4 ms·
Ha! I interviewed at google and told them glass was a horrible consumer product and that they should have started with a market that wouldn't mind looking stupi
by spinlock 9y ago
Ha! I interviewed at google and told them glass was a horrible consumer product and that they should have started with a market that wouldn't mind looking stupid (or skiers who already wore goggles so they wouldn't look stupid at all). The point I made to them was that they engineered an incredible device but hadn't validated the market. I suggested it would have been better to start with something like skiers because they already wore goggles and helmets. So, you wouldn't need to get the product so small to see how people reacted to it.
Needless to say, I didn't get the job. It was really funny to watch Glass (which is a cool technology) totally fail because it's a stupid consumer product. And, I'm no Steve Jobs. It was absolutely predictable that Glass would never work as a consumer product.
And, if you want to make it work for manufacturing, I think you'll need to scale up the form factor. Why wouldn't you make it a safety goggle too? Think about all of the engineering effort that went into shrinking this into a small, completely impractical, package.
Anyway, I think that this was not only predictable but it also shows a company culture where people can't tell the emperor that he's naked. It's not like I was the only person that took one look at glass and knew you couldn't leave the house wearing one. But, that message was pretty actively suppressed at Google.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- valuearb 9y agoNot sure why you got down-voted, everything you wrote is true.
- Gigablah 9y agoExcept for the parts where he claimed that his opinions were the reason for him failing the interview, or the fact that he failed the interview was indicative of some company culture. Unless you believe that he's an omniscient psychic who somehow has insider knowledge of his hiring process.
- sbank 9y agoOr maybe it was just said in jest. Not everything has to be so black and white.
- nojvek 9y agoI can't say whether you failed the interview because of that but Google is a company that believes that their superior technology validates itself. Sometimes it's the pressure "if you can't sell them in millions, we don't want to do it at Google". This means Google is a great company to make acquisitions that they can scale e.g docs, maps, YouTube, Android. Google has so much money than they know what to do with it. They can't experiment like a startup because failed products hurt their brand. Their best bet is to invest in startups that use their stack and if successful, acquire and scale the shit out of them.
- spinlock 9y ago> Google is a company that believes that their superior technology validates itself. This is a good point. I bet the team that made glass looks at what a technical achievement Glass is and rate the project as a complete success. I don't know how many millions they spent to get the form factor so small but I really would be surprised if anyone caught any flack for it.
- Snowflame 9y agoXoogler here. You are very, very wrong if you think there is no dissent within Google. There's plenty. That said, this is a company that has massively succeeded with other bets that were "absolutely predictable they would never work." So just because something looks questionable doesn't mean it gets shot down. (Now, IMO, Glass was a mistake - but for entirely different reasons than you describe. An elite fashion product cuts against Google's reputation as something for everybody, even IF it had succeeded.)