It's ancient history to me, and I'm not even a teenager. I can't believe it was 2012... I would have said 2005 or something. According to Wikipedia, it was actually 2013. Wow.
Spectacles may have failed, but on the contrary, I think they made a whole different set of mistakes than Glass:
1. They specifically focused on the fashion-conscious aspect initially (e.g. the Karl Lagerfeld shoot), and purposefully tried to keep the specs away from the nerdy tech press. In the early stages this was actual really successful, and at the very least they got "fashion buzz" when Spectacles came out.
2. They highlighted that Spectacles have a big light go on when recording, which helped blunt some of the "creepiness factor". In fact, I think they did a largely good job of positioning Spectacles as "fun way to take video with friends" as opposed to Glass's "cyborg assistant" approach.
It's interesting how on the other side Apple has succeeded with the Apple watch even though you need to recharge it every day. My guess is that it was highly priced and so seen as a "rich people" jewelry. Hence the market being driven by people who want to look rich.
I'm sure that if snapchat spectacles had been priced lower, every middle schooler would have gotten them. Driving the market/trend by mass adoption.
But isn't the Apple watch useful? I definitely see the appeal of being able to see notifications without having to take out my phone.
I don't think it's worth the cost for me, but for those who just enjoy using technology and playing with the newest thing, I can see why you'd want one. Plus, I'm sure they make nice gifts.
I don't really buy that they're seen as rich people jewelry. It's less than an iPhone and priced like a budget or fashion brand watch.
Of course, this could be my bias showing! To me, the Apple Watch is cheap enough that you'd consider getting one as a gift for someone special, so not show-off expensive but just expensive enough. Indeed I've seen them given as such.
In terms of watch prices it is far from highly priced. I don't know anyone that would considering it "rich people" jewelry. I've had my Apple Watch for several weeks now and its usefulness has made it worth every penny. I especially love having cellular service and not having to take my phone with me everywhere I go.
Apple watch probably combines function with form in a way that is probably very good value at its price point. I'd certainly consider buying one if only it worked with Android phones. I have airpods that works well with my Android phone that I consider a fantastic value buy.
A few months ago on Hacker News I asked about the low usage of the Spectacles and the response was generally that people who bought it liked it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14562560
Spectacles are a case where appealing to a niche may not be the most profitable endeavor. (and now that Snap is a public company, they have to actually care about profit at some point)
I was really curious about spectacles, and bought a pair as soon as I could. I lost them about 3 weeks later, and that was that.
In some ways they were really cool, but the article was bang-on about pretty much everything. It's really a case study about how to fuck up a product roll-out.
Portability complications were a huge downer. The shaded lenses made them difficult to use indoors, and what wasn't mentioned was that the mic was hypersensitive to distortion from the slightest breeze, which made them useless outside as well.
But, as the article states:
>To drive demand, Snap needed to demonstrate all the creative things you could do with Spectacles, and the cool people who wore them.
This was obviously a marketing-led disaster from day one. It's hard to accept company leadership that can be be persuaded to do go down a path like this so easily.
EDIT: actually looking at the snapchat spectacle webpage, it looks neat and I can see myself buying them. Just not at that price (130GBP) because I will probably not be using them a lot. But if there is a promotion around Christmas why not.
I dunno, they are/were demoing them at Universal Orlando and plenty of people were checking them out. Price tag probably scared most away (who's dumping 100+ on glasses at a theme park?).
I'd buy a pair if they were more like traditional action cam style glasses. The technical limitations right now make them far too expensive for what they are.
You'd be surprised: when I worked in retail, I was told that the sunglass stands in the theme parks were 3 of the the top five grossing stores at the time for the luxury sunglass brand that I was working for. Admittedly, this was...almost 20ish years ago, but, I'd still think this would be true today.
Just curious, am I the only one who really, really wants the AR glasses from Daemon by Daniel Suarez? I would very much like a pair of glasses that records information, helps me to recognize faces, and bring information further into my reality.
For a moment you got me excited thinking that such a thing actually exists, givens today's technology wouldn't be actually rocket science, until I realized its a book :)
If they could tell you when did you see this person in the past and recognize from your contacts, and if it didn't "sync to cloud" or that crap, I'd buy three just for gifting.
Unfortunately, it's just not realistic right now, I think. The Spectacles battery life lasts less than 30 minutes of recording, and they don't even have a screen.
Daemon is a great series with interesting tech ideas. That's exactly what i hoped we could be moving towards when i got google glass. Still waiting for something capable.
I read Daemon in middle school and became so obsessed with augmented reality that I essentially devoted the next seven years of my life to working towards making it happen: attending conferences, conducting research, and starting an AR hardware company.
So no, you're not the only one :)
Also, unrelated to my previous obsession with AR, I have prosopagnosia, so having glasses that could tell me who I'm looking at would make a major improvement to my life.
I was curious as well. Looks like he worked on Mira, an AR company that is working on shipping hardware that works with your phone. Reading the about section (https://www.mirareality.com/about), it's kind of funny, lists only three founders, who are not him, in the copy, but the photo at the top of the page has 4 founders. Looked like it could be an interesting product, though I'm sure the right AR glasses that customers will purchase need to be far less bulky.
Cool. Thanks for the clarification. I assumed it was you since you weren't in the copy ("founded by Ben Taft, Matt Stern, and Montana Reed"). Any reason you left the AR world when it seems to be heating up now?
Sounds useful, but I'm not comfortable with the idea that anyone can recognize my face and pull up information about me by virtue of wearing something on their face. Sounds a little too much like Black Mirror to me.
I wonder how many other people feel the same way. My belief is that if you don't recognize me, you should have to ask me for information about myself. I'd rather not any random stranger be able to just know.
Ok let's try this: What if wearable cameras the police are using do this? What if I mounted a phone around my neck with the camera facing out, and used it to record everything it saw, and then compiled my own database of facial features, comparing, recording, etc. [0] The problem is that in public you have no expectation of privacy. Same with private communities (and some private citizens)[1] using license plate readers. I think eventually we're going to reach a point where facial recognition, and public recording will be omnipresent, in private hands, and we either ban cameras in public, or...stop going outside.
Wasn't this the same problem with Google+? Facebook started exclusively with college students, Google started a social network exclusively with programmers.
FUCK. I thought that when we attained wealth, power, and appeared on the covers of magazines people would stop dunking our heads in toilets and finally pay us SOME RESPECT. This just shows that our society isn't a meritocracy. It doesn't even matter anymore what you do, we're still undesirables to the cheerleaders and jocks and the popular kids.
We'll get our revenge though. We control everything you mfers see, hear, buy, and think. If you look down on us, get ready for your phone to be the new heroin. If you like us, you can be free and dance with us and sample the earthly delights of the real world. We will be Neo, you can elect to be Morpheus or Trinity. Or we can be the machines in zero-one. Maybe that fits better.
iGlass will probably be created by Apple or a hardware startup led by some people like Steve Jobs and Woz. No software company has made a hugely successful hardware product.
