling Glass a failure. It's thousands of different news outlets and writers-I'm sure they're all trash and ignorant and have no experience or understanding or depth of knowledge compared to you though-have used the exact same term to describe what happened with Glass.

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Crying "failure" over something one of the largest companies in the world does is a great way to get pageviews, don't you think? You seem to have a lot of trouble looking below the surface of things.

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I absolutely do believe that [Google thought Glass would make money].

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Why would they sell a product that cost $80 to make

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They cost much more than $80 each. $80 worth of individual components, maybe, but then you have to assemble them, plus throw in huge R&D costs for a very limited run of production.

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for $1,500

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Yeah, seems like they could have sold a lot more of them if they were priced around $300, right? Don't you think they priced them that high on purpose to limit sales? Don't you think they knew Glass wasn't ready for the masses? Google rolls out Android updates very slowly for the same reason. Is all of this still flying right over your head, or are you starting to realize that every move Google makes is calculated?

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and then "drop" the price to $1,000? Is that some type of deal?

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When did the price drop? As far as I know, they were $1500 until the last day.

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They took a page out of Apple's premium pricing for the product.

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Uh, no. With the Nexus 6, maybe. With Glass, no.

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They paid the blogosphere millions to promote it and trotted out their founder to ride on a Subway and be pictured with it, nevermind to get out in front of the trendsetters and kingmakers at TED and talk about it's virtues.

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Yep, and here we are still talking about it, even though it is supposedly a dead project.

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Do you think they were taking the "long run" and planning for it not to make money by doing all that early stage effort?

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Absolutely. Glass has been a test project from day 1. And yeah, even test projects require marketing. Especially for products whose success depends on third party app developers.

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Look at Project Ara, and look at Google Glass...Which one had more hype, PR, and general oomph behind it from Google? It's obvious...They thought that Google Glass would be the killer product

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No, they knew that Glass would require a lot of marketing to get as far as it did. Also, Glass and Ara are targeted at two totally different demographics. Like, there is basically zero overlap between them, and guess which one the US falls under?

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that helped them leap forward and compete with Apple as a hardware/software maker in one that had a hot piece of premium tech that was first-to-market in the space.

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Google has always and likely will always make their money on advertisements. Any hardware/software they make and sell has essentially the sole purpose of expanding their audience. The Nexus line, while they probably don't increase the use of Android much directly, it certainly guides manufacturers in a direction Google wants them to go. Chromecast, Nexus Player... eyeballs. fricking self-driving cars?! People will eventually spend those hours browsing the web and seeing ads rather than driving.

So, no, Google was not trying to out-Apple Apple with Glass. If they were, you said yourself that the BOM was low enough that they could have cut the price down to $3/4/500 or so, sold a lot more, and that would still be a "premium" price for a gadget. But they didn't because that wasn't the goal.

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Seriously...They were selling it to the public for a grand and a half...but it cost $80...If they weren't trying to make money off of it WTF were they doing?

Sheesh...

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I explained before, but I get the feeling you might need to hear it again. $1500 was the price at which Google could sell enough units to get the data they needed. It should be crystal fricking clear by now that they could have sold a whole lot more units at a lower price, and could have been much less in the red (and maybe even in the black), but they did not want to. The product was NOT ready for the masses, and Google knew that.

If that doesn't convince you that Google did not fail to reach their goals with Glass, then you don't want to be convinced. If that's the case, then I have to write this off as a troll thread.

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Why wouldn't they take them towards profit without a pause and reset? Just out of curiosity.

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Since you're curious, it is fricking hard to create an entirely new industry, and it takes a long time to work towards a product that someone like yourself might deem successful, much less actually turn a profit. Failure is expected. It is planned for. "Failure", "pause and reset", improve. Is failure really a failure if it is expected and part of the process? Is low sales figures a failure if you intentionally price the product to result in low sales? A failed product is one that cannot be priced to sell above cost and make money. A product that is intentionally priced well above the max profitability price point is one of two things: an "exclusive" product that builds a brand name, or an experimental product that is not ready for the masses. You and I both know that exclusivity is not Google's game. Their game is the exact opposite.

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Yep...I'm sure the Atlantic and the Harvard Business Review are struggling for pageviews and have now turned towards sensationalism in order to stay afloat financially

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What?! Do those sites have ads, or do they not? The Atlantic even has ads by Google! And you still don't understand the circle of profit going on here?

