The Google Glass ‘failure’
The Google Glass Epic Fail: What Happened?
Google Glass’s deployment and short public life cycle demonstrate many of the topics we have discussed in class. Google Glass is interesting because it is very unlike Google to deliver such a failure in the public realm.
The first relation to the class is from the idea of adjusting prices to pass the ‘tipping point’ found in network effect equilibrium situations. Google Glass tried to achieve initial popularity and ‘lift’ by establishing the Explorer program. This program, which was popularized in the tech realm, allowed users to try Google Glass for free. This is the strategy we discussed in class, where the price is dropped low, or even to 0/negative, so that the company can surpass the necessary fraction of users to get above the ‘tipping point’. Google Glass tried to do this with the Explorer program, but because of all the negative information being spread between users, even free products weren’t enough.
The second topic that is interesting is that the Google Glass failure shows that network effects can’t cancel out badly designed products. The model for network effects that we have discussed in class deals with whether an incremental person will purchase a product. But, if their value for the product goes down due to information they receiving from the media or from friends, then even if some of their other friends are using the product, it is still not worth it for them to purchase the product. So the Explorer program users likely represented a small, well connected community of nodes that might have been able to start a cascade of users. Instead, the negative information that was passed along to potential users meant that the product never started to cascade through the network.