XBox seems to be stuck at ~breakeven over the entire lifecycle. They have spent several billion on advertising, they generally sell the console for a direct loss, and it's PS2/3/4 have each sold significantly more each generation.
So, IMO it's not hugely successful just not out an outright failure.
That said, they have shipped a lot of hardware over time, and made some reasonable profit from mice / keyboards.
They took a gamble and it did not work out for them, their product was not the next 'spinner' grade craze. But if you don't try you don't get.
It is only a matter of time before cameras in sunglasses becomes a common thing with people using them in place of action cameras, dashcams and regular cameras. The UX needs to be 'wink' to take a picture so these things can operate hands free with voice control - 'cheese' etc.
Somehow these wonder sunglasses of the near future weigh no more than normal sunglasses, charge magically in their special case and stream 4K HDR+ 3D stereo over bluetooth 24/7 storing all content on a nano-SD card. But we are not there yet and Snap took a punt at pitching a fun variant of the ideal product with low-res functionality seeing if people would go for it. They didn't. People didn't go crazy for them like they did with 'spinners', an equally 'useless' product. But cameras in sunglasses are happening. People have got over lenses in public. There is one in every car bumper.
I was a Snap power user. Got spectacles very early. Hated the upload UX.
Bluetooth issues galore. Completely stopped using them. As standalone sunglasses, they are inferior to a good $10 pair from amazon - heavier, worse lens quality, and limited viewable area.
I was talking to a parent friend of mine a while back, and we both agreed (he owns a pair) that Snapchat Spectacles could be an amazing accessory for parents.
Kids are easily distracted, so if you point a phone at them it'll completely throw them off whatever cute activity it was they were just doing - probably because they now want to play with your phone. No such problem with Spectacles - and not only that, it means you can keep two hands free (not a small issue when one arm might already have a child in it).
The problem is that Spectacles are so tied into Snapchat that it makes sharing the output very difficult. Grandma and Grandpa are not going to use Snapchat, and I'm not sure Snapchat wants them to. You can, eventually, import into Snapchat then export single videos back out again, but they lose the cool display method for circular videos and look awful. I think they could shift some of these glasses with a little rebranding and a spin-off app just for importing videos into whatever destination you want. They'll never do that, though. Maybe if they finally declare it dead they'll open up the sync API, but I'm not holding my breath.
(this is a repost of an old comment I wrote a few days ago in case anyone is suffering from deja-vu)
> Grandma and Grandpa are not going to use Snapchat, and I'm not sure Snapchat wants them to.
There's no maybe about it: Snapchat definitely doesn't want them. Evan Spiegel has been very upfront that he doesn't want the riff-raff. Snapchat has always been deliberately shitty on Android and Spiegel went out of his way to make clear how they definitely weren't going to make a Windows Phone application, back when WP was a potential player. If you're not a cool, hip teen with an iPhone, you can piss off.
He reminds me a lot of that Abercrombie CEO who said that they didn't want fatties and uglies in their stores, which was a winning strategy until it suddenly wasn't.
This is partially why, as much as I hate Facebook, I'm not particularly upset at Snapchat slowly getting steamrolled by them. Businesses that stick up their middle finger at potential customers out of snobbery deserve to fail.
He reminds me a lot of that Abercrombie CEO who said that they didn't want fatties and uglies in their stores, which was a winning strategy until it suddenly wasn't.
To be fair, my impression is that this aspect of their marketing wasn't the problem; the Great Recession was the problem, because suddenly no one had 2 – 4x the money to pay for a piece of clothing that only differed from the competition in that it told other teens you have 2 – 4x the money.
Great Recession + fast fashion seems to be the real culprit.
The market for elitism has never disappeared in that domain. Maybe any domain.
There's a difference between being an upscale brand and actually turning away customers. Apple and BMW are elite brands, but if you're poorer but save up for one because you want it that bad, they'll happily take your money. Snapchat and Abercrombie are looking at people who want to give them money and telling them to go away.
To be fair to Evan Spiegel and Snap, almost no-one was interested in doing versions of their apps for Windows Phone.
Windows Phone turned up late to the party - third or fourth horse (remember Blackberry?) in an already competitive two horse race. A lot of the apps that made it to Windows Phone were paid for by MS.
It's also worth bearing in mind the advice of "its better to make something 100 people love than 1000 people like".
Marketing is a dark art, and signalling is real. Trying to appeal to everyone, especially when you are a scrappy startup, sounds like a great way to appeal to absolutely no-one.
By your own definition, how are kids with iPhones cool? They're the choice of old people everywhere. Every teen I see has some sort of jazzed up Android (phablet).
It's like the Porsche 911. Great car, but definitely not cool. 3/4 of the people driving them are of retirement age. Definitely not cool by any stretch of the imagination.
Because BB messaging was exempt from data caps etc thanks to agreements between Blackberry and carriers.
I have seen similar outcomes when carriers have introduced unlimited calling plans "because teens only text", only for said teens to switch to calling en mass.
I feel like Snapchat is aging out of coolness and there's nothing they can do about it. First adopters are in the workforce and probably starting families by now. Do kids want to be on the same social media platform their uncle or aunt are posting baby pictures on?
I have never seen a baby picture on Snapchat. I'm sure it'll get to that point with that happening a bit. But Snapchat is pretty far away from being like that.
There also isn't any other social network that is close to being big. There's just the current incumbents. For teens i can think of Musically, but that's a focused app. On the other hand I am actually surprised Snapchat didn't try to go and buy Musically.
Google just released a product that is aimed directly at this opportunity: Google Clips. You don't wear it on your face, so it's a little different, but it's clearly designed for hands free use by parents, and it should be a little easier to get the videos out and onto whatever service you prefer.
Yes! I'll be interested to see the reaction to it. Having to carry it around and clip it to things feels a little unwieldy, and no audio is an odd restriction, but the idea of smartly detecting clips worth keeping is absolutely fascinating. And the whole thing shows exactly the kind of parent-focused design Snapchat obviously doesn't do.
> Kids are easily distracted, so if you point a phone at them it'll completely throw them off whatever cute activity it was they were just doing - probably because they now want to play with your phone.
True that! Thanks for the idea, I am tempted to pull my Looxcie out of retirement and see if it is discreet enough to avoid notice.
I guess the main issue is the media will drum up some moral panic about undesirables using devices like this, to record clips of children or whatever.
I've often thought about a device that would catalogue my life, what I did, be intelligent enough to group events together etc, have a searchable index of time, places, people. But the ethical implications of this are just too great, and effects on society would shift in strange ways. There was an episode of Black Mirror a few years ago that explored this, in some ways it is "be careful what you wish for"
Narrative Clip (http://getnarrative.com) is pretty close to what you're talking about. The intelligence of the software isn't/wasn't there. Though you could upload to google photos and get some of that.
In the near term there's no worry about ethics. My friends and family found the Narrative Clip interesting to varying degrees but almost none of them were interested in it for themselves.
