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Why Snapchat didn’t give Spectacles to techies

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Re: Why Snapchat didn’t give Spectacles to techies

#41

Post by JonnieCache »

jknoepfler wrote: post #5

I look forward to a future in which we are all wearing ridiculously walled-garden tech on our faces, and a future in which we've gotten over it. I feel like just as we're slowly recovering the art of making food from the excesses of the early 20th century, our children's children will have to recover the art of being a social human being from the excesses of the early 21st century. I recognize that otherizing an inev…

> otherizing

what? Can you explain what you mean here?

I know what "othering" means but I have no idea how you would do it to a technology, or what it means to write it with the "-ize" suffix.

Re: Why Snapchat didn’t give Spectacles to techies

#42

Post by edblarney »

bitwize wrote: post #8

TL;DR, don't make and market tech products for tech people, because they're all queasy autists who will make your product look dorky and ugly. Aim your products at the cool people, the beautiful people, the Kardashians and Iggy Azaleas of the world. They're the people who matter .

* The glasses are not a tech product *

And Snapchat is * not a tech company *

That's an important thing to get first :)

Re: Why Snapchat didn’t give Spectacles to techies

#43

Post by trymas »

edblarney wrote: post #39
jpatokal wrote: post #28

> That’s why the first memorable photos of Spectacles weren’t shot by Scoble, but by famous fashion photographer Karl Lagerfeld. How soon we forget: Google Glass actually collaborated with Diane von Furstenberg (a famous fashion designer) and did a launch party at New York Fashion Week. https://www.fastcompany.com/3001142/google-glass-hits-runway... But Google positioned Glass as a platform for apps, meaning they had…

Even though G*Glasses were 'in a fashion' show doesn't mean in any way there were positioned in the proper aspirational way. Though yes, I agree they had to get devs in the loop 'because apps'. Snapchat is almost proper consumer marketing company. Google is a tech company - and they had absolutely no idea how to market and position those glasses to consumers.

> Google is a tech company - and they had absolutely no idea how to market and position those glasses to consumers.

wat.

1. G-glass != snapchat spectacles.

2. IMHO google tried to create new accessory - smart glasses, they first wanted to introduce it to developers to create apps for it.

3. Either:

3.1. Google saw that it was not worth it at that time. Google is in business of making money after all and not in business of making selfish and shameless teenagers happy.

3.2. The idea was burned down by privacy concerns. G-glass became recognizable enough that users won't use because public will dismiss them due to privacy reasons and vice versa.

I loathe 'startups' like snapchat (though I understand there's money when such big user base takes pictures/videos of everything around them), but IMHO it's a matter of time when teenagers will grab another new and hip service to scream their daily lives to the world and all 'genius of marketing' will disappear.

Re: Why Snapchat didn’t give Spectacles to techies

#44

Post by maxerickson »

ethanbond wrote: post #34
vostok wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even as a liberal I think there's actually something to this idea. You can see it with things like the financial transaction tax proposals that are clearly meant to hurt nerdy HFTs rather than affect banks. I think part of it is that nerdy HFTs aren't eloquent enough to explain what they're doing and how it benefits the world.

I would love to hear an explanation of how beating the next guy by 1ms is helping the world enough to justify obscene payouts. Go for it.

Lay out the case for the payouts being obscene.

Probably keep in mind that the nominal value of the stocks changing hands on a given day is hundreds of billions of dollars and that an actively trading counterparty is facilitating the movement of that money. What's fair compensation for that?

Re: Why Snapchat didn’t give Spectacles to techies

#45

Post by ohstopitu »

edblarney wrote: post #42
bitwize wrote: post #8

TL;DR, don't make and market tech products for tech people, because they're all queasy autists who will make your product look dorky and ugly. Aim your products at the cool people, the beautiful people, the Kardashians and Iggy Azaleas of the world. They're the people who matter .

* The glasses are not a tech product * And Snapchat is * not a tech company * That's an important thing to get first :)

Excatly! it does not integrate with anything else apart from Snapchat (hence, it does not market/depend on the tech folks)!

