re: Google Glass essentially flopped...

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Korkstand

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

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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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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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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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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. You're just twisting off on the topic to act as if you've refuted something I've said. But again I'm glad you feel as I do about this.

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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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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.

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.

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

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Honest to goodness I thought I saw a thread on the OT where they were on "sale" for $1,000. Perhaps it was for a short time. Could be wrong. I'm human, it happens.

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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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Dude I talk about everyone from Tesla to Ben Franklin and New Coke. Dead projects/failures/etc don't preclude us from discussing something. 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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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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Ara is a test project as well. Yet no marketing anywhere near comparable to Glass? Still don't get that and you didn't do a great job of explaining it. More on that below.

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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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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? I disagree with you working reductively backwards. They put marketing into it because they wanted it to be profitable as quickly as possible. Which it failed to do. Which is why sales were halted. Which is why the program was folded into another division of the company. Which is why I consider it a failure. Which is why thousands of people who are paid to observe and cover the tech industry said the same thing.

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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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.

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

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

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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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So they priced a product at a point where they would deter sales, get juuuust enough data to be useful, actually end up in the red, and then be forced to change directions, "press pause and reset" their stategy, along with suspending sales of the device and folding the entire group working on it into another division.

This was all by design.

Look at what you're saying here, man. Seriously. Look how stupid it sounds. Or don't. Soak in your inability to reason and accept facts. Doesn't matter to me. Last word's yours.

Sigh....