As a new parent, this is the use case I investigated spectacles for. I enjoy sending pictures and videos to my new born's grandparents but the phone does distract him.
It is unfortunate that spectacles don't work well outside of snapchat.
So how about this: the influencers on Snapchat are all recording themselves most of the time. These glasses did nothing to help with that particular and most popular use case.
I feel really weird for being the first to bring this up, it seems pretty obvious to me the main reason these glasses weren't going to catch on.
I mean, a lot of us felt this way, but yeah, I think you are the first to articulate it.
What they actually wanted was something more like the cop drones in the new Blade Runner that hover about and take video in near silence. There are quite a few kickstarters that claim they can do this, but the drones are loud. This generates attention on the drone, not the corporate-shill. Err, sorry, snap-fluencer, my bad. Also, the battery life is terrible and I can see airspace getting crowded at homecoming in the multi-use-room.
After I got the spectacles here were the reactions I got, from people in the 21-35 demographic:
First, wow I had no idea these existed
Second, where can I get them
Third, (months later) lost interest
Snapchat should have just had a buy now button in the app. Instead they tried to do some guerrilla marketing thing. If you have a captive audience of tens of millions of people, you don't need to create buzz around your product. Either you made something people want or you didn't. Me personally, they hurt my face. So I wore them about twice.
> If you have a captive audience of tens of millions of people, you don't need to create buzz around your product
The guerrilla marketing was to keep Robert Scobles [1] from setting the Spectacles' zeitgeist. In that, it worked.
I agree that after they had lines they should have started marketing in app. A smooth transition would involve selectively marketing to those deemed to be general influencers, and then working down to the broader population. As a social network, it does seem odd to give away that home-field advantage.
yeah, what they need are programmable drones that follow them around, recording. Bruce Sterling suggested such a thing in "The Artificial Kid" - and I think we've got the tech to actually kinda do it now.
The camera angle seems like it could be... problematic, though.
Also it doesn't look like it has the capability to follow me in even most sedate urban environments. I mean, I'm not asking for stairs, but that thing looks like it'd have a hard time with a sidewalk crack.
Both those problems could probably be solved by making it bigger.
Yes, as do other DJI drones, but only for a few minutes, and of course the whole "you can't actually fly a drone here without calling the 5 airports in the area" rules tends to put a damper on things.
>of course the whole "you can't actually fly a drone here without calling the 5 airports in the area" rules tends to put a damper on things
I could be wrong, but I bet there's a reasonably large market for 'inside only' selfie drones. If you look at who is posting on youtube, most of it is filmed indoors.
yeah, what they need are programmable drones that follow them around, recording.
They can call it the "paparazzi" and Snapchat users will eat it up, it would be air and land based that makes them look like stars.
In all seriousness, the biggest use of Snapchat Spectacles or Google Glass is exploring but that view does lose the star aspect of what people desire on Snapchat. GoPro has that covered but also just a view of what the person is seeing isn't always the best view.
It could work with the drone/bot aspect to make it a full production. Still though, Snapchat is obsessed with angles that make you look the best so it might be something that would need to be edited/managed like a photo/video.
The new iBubble underwater camera drone supposedly does that for scuba divers. Floating in the water with neutral buoyancy takes less power than flying so battery life should be decent.
There is a possibility that Snapchat realized that aspect of the influencers population, and sought to expand their revenue base by creating another large use case with Spectacles.
I think we're in a spontaneity uncanny valley for that kind of use case, though, and we have to wait for the hardware (mostly low energy processing and battery) tech to catch up before we climb out of the valley. A lot of the popular content has some element of surprise/spontaneity to hook eyeballs in. I suspect a device form factor like Spectacles, or really, the "recording others" use case, won't take off for the masses until it is as light as normal sunglasses, as stylish, continuously records HD video and high-grade audio 16-20 hours before needing a recharge, and is coupled with management software that makes it easy to pick out what you want to publish (if you exclaim, "Woah! Did you see that!?", or more prosaically, "Worldsta-a-a-r!", that's picked up for a potential clip to publish, so you don't have to scrub through hours of video). Maybe coupled with an AR interface that gives you on-the-spot access to the publishing interface.
Until then, the "recording others" use case will likely continue to be dominated by right-place-right-time smartphone recordings, and pro/pro-am publishers/bloggers with scripted/guided content like what we see on YouTube today.
A selfie gadget would be an amazing thing. Maybe it could simply be an accessory to a phone, a variation on the selfie stick that would let you use the back camera (the good one) for selfies.
It strikes me as very strange that on all phones the good camera is on the back and the crappy one on the front. Many people mostly take selfies with their phones and so it would make much more sense to do the opposite.
There have been a few 'selfie phones' (Zenfone Selfie, HTC Eye, Xperia XA Ultra) with identical front and rear cameras but clearly they never really took off.
Besides their technical and marketing failings, spectacles are also a failure of imagination. They attempt to digitize moments rather than trying to use technology to enhance what you are doing or to create entirely new artificial experiences. I wish this was why they failed but the reasons outlined in the article are much more realistic
God damn it. These fucking wearable pieces of shit need to stand on their own. They can’t be unrepairable, expensive, tethered pieces of shit that die when the battery refuses to charge.
No one wants garbage that only works with one website, and no one wants to pay for an uncontrollable device with a mind of its own.
If you have a free service on the internet, millions or perhaps even billions may clamour to use it. If you’re giving stuff out for free, people will happily try it out, if they have the option to throw it in the trash without consequence.
Make people pay for something? It better do what they want, when they want it, or you might have some pissed off people on your hands.
I can buy a pair of spy glasses for $100 to record at 30fps for an hour in full color 1080, 60fps for half that time. There are no giant lenses on the sides with lights that show my glasses are even capable of recording.
I can even order those glasses with a prescription. They will help me see, and nobody else will be the wiser about being recorded. I'm not saying that I go out of my way to discreetly record people - I don't. But that shows to me these commodity glasses are a superior product to cartoonish looking Snapchat Spectacles.
For me, that is why Snapchat and all other similar recording spectacles will fail.
I'd not heard of these glasses before, but for action sports they seem like the perfect fit. I kitesurf so I can't hold a camera, I tend to clamp a GoPro between my teeth to film. Same with surfers.
If these glasses had waterproof headphones I know tons of people who would snap them sup.
GoPro and third-party vendors sell a bunch of mounting accessories to put on your head or chest or wherever. Why don't you buy one of those instead of holding the camera in your teeth?
In terms of units, Fitbit has probably been the most successful so far (22m units sold in 2016). They don't get attention in the US, but the Mi Band from Xiaomi isn't far behind.
2: circular video does not work since a lot of people want to port out the videos away from snapchat.
3: i wear glasses, the lens on these frames are not circular. couldn't find anyone in the bay area who did custom lenses (at the time).
4: towards the end of the year (2016), a lot of people wanted them but were frustrated that even if they got to the vending machine there was zero guarantee they would even get one. at most they had ~70ish in quantity per day. way too low. drove short term hype up though.
