Google could spinoff those products and services. Some are probably unnoticeable at Google's scale and not enough employees want to tie gheir careers to them. However some of them could stand on their own legs if owned by a smaller company fully dedicated to them. A way to spin them off is to sell them to somebody. Did that ever happen and did any company ever offer to buy a part of Google?
Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise
131–140 of 259 posts
Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise
#132Glass just wasn't very good. Tiny low resolution display, poor quality camera, uncomfortable to wear, terrible battery life. Pivoting to "for Enterprise" was just a half-assed attempt to make back some of the $$$ wasted on development without putting much more effort into R&D. Not a surprise that adoption was limited. (I worked at X 2013-2015.)
There was a lot of really impressive tech in glass. Especially for 10 years ago. I have no doubt that with continued focus and funding, they could have build something truly impressive.
Unfortunately, glass was a pet project of Sergey's and he decided to exit stage left fairly quickly once some of his unsavory behaviors started becoming known publicly. This was just a few months after the launch. Once he was no longer hands on, the entire endeavor was left the languish without clear direction.
Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise
#133If I were to get one of these on ebay or somewhere used, is there any sort of dev ecosystem available if I wanted to hack around on them? Or are they pretty locked down?
Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise
#134Google Glass, Google Car, Google Plus... Its always the same pattern. A lot of pre-release advertisment, followed by a release of a beta version and another press release declaring the end of the product. At this point, I wouldn't adopt any Google offering because I sort of expect by default it will go away in 6 months or 12.
Google Car as in Waymo? Isn't that still growing and getting expanded? Obviously self driving is harder than everyone thought, but its not abandoned by any means.
Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise
#135If I were to get one of these on ebay or somewhere used, is there any sort of dev ecosystem available if I wanted to hack around on them? Or are they pretty locked down?
I have one of the original ones, and I will admit: for a dev-focused person, you could see A LOT of potential. But, now it is quite an ordeal to get things up and running... if you want to experiment with that kind of interface, something tells me you are better off buying an nreal or something like that and having an actual functional and supported device + something you can potentially hack on.
Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting, but I think the device is a bit too bulky and sticks too far out to work in my use case. The environment where we'd use this is essentially a giant machine shop where you have to wear a hard-hat, it is noisy and dirty and you often have to get into tight spaces with cabling and piping everywhere. Besides it doesn't look like they are primarily focused on selling the device itself. For a device to work fo…
Reach out to the team. They are not a device company but a software company that focuses on integrating with AR devices. Angelo, the founder, has a deep passion for VR/AR so I'm sure he'd love to hear your use case. As a bonus: their focus has been on adding evidence capture (documentation, really) in the flow of the process. The primary use case is pharma manufacturing execution systems (e.g. installation, configura…
Ahh, seems I was a bit too quick.
Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise
#137Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise
#138Innovators dilemma. You were early to market, you did all the work, and no one wanted the product. What do you do? Keep going? Or give up from exhaustion? This is the unfortunate situation with many who tackle new spaces like Mobile, VR and AR. Google will no doubt re-enter the space, but only after it's been validated. And that's totally fine. Expect Google to produce quality hardware and software at a time when the…
Yeah, Edison's gramophone sucked because there were no records at the time.
Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise
#139At this point, I think issue is not about products Google build, it is about how Google put their incentives in place. - Build new shiny thing -> promoted - Support shiny thing -> it's not difficult, everyone can do it This type of culture is influencing future direction of Google products, they put together awesome team, solve problem and get from 0 to 1, then team moves on, others don't have incentive to make 1 to…
> Support shiny thing -> it's not difficult, everyone can do it Sometimes people say those things, but I can't understand for whom it rings true. What's especially hard about new things? Maintenance on the other hand, can be much more tricky. Especially when taking backwards compatibility in mind you really have to think about every step going forward. It's much easier to build a brand new highway than repairing an e…
> What's especially hard about new things?
Because it doesn't exist yet, you need to investigate previous approaches/research, come up with architecture/design, evaluate pros/cons, hardware requirements, staffing and so on.
When things become clear, it is easy to build it.
Support is harder in the sense that it takes a lot of time and digging into the platform to understand how can you solve it, but for a small gain (0.5% users will not see this issue again, unless you introduced new bug). Imagine solving 100 different support tickets, you need to solve at least 10 of them to start seeing the pattern, if there is any, to come up with generic solution. But at the time you solve 100 tickets, someone with experience can build solution which can make your product obsolete.
Support vs new has different trade-offs.
- Support -> takes more time and persistence, very small incremental improvements (88% -> 88.4%,..). But happy customers
- New thing -> takes more time on how to approach the problem, after problem/solution is clear, much faster to build for 85% cases
Re: Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise
#140I wish they had spun it off so it wouldn't just have died within Google. It seems that any project that isn't wildly popular is just starved of talent inside Google. Outside Google with a little bit of money and a dedicated team, I don't see why this couldn't have been a success. What I would really like was a product that was developed to be affordable, fairly open so you can easily integrate it into your own system…
Check out apprentice.io The founder initially fell in love with Google Glass and went on to build an AR/VR startup around it. They are life sciences focused, but I see no reason it couldn't fit your use case.
I just put in a request to talk to them. Got a call back from a sales rep.
I explained the my application was remote support of engineers /customers working in on our hardware microscopes (similar to an electron microscope).
The sales rep says they are only interested in selling life sciences /drug companies. So I would recommend against anyone contacting them who want to use this for general purpose AR.