My biggest concern is if this is executed poorly it could undermine future attempts to bring wearable computing to the mainstream. It still feels a bit early for this to work well. Google can pull off the technical challenges, surely, but the usability hurdles here are outside of their comfort zone.
I don't really see this being an issue... First generation emerging technologies always have big problems, and early adopters know it. Think about pre-iPhone smartphones - they (largely) sucked, but that fact hasn't had any effect on the market for well-engineered smartphones today, as far as I can tell. If anything, Google releasing a product with major deficiencies that early adopters still find valuable will spur further development in the same space by competitors.
You could arguably say that early attempts anchored the industry (into a certain way of thinking about what a smartphone was and how it worked) until Apple came along to pull it out of that rut...
That's arguable. I'm pretty sure there are many more ways to 'do it' which are both wrong, and have not been attempted.
Granted, I'm not putting Apple up on a pedestal or anything. They just came along at the right time, with the right leadership to combine existing technology into a better (and more useful) configuration.
And there may need to be someone in Apple's position in the future. Will it be Apple? Maybe, maybe not. It didn't take Apple to change smartphones for the better, it took a better smartphone that Apple was the first (by a long shot) to realize.
Even though early smartphones sucked in comparison to modern smartphones, I wouldn't trade that development for the world. Bring on the smartglasses.
The article makes it sound like this is more an 'opt in through purchase' experiment rather than a serious product launch - perhaps that is to mitigate this particular concern.
I remembering reading somewhere that they might actually test this like they did with Chromebooks (Cr-48) and distribute them to people to get feedback.
Because this won't be valuable until there is serious data that they can statistically infer different things on (like how Google Translate and other services get better over time). It also sounds like (perhaps wishful thinking) that it would be an open experiment, i.e. with open software and APIs for third-person development.
