Tim Bajarin: Apple Watch vs. the Google Glass debacle

11 years ago

“Apparently, Google found out the hard way how tech products get adopted. They lost hundreds of millions of dollars on this [Google Glass] project and, worse yet, they soured the consumer market for similar products,” Tim Bajarin writes for Tech.pinions. “Even those with disposable income who could afford to be a Glass Explorer have to feel taken as Google used them as beta testers at their personal expense. I have seen a recent private report that details the damage in consumer minds about Google Glass and, even if a competitor came to market with a cheaper product better than Glass, they would have a hard time getting anything but vertical users interested.”

“Even if Google Glass 2.0 comes out or others create glasses similar at cheaper prices, I see them as being dead in the water for consumers for quite some time,” Bajarin writes. “While Google was playing with Glass, Apple brought out the ideal extension of your smartphone in the form of a watch.”

“I was a Google Glass Explorer and the experience was horrible from the start. Google Glass now sits in my office museum of failed products. The UI was terrible, the connection unreliable, and the info it delivered had little use to me. It was the worst $1500 I have ever spent in my life,” Bajarin writes. “During the Google Glasses hype I saw many people suggesting Apple jump in and do glasses of their own. We now know the Apple Watch had been in the works well before Google Glass came out and Apple already knew the best way to extend the info from a smartphone to a wearable would be via the wrist, not through glasses.”

Much more in the full article – highly recommended – here.

MacDailyNews Take: Bajarin is bang on target as usual.

While Apple was being accused of sitting around, resting on their laurels and not innovating for years, Google was fleecing their usual cadre of clueless beta testers to the tune of $1500 per head. While getting pummeled by clueless pundits and analysts, Apple was actually doing the hard work of refining user experiences, feature sets, UIs, and APIs for Apple Watch, Force Touch, Taptic Engine, Apple Pay, Watch OS, WatchKit, etc. You know, all of the sort of work that Our Lady of Perpetual Beta had, as usual, skipped to the detriment of their users.

The difference between Apple and Google is the difference between Apple Watch and Google Glass. Far too many people make the mistake of thinking that the difference is between iPhone and the best Android phones. That is a false comparison. Without iPhone, there would be no Android as it exists today as a blatant iPhone knockoff, it would instead be the BlackBerry knockoff it was originally intended to be.

Google is a search engine and online advertising company. They gather data from wherever possible and use it in order to better target the online ads that they sell. Google is not Apple. They never will be.

“Holy crap! I guess we’re not going to ship that phone.” – Google’s Android chief Andy Rubin, moments after Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone on January 9, 2007

Here’s what Google’s Android looked like before and after Apple’s iPhone:

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