Glass has been out a little over 8 months, and is inching closer to a public release as we enter 2014. While the popularity of Glass is certainly there, Early Adopter of the product Robert Scoble says there are too many things missing and need to be changed before Glass can become the hit that Google wants it to be. Bad battery life, a lackluster API, and design that has need for improvement are among the things that Scoble thinks Google needs to change before Glass can really take off, and he might be right. What might be holding Glass back the most though is its price. If you were invited to join Glass it most certainly did not come without its cost. At $1,500 not just anybody is going to want to purchase a pair for the still very limited amount of things that the tech is capable of.
As stated by Scoble on his Google+ post, the price needs to be under $500 to hit the sweet spot and draw customers in to buy. The problem is that Google might not be able to get the product under the $500 price point this year, says Scoble. He goes on to say that once Google is able to produce Glass for under $300 at cost to the customer and it has gone through one or two more revisions, that’s when it will really boom and we should see a horde of consumers, tech nerds, and all around gadget lovers ready to buy.
There is a whole list of reasons why Scoble is predicting that Glass will be a 2014 failure, but among them the most damning seem to be price, the lack of apps and the way that the UI handles the ones that are loaded on, battery life(it really only does last about 30-45 minutes if you’re shooting video), the design still needs a makeover, and Glass in it’s current state is just too hard to acquire. You can only buy it if you receive an invite from Google. All told there is currently around 10,000 or a little above that number that currently own glass, but that may soon change as Google is sending out invites to anybody that is Google Play Music All Access subscriber. The cost of course is still the same as it’s always been, but that might spark more developers with great ideas for the platform and we’ll definitely see more users. At the end of it all, even if Glass fails to take off this year, Scoble remains confident that it’ll take off at some point, and comments that “he still loves his”, and will continue to wear them including at CES next week. Do you think Glass will take off this year, or are there just too many drawbacks in its current stage? Let us know what you think in the comments.