Spectacles failed because they wouldn't sell us the damn things! There was all this hype but it was practically impossible to buy a pair except for scalper prices on eBay.
It's amazing how you can write a whole article on this, but the gist is they built something with low utility value. period.
If you look at it from this point of view, everything else is just side effect.
- It failed because it's not fashionable? => No. See bluetooth headset. Also see Crocs. If it's useful, people will use it.
- It failed because it waited 5 months to sell it? => No. See Apple.
- It failed because the excitement died off by the time it shipped? => No. See all kinds of films that succeeded WITHOUT any initial hype (such as the Matrix)
- It failed because it couldn't get any influencers to endorse the product? => No, see Snapchat. Yeah their original app itself.
- It failed because the content couldn't be ported over to other platform without cropping? => No. In fact, if Spectacles would have succeeded, Techcrunch would probably be blabbering about how the key to success is how brilliant its marketing strategy was, so that all the videos uploaded to youtube and instagram had the "signature snapchat crop", which got everyone else curious.
The only arguments I agree with in this article are related to its utility--how it's considered rude to be video taping someone else, and how it was limited to sunglasses format.
The rest is bullshit because they're one of those "MBA case studies" type after-the-fact interpretation, which in most cases are bullshit.
Just go build something useful and you will never have to worry about being "fashionable" or all the gimmicks. In fact as a tech company you should never see yourself as a fashion company. It's a myth created by ignorant media pundits who's never built a product in their life.
Yes, such analysis without data is just BS. I would have liked to see following data:
1. Was snapchat users advertised about this product frequently? If not then its failure in execution right there.
2. What was the conversion rate if they did?
3. Where there any user studies for people who did not convert? What was the distribution of their reasoning? Price, battery life, availability?
4. Was the video/photos uploaded through these glasses carried the advertise for the device itself?
5. What was the influence ratio (friends buying product after one friend bought it)?
The thing is that this idea like most ideas was good but execution probably wasn't. The whole trick behind blockbuster product is to understand failure in execution, fix them and reiterate. Never stop after the failure.
1. Kind of/yes. They had campaigns at certain times.
2. Low
3. idk
4. Yes, they did. It would say "taken with spectacles" and the format kind of advertized/demonstrated the product
5. No one I know besides me bought one.
The problem is no one cares about snapchat that much. The average user isn't taking it so seriously that they want to spend money on hardware like this, let alone charge it, set it up, take it around with them etc. If snapchat charged $0.10 to continue using it half their userbase might just uninstall.
I got the spectacles and as sunglasses they wre pretty low quality. They only have one size, which doesn’t fit my head well, and the hinges get too loose after just a few days.
>>but the gist is they built something with low utility value. period
Yep. Today we live in times where apparently this is secondary, however, so they gotta make up a ton of crap.
A friend has a pair. They work... fine. The app support is... fine, and kind of novel actually given that rotation on the screen works with snaps shot with spectacles only.
While you're right that if they had built something with "high utility value", they could have succeeded despite these points, for a pure gimmick that anyone would have only bought ought of curiosity, they failed to capitalise on the sales they could have made in the early period of significant media attention they got.
Gimmicks like that (tamagotchi, fidget spinner, yoyo) have a limited shelf life. That's kind of the genius of many Kickstarters... Gimmicks that noone would buy after careful consideration can sell a decent number of units at "peak hype".
P(Success) is highly correlated with (Marginal Value / Marginal Cost)
The original Snapchat app succeeded because the marginal cost is low (everyone already has a smartphone) and it provides a good marginal value to a subset of population (over other social networks).
Spectacles carry higher monetary and more importantly convenience and social costs to use and add little extra value beyond existing solutions.
The same framework could be applied to Uber, AirBnb, ... as well as many startup failures. Note that P(Success) or probability of success implies that there are factors other than those included in the model.
I’d love to have refinements or counterexamples to the model if anyone is interested.
I don't know. There must be more factors. How else would you explain the success of companies like Apple, Tesla and Xiaomi. Or for that matter, to a certain extent every luxury product.
Marginal Value, MV(iPhone) ~= MV(crap, and most non-crap, android phones) (granted, this is probably not true for the original iPhone). But except for that one time it is certainly not true. The quality is clearly different, however.
Even more clear is the Tesla case: MV(Roadster) <<< MV(alternatives). It wasn't the best electric car, it wasn't the best car, it wasn't ... however again there was a clear difference in quality.
I would argue most real estate developments are equally examples of this (mostly because laws prevent them on competing on anything other than quality in most inner cities). Trump's whole empire seems an example of it too.
It seems to be entirely possible to achieve success by simply copying a badly executed idea, and doing it better.
Mobile phones and cars are used in public and many people associate their personal identity with them. Here are the key values I believe are provided by each of your example:
iPhone: signifier of good taste, ease of use (relative to Android), being well-off (in developing countries)
Xiaomi: middle class or upper-middle class status (in China), good value for money
I agree that current iPhones and Xiaomi phones do not provide much better features relative to their competition (no-name Android phones in the case of Xiaomi). Their values lie elsewhere.
Tesla Roadster: cutting-edge, environmental sensibility
In fact, by sales volume, Roadster itself was not a success. Tesla only sold 2,450 of them in 30 countries [1]. Model S provides much better value for cost and correspondingly achieved much stronger success.
Luxury products in general tend to be associated with social exposure. Maybe luxury mobs or floor cleaning liquid exist but either they do provide some special features for a niche or their sales volumes are relatively tiny.
I have an Android phone for purely economical reasons, but I tend to hate it, because it's buggy as hell, nothing really works the way it should.
Apple phones are way way overpriced but they're so much better than the competition. It's not true people buy Apple phones only for fashion reasons. The absolute value of an iPhone is vastly superior to the marginal value of any other phone, and the marginal value depends on how much you use your phone.
I don't use my phone very much so I can tolerate an Android phone; but if my personal or professional life depended on it, I would buy an iPhone.
You must have a very very cheap or an especially buggy Android phone.
Having used both Android and iOS I think it's quite clear that both platforms are just as buggy as one another with the recent iOS11 outpacing Android in terms of bugginess by quite a large margin.
When you buy an iPhone you are paying for the build quality and for the marketing, you are not getting an objectively 'better' phone.
You also pay for proprietary operating system. Which is a main differentiating point of iPhones. I have used all types of phones (iOS, Android, Windkws Phone, Symbian). Apple has the best operating system. It has superior UX, is most user friendly and has deep vertical integration with other Apple products.
That’s worth a lot of money to most users. I think more people are willing to pay premium to get the great operating system compared to hardware which might be secondary.
All of that is very subjective (and why do you state this as a 'fact'?).
If you don't use Apple as your main computer you basically have zero integration. Don't even get me started on interoperability (you can't even use the iPhone headphones on a mac??)
