Launch of Snap’s Spectacles
https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/15/spectascobles/
As Snap’s new product, Spectacles, have been launched in the past week, I wanted to take a look at their release through a network perspective. Spectacles are the first hardware product that Snap has released. They are a pair of sunglasses with a video recorder attached that is used to record Snapchat videos. I want to discuss the launch and popularity of the hardware product, and compare it to the launch of Google glass.
Spectacles were launched on November 12th. At first, they were only on sale in popup vending machines near the company’s original headquarters in Venice, CA. This launch embodied Snapchat. The machines were spontaneously in “random” locations, and the vending machine it came out of had a huge silly looking eye on it. The vending machines are playful and fun! Thus, through this launch, Snap is hoping to establish a specific network of early adopters. First, you have to be around CA, next you have to have $150, and lastly, you need to both want to try out the Snap product and wait on line, for possibly hours.
What was surprising to some, was that Snap did not first release Spectacles to early adopting tech bloggers and geeks. Most tech companies generally do this, to help spur early adopters to ignite networks to start adopting the technology. If Snap did this, it would generate reviews of the product. This would support the notion that Spectacles are a serious product. But, this isn’t what Snap wanted, and thus released it the way they did. Additionally, by doing a formal release, Snap would have targeted adults and 20 something year olds (the media consuming and tech savvy age), instead of it’s teen and millennial user base.
The spread of popularity of such a device seems like it should follow the threshold cascade model because of it’s relatively low price point and it’s relevance to teens and millenials. It would be interesting to see what the threshold would be in such a case. I think it would be high (around 30%) for a cascade to take effect, because of the fashion implications that the product has.
It’s interesting to compare the launch of this product to that of Google’s Google Glass. Google gave it’s Google Glasses to a much different network of people in it’s initial phase of adoption. It gave the product to journalists and tech bloggers. While this garnered news articles about it, it wasn’t the audience that should have used for the initial release. Glasses are a part of your fashion. Just like we wouldn’t want Google launching a pair of jeans made by Bonobos, it was a bad idea for “Googlers” to be the launch medium for a pair of glasses made by Google. So, it seems like the launch may have followed a network cascade model, but the problem was that Google didn’t do a good enough job of establishing initial adopting nodes in the network.