Re: Why Snapchat didn’t give Spectacles to techies

#46

Post by edblarney »

trymas wrote: post #43
edblarney wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even though G*Glasses were 'in a fashion' show doesn't mean in any way there were positioned in the proper aspirational way. Though yes, I agree they had to get devs in the loop 'because apps'. Snapchat is almost proper consumer marketing company. Google is a tech company - and they had absolutely no idea how to market and position those glasses to consumers.

> Google is a tech company - and they had absolutely no idea how to market and position those glasses to consumers. wat. 1. G-glass != snapchat spectacles. 2. IMHO google tried to create new accessory - smart glasses, they first wanted to introduce it to developers to create apps for it. 3. Either: 3.1. Google saw that it was not worth it at that time. Google is in business of making money after all and not in busine…

If they wold like hotcakes 3.1 would not matter and 3.2 would be rectified enough to assuage the plebes.

Your point 'they tried to create a new accessory': why is a tech company trying to create an 'accessory' that nobody wants, and is completely out of their domain?

Snapchat is very intelligently extending their brand and user experience a little bit. Google was pushing tech.

Things that we wear, are part of our culture, they are about fashion, trends, and to some degree functionality.

Google his a tech company that has absolutely no clue how to do consumer marketing - this is evident in almost everything they do.

When they provide a high degree of utility - then they win - they should stick to that.

Snapchat is doing it exactly right. And there's no reason to believe that in a few years, the Snapchat glasses won't be as powerful and 'app-ish' as the Google glasses.

Re: Why Snapchat didn’t give Spectacles to techies

#47

Post by dragonwriter »

vostok wrote: post #16
dragonwriter wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am somewhat amused by this because I've been a liberal and nerd my whole life, participated extensively in liberal activist circles, and never once encountered this among liberals (the closest to this I've seen would be some segments of the community's reaction to perceived ivory tower intellectuals that are distant from pragmatics, but even that isn't so much an othering as a sometimes white-hot debate about prior…

Even as a liberal I think there's actually something to this idea. You can see it with things like the financial transaction tax proposals that are clearly meant to hurt nerdy HFTs rather than affect banks. I think part of it is that nerdy HFTs aren't eloquent enough to explain what they're doing and how it benefits the world.

I think viewing the HFT tax propoals as being motivated by anti-nerd rather than a out accumulation of wealth that is perceived to be at the expense of people like the tax supporter where the tax supporter fails to see the social utility of the function producing the accumulation of wealth is, well, a significant case of seeing what you want to see rather than what is actually there.

Re: Why Snapchat didn’t give Spectacles to techies

#48

Post by ethanbond »

maxerickson wrote: post #44
ethanbond wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to hear an explanation of how beating the next guy by 1ms is helping the world enough to justify obscene payouts. Go for it.

Lay out the case for the payouts being obscene. Probably keep in mind that the nominal value of the stocks changing hands on a given day is hundreds of billions of dollars and that an actively trading counterparty is facilitating the movement of that money. What's fair compensation for that?

How did markets function prior to HFT? They're only facilitating exchange between other algorithms, right? And in that case how is it helpful to the market?

Note I'm actually asking these questions - not just being rhetorical. The whole concept of it seems plainly ridiculous to me but I don't know much about this area.

Re: Why Snapchat didn’t give Spectacles to techies

#49

Post by oliv__ »

bitwize wrote: post #8

TL;DR, don't make and market tech products for tech people, because they're all queasy autists who will make your product look dorky and ugly. Aim your products at the cool people, the beautiful people, the Kardashians and Iggy Azaleas of the world. They're the people who matter .

Yikes...

Re: Why Snapchat didn’t give Spectacles to techies

#50

Post by kevando »

jpatokal wrote: post #28

> That’s why the first memorable photos of Spectacles weren’t shot by Scoble, but by famous fashion photographer Karl Lagerfeld. How soon we forget: Google Glass actually collaborated with Diane von Furstenberg (a famous fashion designer) and did a launch party at New York Fashion Week. https://www.fastcompany.com/3001142/google-glass-hits-runway... But Google positioned Glass as a platform for apps, meaning they had…

This is a very good point. I understand the comparison to Google Glass, but I don't think it's fair. Google openly experiments. Snapchat openly does not.

Normally this wouldn't bother me, but I see so many early 'start ups' that are just experiments, but because we create benchmarks like this - they put on fronts to be more than they are and we get this ecosystem of show-and-tell.

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