Google co-founder Sergey Brin (Getty Images via @daylife)
Put Google Glass -- this season's favorite wearable-computing device -- on the bridge of your nose, and the list of things that you could do is practically endless. Every day, there's fresh chatter about the appeal of playing battleship, checking Facebook, or something similar. But as aficionados gush about trivial stuff, skeptics are bound to ask: "OK, Glass, what's your killer app?"
If Glass's developers can solve that riddle, they will have created a must-have gadget that will become a workplace necessity or an irresistible part of our weekends and hobbies. If not, Glass may end up as this decade's Segway: an invention that arrived with enormous hype but soon ended up as a niche product ignored by 95% of society.
In the past couple months, Google has made its Glass devices available to about 8,000 early users, hoping to learn something valuable from these explorers' usage habits and ideas for improvements. You can read some of their, um, reflections about Glass here, here and here. Just about everyone likes Glass's ability to take hands-free photos and videos. Instant access to Google maps and directions is nifty, too. But that's not enough yet to justify Glass's current, $1,500 price tag.
So what's missing? Last week, I chatted at length with two savvy Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who are testing Google Glass. Both of them, by their very nature, constantly think about what it takes to transform a reasonably interesting product into something that's explosively appealing. As our conversations stretched out, I realized that both were pinpointing the same crucial factor that Google must get right.
In a word, it's search.
Search? My first reaction was to say: "Isn't that what Google already does just fine?" Every day, Google processes 5.1 billion search queries from around the world -- and its basic methods have pretty much settled into an approach that serves us all quite satisfactorily. While there's always room for a little more fiddling with the algorithms, search for desktop and smartphone users is a solved problem, or something very close to it.
Not so fast, says Jack Herrick, chief executive officer of Palo Alto, Calif., based WikiHow. He wants Glass to be a smooth running "outsourced brain" that can bring knowledge to him nearly as quickly as his own cognition. Ask Glass: "What's IBM's annual revenue?" and the right answer is "$104.5 billion" -- rather than being offered links to Wikipedia's IBM page, or IBM's own website.
Being able to pull up all kinds of facts in a hurry would make Glass compelling both at work and at play, adds Tom Shields, founder and chief strategy officer at YieldEx, an advertising analytics platform for digital publishers. During a family weekend at Lake Tahoe, Shields says he was delighted when Glass could provide instant answers about which actors and actresses started in famous movies -- and annoyed when the Google gadget turned out to be the most slow-witted presence in the room.
Voice-based search right now is still in its infancy, despite aggressive attempts by Google and Apple to build out that capability. Some queries are misheard; others require a more subtle grasp of the way information is woven together than current software can accommodate. But there's an even bigger problem.
Right now, Google's traditional search approach can be paired quite smoothly with an ad-delivery system that creates many billions of dollars a year in revenue. Type in a query, and the result is not just a list of especially relevant sites -- but also a lucrative serenade of ads. The instant-answer approach that Herrick and Shields describe doesn't really leave any room for ads.
Imagine a world in which Glass-driven searches became everyone's favorite way of embracing the "outsourced brain" principle. Suddenly the only way for Google to get paid would be by charging purchase fees for its equipment, or monthly subscriptions for users. The overall impact on Google's revenue could be highly disruptive.
In that case, vastly better search on Glass would be a killer app in more ways than one. It would be murderously appealing to users. But it might also be quite deadly to Google's current way of making money. Does Google dare proceed?