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I'm well aware of R&D costs factoring into price. Even accounting for that they were absurdly priced. I think we agree on this.

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Yeah, I guess we agree here. It's just that you think that, for some reason, Google is stepping way outside of their core competency to try to sell a "premium" device, while I see it for what it is: pricing that limits demand in order to test the waters and formulate a product plan.

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So they overpriced them but let anyone in the world buy them. Hmmm. Most folks I read at the time indicated they wanted to price them that high initially so as to make them scarcely seen in public and thereby more premium. But I'm sure whomever wrote that doesn't know what Google's ultimate strategy was with pricing and profitability.

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I'd say that whoever wrote that is a complete moron. Every physical product that Google makes sells for at or just above cost. Given the choice between higher profitability / fewer users, and lower profitability / more users, Google is going the more users route every single time. They are good at monetizing users in the long run.

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You do. As we've found out by you stating that they wanted to take wearables to profitability by having them press pause, reset and then folding the program and the employees into a different section of the company. Along with halting public sales. All just a part of the master plan of profitability.

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Yep. Or maybe you missed the part about the program being "folded" from the experimental X division over to the Nest division. You know, the division that sells hardware.

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Which you understand. Yet anyone who follows the industry and the company specifically and closely has somehow missed. In other words: It's everyone else on Earth's problem. Not yours. We have you marked down.

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You only miss it if you want to. Plenty of people see the big picture. Here's a tip: search for "google glass success" instead of "google glass failure".

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Dead projects/failures/etc don't preclude us from discussing something.

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I just meant that here we are generating advertising dollars for Google over a supposedly failed product.

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But I can assure you after all that effort Google's intent was not-ever-to suspend sales of a product.

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Well I can assure you that Google has a very long history of suspending sales of products and discontinuing services. That is their MO. No endeavor is a complete failure if you learn something, especially not if you learn something that results in profits later on. Google is pretty damned good at that, and I assure you that Google will be involved in wearables in the future.

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Revisionist history. Did the phone or the tablet that Apple came up with need marketing? Did the Roku or Apple TV, etc require that marketing?

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Huh? Of course they did. What's your point?

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They put marketing into it because they wanted it to be profitable as quickly as possible.

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And "as quickly as possible" is likely a decade or so, and for Google the profits will come from ads rather than hardware sales. Why are you so quick to dismiss the effectiveness of marketing and how it relates to long-term business goals? Surely you can't deny that Google has gotten the world talking about wearables. And surely you can't deny that no matter which company/companies end up making money selling them, that Google is going to profit handsomely on the back end.

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Which it failed to do.

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This whole thread boils down to you calling failure prematurely.

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Which is why sales were halted.

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Sales were halted because they have clearly received a lot of feedback, which is what they were after.

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Which is why the program was folded into another division of the company.

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Again, the program was folded into a division of the company that deals with hardware, as opposed to the experimental division it was in before. The convincing you claim to seek is right in front of your face, and you still keep looking past it.

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Which is why I consider it a failure

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Which is probably why you aren't running one of the largest companies in the world.

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Which is why thousands of people who are paid to observe and cover the tech industry said the same thing.

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Which is why they also aren't running one of the largest companies in the world, and are instead paid to generate pageviews.

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But I guess they've alllllll got it wrong. You on the other hand? You're the voice of reason in a cacophony of madness. Lemme tell ya.

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Yep.

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They're point is to be profitable. WGAF how they get there? Better yet, who here on the Tech board that knows anything about Google doesn't realize that they make money off their advertising, and that fact is at the very core of their businesses across the spectrum? If their point was to make money, then the angle they took with Google Glass failed.

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Once again I will remind you, here we are generating ad dollars for Google, discussing this "failed" venture.

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Spectacularly compared to the front-end, real-world capital they sunk into introducing it to the world.

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:lol: Care to share how much they spent on Glass? Also, care to estimate how that investment will play out in profits over the next decade as Google and other companies continue development, and as the social barriers begin to fall (thanks in no small part to the uproar over Glass), and as Google's ability to place ads moves closer and closer to all-the-fricking-time?

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How is this arguable? For a fanboi, it's easily done. Your post is proof positive.

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The argument makes itself based on Google's history. It actually takes a gigantic twist of logic to claim that Google was attempting a complete shift in business model with Glass, and failed at doing so.



continued...

We can end this thread here. Have an upvote.