Google Glass is not all that

Robert Scoble has proclaimed Google Glass the next revolutionary thing. He did the same thing with RSS and podcasting back in 2004. RSS and podcasts are great. I was upset as anybody by the demise of Google Reader. However, 98% of the world didn't care. If podcasts ceased to exist tomorrow the only people who would care are the handful of people managing to make a living creating them, and the relative minority of us that consume them. He also proclaimed Netflix dead in 2007. I'm not running a "Scoble is wrong" blog, honest. I didn't even remember the Netflix post, it just came up when I was searching for the RSS/podcast post.

However, If he missed the mark so badly on 3 big issues already, why would we have any confidence that he is right this time? Google Glass suffers from the same problem that RSS and Podcasting suffer from. They don't solve a problem that most people have. Most of us are not looking for a more convenient way to search the web while we are walking down the street. The Internet democratized access to information. Cars made your world a smaller place. The telephone enabled real-time communication. What is Google Glass going to do? It probably is an incremental improvement over using your phone to take pictures. So what? What market is Google Glass going to disrupt? Robert theorizes that it might be advertising, as Google can use Glass to get in between virtually every transaction you do and minimize it's dependency on ads for revenue. That is an interesting theory, but they have to sell 100 million of the things first. Good luck with that. They already have 100 million Android phones in circulation. Has anybody noticed a decline in ads? The hype around Glass reminds me of the hype around the Segway. Remember how it was going to revolutionize transportation?

Lest anyone thing I'm throwing stones in glass houses, just take a look at my comments regarding social networks in the second link in the first paragraph. I can be wrong too.