New York Times reporter Nick Bilton broke the story that became Google Glass. Today, he tells what went wrong, and it’s really pretty simple: the marketers saw what the engineers were working on and put it out to the world far before it was ready. In other words, what happened was exactly what anyone with any sense knew what was going on.
What happens next? Glass is now in the hands of real product people, who aren’t going to let that disaster happen again:
Several people with knowledge of Mr. [Tony] Fadell’s plans for Glass said he was going to redesign the product from scratch and would not release it until it was complete. “There will be no public experimentation,” one adviser to Mr. Fadell said. “Tony is a product guy and he’s not going to release something until it’s perfect.”
There aren’t a lot of do-overs in technology. Google is fortunate that it has the resources to get one of the few.