That the UX is superior is also highly subjective. There are many things that are either impossible to do or a massive pain to do on an iPhone; I would not consider that good UX (for example try looking at a picture you just took on your camera and apply some filters before posting it to instagram. The only way I have found to do that is to open instagram and open the picture in that app. The notification system is a massive joke. There are dozens of other such examples).
What is worth a lot of money to users is convenience and habituality. Having to change your habits, workflow and frame of mind can be quite taxing for some people.
The entire luxury market disagrees with this. This isn't a small market: companies like Louis Vuitton, BMW, etc (and even arguably Apple) are huge, profitable entities selling large numbers of goods to large numbers of people.
Even outside the luxury market there are numerous other factors, not least of which include: distribution, vitality, marketing etc.
Edit: Also there are at least three Nobel prizes showing how marginal value isn’t what matters in making choices (Nash, Kahneman, Thaler)
Distribution and marketing are good points. Inferior products with better marketing and distribution sometimes win out especially when they partner with monopolistic/oligopolistic channels.
What do you mean by 'vitality'?
Luxury products provide social signal value rather than pure performance.
I agree that imperfect rationality is a major factor in human decision making and perhaps should be included into the model somehow.
I'm not sure how Nash's game theory is related to this. Care to elaborate?
PS. I didn't downvote you and feel that too much downvoting, sometimes unwarranted, occurs on HN lately.
Luxury products provide social signal value rather than pure performance.
Social signaling is often (usually? Outside subsistence cases - there are some good studies showing how this switches over) more important than performance.
Sometimes performance and social signaling are correlated, but they don't have to be.
I'm not sure how Nash's game theory is related to this. Care to elaborate?
A product marketplace is pretty much the perfect example of a non-competitive game. Indeed, the New Yorker used is as one:
The setting could be nuclear negotiations, such as the ones currently taking place between Iran and the great powers. It could be a product market, in which a number of firms compete for business.[1]
This is a relatively mature field, and there are some fairly comprehensive ways of expressing the likelihood of success of a product.
Unfortunately your formula doesn't capture anything like enough of the complexities of a market place.
But hey - it is simple, and you typed it quickly, and it seems like it could be right so nothing else matters, right?
Virality without value advantage tends to be short-lived.
Social signaling is part of the ‘value’ in my model.
The utility of existing competition and their costs are included in the term ‘marginal’.
I am aware that my simple model, occurring in a couple minutes, is incomplete that’s why I asked for refinements. Including factors like distribution & marketing seems very useful. However, capturing imperfect rationality does not seem possible for a simple model.
Do you have references to the ‘fairly comprehensive ways of expressing the likelihood of success of a product’?
I absolutely agree with you. It’s plain and simple. They failed because they were useless.
Like Silicon Valley builds a lot of products out of a perceived need of their local area, which often doesn’t translate into worldwide product need, Snap built something for the Venice hippster cool-kid crowd. Huge where Snap is located. Tiny globally really.
There are lots of successful but useless or nearly useless products. This is a nearly useless fashion product, but really it’s just something you’d buy for fun. Most fashion products are in that territory.
I disagree with your entire comment and here’s why - in my view, saying that the reason something failed because it relieved no itch or there was insufficient utility is at par with suggesting that trading is simple because you have to “Buy Low and Sell High, d’oh”. It teaches no one anything they don’t instinctively know.
Everything the article says - be it about influencers not picking up and promoting the Spectacles to difficulties with porting content without cropping - is extremely useful to anyone else looking to launch a Spectacles type device.
Of course it would be tautological to say "what's useful is useful" but that's not what the parent is saying.
The parent is saying that usefulness is the main, if not only, cause of success, and that other factors are in fact irrelevant (namely, fashionableness, launch strategy, celebrity endorsements, etc.)
You can agree or disagree with that thesis, but here you're misrepresenting it.
“Usefulness” is not a metric that can measured or sought in isolation. Usefulness needs an actor trying to perform an action desiring a result.
When OP says something failed because it isn’t useful, they are deliberately ignoring the subject and object of the equation.
When the article says that influencers didn’t glom on to Spectacles, they are making a statement about influencers not finding it useful but if you read the parent comment, this observation is useless because it obfuscates the true problem - that Spectacles is “useless”.
>Everything the article says - [...] - is extremely useful to anyone else
The post you replied to tried to explain why it's actually not useful. The journalist uses a style of seductive writing (some call it "narrative fallacy"[1]) which connects plausible-sounding causes to its supposedly logical effects. That style of explanation can actually make readers dumber about what happened because it leaves out counterexamples.
That "narrative fallacy" is common in writings from Harvard Business Review, histories, biographies, newspapers & pundits trying to explain why the Dow Jones Index went up/down, why startups/products failed/succeeded, etc. All of those suffer the omission of counterexamples.
Sure, you'll get some people to wear it, see whitemenwearinggoogleglass at tumblr, but ignoring fashion in wearables is just inviting competitors to put you out of business.
I also don't think they "failed". I think it was all about positioning the company as "not just a teen social app" to help with the IPO. The pitch is Snap is really a camera/picture/video company that happens to have a popular social media app.
So the movie had a huge promotional campaign and nobody noticed or cared? It made $28 million on its opening weekend, 16% of its US gross. This isn't some unknown movie that built up in popularity as word about it spread around.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 211 ms ] thread1. They specifically focused on the fashion-conscious aspect initially (e.g. the Karl Lagerfeld shoot), and purposefully tried to keep the specs away from the nerdy tech press. In the early stages this was actual really successful, and at the very least they got "fashion buzz" when Spectacles came out. 2. They highlighted that Spectacles have a big light go on when recording, which helped blunt some of the "creepiness factor". In fact, I think they did a largely good job of positioning Spectacles as "fun way to take video with friends" as opposed to Glass's "cyborg assistant" approach.
I'm sure that if snapchat spectacles had been priced lower, every middle schooler would have gotten them. Driving the market/trend by mass adoption.
I don't think it's worth the cost for me, but for those who just enjoy using technology and playing with the newest thing, I can see why you'd want one. Plus, I'm sure they make nice gifts.
I don't really buy that they're seen as rich people jewelry. It's less than an iPhone and priced like a budget or fashion brand watch.
Of course, this could be my bias showing! To me, the Apple Watch is cheap enough that you'd consider getting one as a gift for someone special, so not show-off expensive but just expensive enough. Indeed I've seen them given as such.
Making it look easy...is very very hard.
It's to easy to be seduced by (it looks) easy. But Snap won't be the last, will they :)
Spectacles are a case where appealing to a niche may not be the most profitable endeavor. (and now that Snap is a public company, they have to actually care about profit at some point)
In some ways they were really cool, but the article was bang-on about pretty much everything. It's really a case study about how to fuck up a product roll-out.
Portability complications were a huge downer. The shaded lenses made them difficult to use indoors, and what wasn't mentioned was that the mic was hypersensitive to distortion from the slightest breeze, which made them useless outside as well.
But, as the article states:
>To drive demand, Snap needed to demonstrate all the creative things you could do with Spectacles, and the cool people who wore them.
Why the fuck didn't they do this?
