Remember all the hype over the Segway? It was going to revolutionize transportation and generally change the world. Decades later, use is confined largely to tourist tours, mall security, and cops.
The NYPD’s announcement they are testing Google Glass seems like another small step into a similar slide into irrelevance. Ending with a few use cases that only reinforce its deeply un-cool status in the broader human ecosystem. The things are just geeky-looking. Not to mention just how hopelessly awkward someone wearing them is going to be in person (fact: people are proven to be awful at multi-tasking, but they think they are great at it). Even worse, the initial use cases (beyond a few uber geeks)?
- Cops – Glass would actually be a good way to record incidents and look up records.
- Tourists – watch for Google Glass enabled “self tour” groups bumbling around a metropolis near you (and looking up, around, or anywhere else besides where they are going).
- Mall Security, teachers, dog-catchers, and other “nuisance” quasi-authority figures: They’ll mostly buy it to feel cool – because the cops will have them. But they will come up with some sort of justification over time.
So there you have it. The Segway trinity re-created. And another perfectly good product (with useful potential) is irredeemably condemned to the ghetto of geekiness.
Real geek; Not that cute, semi-distracted mad scientist-y guy. Not the no-makeup-but-cute-with-her-hair-down girl with the slightly-too-thick-black-eyeglass-frames. Real geek. The kind that even other geeks won’t date…
