Google Glasses Remixed with Google Ads

quietstorms

I don’t think this will totally be the result of Glasses but it was funny.

The Valley is weird to me now. I was watching a PBS documentary on what was essentially about Robert Noyce. You could draw a straight line between him and Jobs but everything almost falls apart in this new era where you don’t have to have a business plan for a product. Just more users. VCs are sometimes rewarded (usually greater than the company they have a stake in) to make up for their misses.

I say this because it reminds me of Google. They won’t put ads in your face just like they don’t on Android. However they’re not going to make any serious money off of either which makes you question why the product exists. It’s the current belief in the Valley that you no longer need to have a business plan. For those who aren’t as large as Google, they’re waiting to be bought out (see Mailbox.) It’s interesting to see Google following the gameplan of smaller companies when there’s no payoff at the end.

Tvaddic

Its a complete strech to say there isn’t a payoff, or that they don’t make any serious money. Google makes more money than the ENTIRE print industry, where the ads are literally pushed in your face.
- JohnDoey
  
  98% of Google revenue is ad revenue, and of that, 90% of it comes from ads on Google’s own products.
tyr

Android exists because Google was afraid Apple had too much power as the middleman between them and the customers they serve ads to. They needed it to spread far and wide to break the burgeoning iOS monopoly in mobile, so it couldn’t have ads. Now positions in mobile have sort of stabilized around 2 platforms and seeing Google Glass is essentially a new product category I don’t think there’s any reason to assume they wouldn’t have ads. Though they’ll probably sell it as “added value information”.
- JohnDoey
  
  No, that is not true. Google bought Android, Inc in 2005, 2 years before the iPhone introduction. Android exists because Google was afraid Microsoft had too much power as the middleman between them and the customers they serve ads to.
  
  Android pretends to be an iPhone because by the time Android shipped, the demand from generic hardware vendors was for an iPhone cloning kit, not a Microsoft cloning kit. If you scratch the paint on Android, you see 2005-style baby Java apps and other archaic features.
  
  iOS monopoly in mobile
  
  Apple has less than 10% of the overall phone market. What you said is completely ridiculous. It’s exactly the same as saying “Mac monopoly in Intel PC’s,” where Apple also has roughly 10% of the overall Intel PC market.
  
  What you may be thinking of is that Apple has over 90% of HIGH-END phone and Intel PC sales. They do not at this time have a low-end phone or a low-end Intel PC, whereas that is almost all the generic hardware makers have is low-end gear. But that is also not a monopoly in any way — it’s a leadership position. Everything happens first on Apple because the money is there and the devices are always 5 years ahead of the low-end market. That is why everything seems to be Apple-Apple-Apple to the point where PC people lose their frickin’ minds. It is not because Apple has a monopoly of any kind.
  - tyr
    
    Google may have bought Android in 2005 but Google buys a lot of things and most of them never leave the lab. This was around the time there was speculation Google would start their own cell network. What matters is how they eventually extensively redeveloped Android to reposition it as an iOS competitor and brought it to market. Research projects don’t count, just ask Xerox Park.
    
    When iOS was released it had a defacto monopoly on smartphone users. Oh other handsets were available, and soon Android joined the fray but although many of these people have smartphones there are not the always connected, app buying, web browsing smart phone users that iOS had from the start. In fact even now when as you rightfully point out iOS has around 10% of the phone market, every study points out that in web browsing smart phone use is basically a duopoly between iOS and Android and in the so-called app economy the overwhelming majority of cash being made is still on iOS.
JohnDoey

Google is an advertising company. That is how they make their money. All of their products have exactly one purpose: show the user ads. Google Glasses are just as much an ad platform as anything else they make. Even the self-driving cars they are working on are made so that you can look at ads while the car is doing the driving.

Gaussian Blur

Hmmm… a partially or entirely ad-subsidized version is not at all outside the realm of possibility. Glass at, say, $500 or less with ads is almost not so nutty

JohnDoey

No, it is $1500 with ads.

Saying that Google Glasses won’t have ads is like saying an Apple product won’t have apps. Everything Google does is about showing you an ad. Everything Apple does is about showing you an app.
- Gaussian Blur
  
  filed away for future claim chowder

John Daniel

Don’t forget Google is always working on the next plan. It won’t always be about advertising. Once they get a large enough monopoly, then they can charge developers for access to their “product”.

http://sharonsharalike.com/ Sharon Sharalike

Google has never made any significant money from anything other than advertising. They lose money on most everything they do.
- Tvaddic
  
  I think he was trying to say that Google wants to diversify move past just advertising.
  - http://sharonsharalike.com/ Sharon Sharalike
    
    I guess I was trying to say that they so far have not been able to make money, or even just avoid losing it, on anything else.
    
    I didn’t even address his notion that Google will have a monopoly and then charge for it. The reason Android has been so widely adopted is because it’s free, and in many cases Google actually pays them, not the other way around.
JohnDoey

That’s like saying that Apple is working on their next plan, and it will be to give away all their products for free and support that with ads. Apple is not setup that way, does not operate that way. Google is the opposite: they are setup entirely for ads.

http://www.new1000ad.com/ Jack Jones

In two months this wont be available. Somehow it will get abused and it will go away.

matthewmaurice

Of course this doesn’t include the ads you see in Gmail and Google searches outside of Glass based on every place you went and everything you looked at while going there.

How many times have you seen an ad for a product or company on nearly every website you visit for 3 days after you searched for that company or product with Google? Now imagine what your surfing looks like when “The Algorithm” knows you walk past a particular business every day or spent 3.47 seconds looking at particular billboard when you usually only spend 1.667 seconds doing so?

JohnDoey

Google considers that a feature, and so do a minority of their customers. The danger comes from the fact that the majority of their customers think Google is another Apple, they don’t understand the implications of being part of the Google ecosystem.

JohnDoey

Uploading everything I see to Google is not nearly as scary as the viruses that will run on these things, uploading everything I see to the mob and various law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Android has more viruses than apps, so good luck with your glasses.