And you can't really stick a micromuff on your glasses.
http://www.micromuff.com/
The first time I saw them I thought to myself, well that's a cool idea but that was it.
It truly felt like marketing or some attempt to trick people into believing Snap could make cool things... like a response to Facebook/Oculus.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3i5asc3qI4
EDIT: actually looking at the snapchat spectacle webpage, it looks neat and I can see myself buying them. Just not at that price (130GBP) because I will probably not be using them a lot. But if there is a promotion around Christmas why not.
I'd buy a pair if they were more like traditional action cam style glasses. The technical limitations right now make them far too expensive for what they are.
https://www.amazon.com/DAEMON-Daniel-Suarez/dp/0451228731
Unfortunately, it's just not realistic right now, I think. The Spectacles battery life lasts less than 30 minutes of recording, and they don't even have a screen.
So no, you're not the only one :)
Also, unrelated to my previous obsession with AR, I have prosopagnosia, so having glasses that could tell me who I'm looking at would make a major improvement to my life.
Was that a while ago? Or is that still what you're doing?
I wonder how many other people feel the same way. My belief is that if you don't recognize me, you should have to ask me for information about myself. I'd rather not any random stranger be able to just know.
[0]. https://www.ted.com/talks/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potent...
[1]. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/12/new-o...
That's us! We're the mistake :-D
We'll get our revenge though. We control everything you mfers see, hear, buy, and think. If you look down on us, get ready for your phone to be the new heroin. If you like us, you can be free and dance with us and sample the earthly delights of the real world. We will be Neo, you can elect to be Morpheus or Trinity. Or we can be the machines in zero-one. Maybe that fits better.
Enjoy your new paradise losers.
/s
So, IMO it's not hugely successful just not out an outright failure.
That said, they have shipped a lot of hardware over time, and made some reasonable profit from mice / keyboards.
It is only a matter of time before cameras in sunglasses becomes a common thing with people using them in place of action cameras, dashcams and regular cameras. The UX needs to be 'wink' to take a picture so these things can operate hands free with voice control - 'cheese' etc.
Somehow these wonder sunglasses of the near future weigh no more than normal sunglasses, charge magically in their special case and stream 4K HDR+ 3D stereo over bluetooth 24/7 storing all content on a nano-SD card. But we are not there yet and Snap took a punt at pitching a fun variant of the ideal product with low-res functionality seeing if people would go for it. They didn't. People didn't go crazy for them like they did with 'spinners', an equally 'useless' product. But cameras in sunglasses are happening. People have got over lenses in public. There is one in every car bumper.
Bluetooth issues galore. Completely stopped using them. As standalone sunglasses, they are inferior to a good $10 pair from amazon - heavier, worse lens quality, and limited viewable area.
Kids are easily distracted, so if you point a phone at them it'll completely throw them off whatever cute activity it was they were just doing - probably because they now want to play with your phone. No such problem with Spectacles - and not only that, it means you can keep two hands free (not a small issue when one arm might already have a child in it).
The problem is that Spectacles are so tied into Snapchat that it makes sharing the output very difficult. Grandma and Grandpa are not going to use Snapchat, and I'm not sure Snapchat wants them to. You can, eventually, import into Snapchat then export single videos back out again, but they lose the cool display method for circular videos and look awful. I think they could shift some of these glasses with a little rebranding and a spin-off app just for importing videos into whatever destination you want. They'll never do that, though. Maybe if they finally declare it dead they'll open up the sync API, but I'm not holding my breath.
(this is a repost of an old comment I wrote a few days ago in case anyone is suffering from deja-vu)
There's no maybe about it: Snapchat definitely doesn't want them. Evan Spiegel has been very upfront that he doesn't want the riff-raff. Snapchat has always been deliberately shitty on Android and Spiegel went out of his way to make clear how they definitely weren't going to make a Windows Phone application, back when WP was a potential player. If you're not a cool, hip teen with an iPhone, you can piss off.
He reminds me a lot of that Abercrombie CEO who said that they didn't want fatties and uglies in their stores, which was a winning strategy until it suddenly wasn't.
This is partially why, as much as I hate Facebook, I'm not particularly upset at Snapchat slowly getting steamrolled by them. Businesses that stick up their middle finger at potential customers out of snobbery deserve to fail.
To be fair, my impression is that this aspect of their marketing wasn't the problem; the Great Recession was the problem, because suddenly no one had 2 – 4x the money to pay for a piece of clothing that only differed from the competition in that it told other teens you have 2 – 4x the money.
Great Recession + fast fashion seems to be the real culprit.
The market for elitism has never disappeared in that domain. Maybe any domain.
Windows Phone turned up late to the party - third or fourth horse (remember Blackberry?) in an already competitive two horse race. A lot of the apps that made it to Windows Phone were paid for by MS.
It's also worth bearing in mind the advice of "its better to make something 100 people love than 1000 people like".
Marketing is a dark art, and signalling is real. Trying to appeal to everyone, especially when you are a scrappy startup, sounds like a great way to appeal to absolutely no-one.
It's like the Porsche 911. Great car, but definitely not cool. 3/4 of the people driving them are of retirement age. Definitely not cool by any stretch of the imagination.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2016/04/13/apple-mar...
For example, do your parents have iPhones? Anything your parents are into instantly loses cool.
After the London riots there were lots of breathless articles about the menace of BBM and how the yoof were using it to plan their mischief.
I have seen similar outcomes when carriers have introduced unlimited calling plans "because teens only text", only for said teens to switch to calling en mass.
There also isn't any other social network that is close to being big. There's just the current incumbents. For teens i can think of Musically, but that's a focused app. On the other hand I am actually surprised Snapchat didn't try to go and buy Musically.
https://store.google.com/product/google_clips
I really like the idea of Narrative Clip. Google seems to be going for something a bit different with the price being high and battery life being low.
True that! Thanks for the idea, I am tempted to pull my Looxcie out of retirement and see if it is discreet enough to avoid notice.
I've often thought about a device that would catalogue my life, what I did, be intelligent enough to group events together etc, have a searchable index of time, places, people. But the ethical implications of this are just too great, and effects on society would shift in strange ways. There was an episode of Black Mirror a few years ago that explored this, in some ways it is "be careful what you wish for"
In the near term there's no worry about ethics. My friends and family found the Narrative Clip interesting to varying degrees but almost none of them were interested in it for themselves.
It is unfortunate that spectacles don't work well outside of snapchat.
I feel really weird for being the first to bring this up, it seems pretty obvious to me the main reason these glasses weren't going to catch on.
What they actually wanted was something more like the cop drones in the new Blade Runner that hover about and take video in near silence. There are quite a few kickstarters that claim they can do this, but the drones are loud. This generates attention on the drone, not the corporate-shill. Err, sorry, snap-fluencer, my bad. Also, the battery life is terrible and I can see airspace getting crowded at homecoming in the multi-use-room.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sqdr/hexo-your-autonomo...
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/airdog/airdog-worlds-fi...
First, wow I had no idea these existed
Second, where can I get them
Third, (months later) lost interest
Snapchat should have just had a buy now button in the app. Instead they tried to do some guerrilla marketing thing. If you have a captive audience of tens of millions of people, you don't need to create buzz around your product. Either you made something people want or you didn't. Me personally, they hurt my face. So I wore them about twice.
The guerrilla marketing was to keep Robert Scobles [1] from setting the Spectacles' zeitgeist. In that, it worked.
I agree that after they had lines they should have started marketing in app. A smooth transition would involve selectively marketing to those deemed to be general influencers, and then working down to the broader population. As a social network, it does seem odd to give away that home-field advantage.
[1] http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/5826657846e27af2008...
Prescient, given how toxic his personal brand now is.
i cant imagine the increase in content snapchat would have if it were recording what every subscriber was looking at.
Spoiler: the video was misleading (California is suing them for false advertising) and the company is dead.
It is a real product, founded by a bunch of robotics people from Harvey Mudd.
Also it doesn't look like it has the capability to follow me in even most sedate urban environments. I mean, I'm not asking for stairs, but that thing looks like it'd have a hard time with a sidewalk crack.
Both those problems could probably be solved by making it bigger.
I could be wrong, but I bet there's a reasonably large market for 'inside only' selfie drones. If you look at who is posting on youtube, most of it is filmed indoors.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/airdog/introducing-the-...
https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2017/07/airdog-adii-2nd-gen-spor...
They can call it the "paparazzi" and Snapchat users will eat it up, it would be air and land based that makes them look like stars.
In all seriousness, the biggest use of Snapchat Spectacles or Google Glass is exploring but that view does lose the star aspect of what people desire on Snapchat. GoPro has that covered but also just a view of what the person is seeing isn't always the best view.
It could work with the drone/bot aspect to make it a full production. Still though, Snapchat is obsessed with angles that make you look the best so it might be something that would need to be edited/managed like a photo/video.
https://ibubble.camera/
I think we're in a spontaneity uncanny valley for that kind of use case, though, and we have to wait for the hardware (mostly low energy processing and battery) tech to catch up before we climb out of the valley. A lot of the popular content has some element of surprise/spontaneity to hook eyeballs in. I suspect a device form factor like Spectacles, or really, the "recording others" use case, won't take off for the masses until it is as light as normal sunglasses, as stylish, continuously records HD video and high-grade audio 16-20 hours before needing a recharge, and is coupled with management software that makes it easy to pick out what you want to publish (if you exclaim, "Woah! Did you see that!?", or more prosaically, "Worldsta-a-a-r!", that's picked up for a potential clip to publish, so you don't have to scrub through hours of video). Maybe coupled with an AR interface that gives you on-the-spot access to the publishing interface.
Until then, the "recording others" use case will likely continue to be dominated by right-place-right-time smartphone recordings, and pro/pro-am publishers/bloggers with scripted/guided content like what we see on YouTube today.
It strikes me as very strange that on all phones the good camera is on the back and the crappy one on the front. Many people mostly take selfies with their phones and so it would make much more sense to do the opposite.
No one wants garbage that only works with one website, and no one wants to pay for an uncontrollable device with a mind of its own.
If you have a free service on the internet, millions or perhaps even billions may clamour to use it. If you’re giving stuff out for free, people will happily try it out, if they have the option to throw it in the trash without consequence.
Make people pay for something? It better do what they want, when they want it, or you might have some pissed off people on your hands.
Getting people to spend their free time is relatively easy.
Getting people to spend their hard earned cash is very (very) difficult.
You'd think this would be obvious already :)
I can even order those glasses with a prescription. They will help me see, and nobody else will be the wiser about being recorded. I'm not saying that I go out of my way to discreetly record people - I don't. But that shows to me these commodity glasses are a superior product to cartoonish looking Snapchat Spectacles.
For me, that is why Snapchat and all other similar recording spectacles will fail.
You can also find a bunch here: https://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=1080p+spy+glasses, but at ebay I'd rather spend $100 instead of $12 for these types of things.
If these glasses had waterproof headphones I know tons of people who would snap them sup.
1: hard as hell to pair.
2: circular video does not work since a lot of people want to port out the videos away from snapchat.
3: i wear glasses, the lens on these frames are not circular. couldn't find anyone in the bay area who did custom lenses (at the time).
4: towards the end of the year (2016), a lot of people wanted them but were frustrated that even if they got to the vending machine there was zero guarantee they would even get one. at most they had ~70ish in quantity per day. way too low. drove short term hype up though.
5: no marketing at all for this thing.
Same as google glass. The tech wasn't the issue
If you look at it from this point of view, everything else is just side effect.
- It failed because it's not fashionable? => No. See bluetooth headset. Also see Crocs. If it's useful, people will use it.
- It failed because it waited 5 months to sell it? => No. See Apple.
- It failed because the excitement died off by the time it shipped? => No. See all kinds of films that succeeded WITHOUT any initial hype (such as the Matrix)
- It failed because it couldn't get any influencers to endorse the product? => No, see Snapchat. Yeah their original app itself.
- It failed because the content couldn't be ported over to other platform without cropping? => No. In fact, if Spectacles would have succeeded, Techcrunch would probably be blabbering about how the key to success is how brilliant its marketing strategy was, so that all the videos uploaded to youtube and instagram had the "signature snapchat crop", which got everyone else curious.
The only arguments I agree with in this article are related to its utility--how it's considered rude to be video taping someone else, and how it was limited to sunglasses format.
The rest is bullshit because they're one of those "MBA case studies" type after-the-fact interpretation, which in most cases are bullshit.
Just go build something useful and you will never have to worry about being "fashionable" or all the gimmicks. In fact as a tech company you should never see yourself as a fashion company. It's a myth created by ignorant media pundits who's never built a product in their life.
1. Was snapchat users advertised about this product frequently? If not then its failure in execution right there.
2. What was the conversion rate if they did?
3. Where there any user studies for people who did not convert? What was the distribution of their reasoning? Price, battery life, availability?
4. Was the video/photos uploaded through these glasses carried the advertise for the device itself?
5. What was the influence ratio (friends buying product after one friend bought it)?
The thing is that this idea like most ideas was good but execution probably wasn't. The whole trick behind blockbuster product is to understand failure in execution, fix them and reiterate. Never stop after the failure.
1. Kind of/yes. They had campaigns at certain times. 2. Low 3. idk 4. Yes, they did. It would say "taken with spectacles" and the format kind of advertized/demonstrated the product 5. No one I know besides me bought one.
The problem is no one cares about snapchat that much. The average user isn't taking it so seriously that they want to spend money on hardware like this, let alone charge it, set it up, take it around with them etc. If snapchat charged $0.10 to continue using it half their userbase might just uninstall.
Yep. Today we live in times where apparently this is secondary, however, so they gotta make up a ton of crap.
A friend has a pair. They work... fine. The app support is... fine, and kind of novel actually given that rotation on the screen works with snaps shot with spectacles only.
But... there's not much value there. At all.
And why would there be, anyway?
P(Success) is highly correlated with (Marginal Value / Marginal Cost)
The original Snapchat app succeeded because the marginal cost is low (everyone already has a smartphone) and it provides a good marginal value to a subset of population (over other social networks).
Spectacles carry higher monetary and more importantly convenience and social costs to use and add little extra value beyond existing solutions.
The same framework could be applied to Uber, AirBnb, ... as well as many startup failures. Note that P(Success) or probability of success implies that there are factors other than those included in the model.
I’d love to have refinements or counterexamples to the model if anyone is interested.
Marginal Value, MV(iPhone) ~= MV(crap, and most non-crap, android phones) (granted, this is probably not true for the original iPhone). But except for that one time it is certainly not true. The quality is clearly different, however.
Even more clear is the Tesla case: MV(Roadster) <<< MV(alternatives). It wasn't the best electric car, it wasn't the best car, it wasn't ... however again there was a clear difference in quality.
I would argue most real estate developments are equally examples of this (mostly because laws prevent them on competing on anything other than quality in most inner cities). Trump's whole empire seems an example of it too.
It seems to be entirely possible to achieve success by simply copying a badly executed idea, and doing it better.
iPhone: signifier of good taste, ease of use (relative to Android), being well-off (in developing countries)
Xiaomi: middle class or upper-middle class status (in China), good value for money
I agree that current iPhones and Xiaomi phones do not provide much better features relative to their competition (no-name Android phones in the case of Xiaomi). Their values lie elsewhere.
Tesla Roadster: cutting-edge, environmental sensibility
In fact, by sales volume, Roadster itself was not a success. Tesla only sold 2,450 of them in 30 countries [1]. Model S provides much better value for cost and correspondingly achieved much stronger success.
Luxury products in general tend to be associated with social exposure. Maybe luxury mobs or floor cleaning liquid exist but either they do provide some special features for a niche or their sales volumes are relatively tiny.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Roadster
It’s almost like marginal value isn’t the only thing that matters.
Apple phones are way way overpriced but they're so much better than the competition. It's not true people buy Apple phones only for fashion reasons. The absolute value of an iPhone is vastly superior to the marginal value of any other phone, and the marginal value depends on how much you use your phone.
I don't use my phone very much so I can tolerate an Android phone; but if my personal or professional life depended on it, I would buy an iPhone.
Having used both Android and iOS I think it's quite clear that both platforms are just as buggy as one another with the recent iOS11 outpacing Android in terms of bugginess by quite a large margin.
When you buy an iPhone you are paying for the build quality and for the marketing, you are not getting an objectively 'better' phone.
That’s worth a lot of money to most users. I think more people are willing to pay premium to get the great operating system compared to hardware which might be secondary.
If you don't use Apple as your main computer you basically have zero integration. Don't even get me started on interoperability (you can't even use the iPhone headphones on a mac??)
That the UX is superior is also highly subjective. There are many things that are either impossible to do or a massive pain to do on an iPhone; I would not consider that good UX (for example try looking at a picture you just took on your camera and apply some filters before posting it to instagram. The only way I have found to do that is to open instagram and open the picture in that app. The notification system is a massive joke. There are dozens of other such examples).
What is worth a lot of money to users is convenience and habituality. Having to change your habits, workflow and frame of mind can be quite taxing for some people.
Even outside the luxury market there are numerous other factors, not least of which include: distribution, vitality, marketing etc.
Edit: Also there are at least three Nobel prizes showing how marginal value isn’t what matters in making choices (Nash, Kahneman, Thaler)
What do you mean by 'vitality'?
Luxury products provide social signal value rather than pure performance.
I agree that imperfect rationality is a major factor in human decision making and perhaps should be included into the model somehow.
I'm not sure how Nash's game theory is related to this. Care to elaborate?
PS. I didn't downvote you and feel that too much downvoting, sometimes unwarranted, occurs on HN lately.
Sorry, virality. Damn autocomplete.
Luxury products provide social signal value rather than pure performance.
Social signaling is often (usually? Outside subsistence cases - there are some good studies showing how this switches over) more important than performance.
Sometimes performance and social signaling are correlated, but they don't have to be.
I'm not sure how Nash's game theory is related to this. Care to elaborate?
A product marketplace is pretty much the perfect example of a non-competitive game. Indeed, the New Yorker used is as one:
The setting could be nuclear negotiations, such as the ones currently taking place between Iran and the great powers. It could be a product market, in which a number of firms compete for business.[1]
This is a relatively mature field, and there are some fairly comprehensive ways of expressing the likelihood of success of a product.
Unfortunately your formula doesn't capture anything like enough of the complexities of a market place.
But hey - it is simple, and you typed it quickly, and it seems like it could be right so nothing else matters, right?
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/the-triumph-and-...
Social signaling is part of the ‘value’ in my model.
The utility of existing competition and their costs are included in the term ‘marginal’.
I am aware that my simple model, occurring in a couple minutes, is incomplete that’s why I asked for refinements. Including factors like distribution & marketing seems very useful. However, capturing imperfect rationality does not seem possible for a simple model.
Do you have references to the ‘fairly comprehensive ways of expressing the likelihood of success of a product’?
Everything the article says - be it about influencers not picking up and promoting the Spectacles to difficulties with porting content without cropping - is extremely useful to anyone else looking to launch a Spectacles type device.
The parent is saying that usefulness is the main, if not only, cause of success, and that other factors are in fact irrelevant (namely, fashionableness, launch strategy, celebrity endorsements, etc.)
You can agree or disagree with that thesis, but here you're misrepresenting it.
When OP says something failed because it isn’t useful, they are deliberately ignoring the subject and object of the equation.
When the article says that influencers didn’t glom on to Spectacles, they are making a statement about influencers not finding it useful but if you read the parent comment, this observation is useless because it obfuscates the true problem - that Spectacles is “useless”.
Earth has limited resources. I wish people wouldn't feel the need to buy / produce hypster "Spectacles type devices".
The post you replied to tried to explain why it's actually not useful. The journalist uses a style of seductive writing (some call it "narrative fallacy"[1]) which connects plausible-sounding causes to its supposedly logical effects. That style of explanation can actually make readers dumber about what happened because it leaves out counterexamples.
That "narrative fallacy" is common in writings from Harvard Business Review, histories, biographies, newspapers & pundits trying to explain why the Dow Jones Index went up/down, why startups/products failed/succeeded, etc. All of those suffer the omission of counterexamples.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayden_White
Thank you for writing this
That audience is tiny and has budgets to hire marketers with much better analysis than this article.
I don't use Snapchat, but take a look at all the anti-Snapchat posts in his Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/joshconstine
It feels more like someone shorting stocks than providing thoughtful analysis.
Please don't wear crocs in public.
I won’t define that. It’s like Potter Stewart - I know it when I see it.
The Matrix's promotion campaign included a Super Bowl ad.