Google, otherwise normal
We often deal with Google because Google is great show. He is adventurous and happily anarchist, candid and chaotic, in permanent reorg e utopian like an architecture by Piranesi, but also cynical and opportunist like Frank Underwood. It will be because it reflects the Montessorian training of its founders, it will be because it embodies it spirit of the web, Google represents the modernity. It is modernity that fascinates and frightens, but that cannot be kept outside the door. THE technophobes they made one scapegoat and Dave Eggers was inspired by him for his Orwellian novel, The Circle.
Europeans are as annoyed with Google as a father who sees his daughter going out with a boy he doesn't like and therefore tries to keep it away. Google's greatest concern is certainly not to eliminate drafts from the windows, an activity which, according to Angela Merkel, is at the top of the German concerns. But the Europeans they do not have more I got it nothing on and gentle cosmetics of these greats technology groups who from Silicon Valley venture into their territories without asking permission.
Google is one platform, with which is not for nothing easy work. Third parties are, to say the least, bewildered. Every day a product or a new service which is still a prototype and what if does not work, comes soon left to itself with the match that remains lit in the hands of the partners. See what happened with i Google Glass which looked like the next big thing and instead they were little more than an imperfect prototype. But it's not always that frustrating to work with Google—in fact, it can be enormously uplifting.
Per esempio Uber e Lyft they are building a colossal business based on Google maps without having to pay Google a cent, even though Google has invested $250 million in Uber through its VP fund. Google Maps is becoming one of the biggest power plants of the new economy. This service is incorporated in countless applications that are revolutionizing entire economic sectors such as the catering and hôtellerie sectors. All this happens for courtesy of Google. The same can be said for Android that turns on 70% of the world's smartphones. This type of "free" is estimated to be worth 3% to 5% of US GDP, although there is no mention of it in official data.
There is no area of human activity in which Google don't want to expand. “Google wants to be everywhere, even in our bodies,” he writes Conor Dougherty in the NYTimes commenting on a deal with Johnson & Johnson for robotic surgery. And that's right, be wherever there is from develop some innovation. And the contrary of what he does Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), which is maniacal in focus on a segment and in theprocess all the details of an idea before turning it into a product. Apple recalls the Prussian army at the Battle of Sedan when Google brings to mind the Communards of Paris.
The Last Days of Quantitative Easing (QE)
This "vagueness" like it a Wall Street which awarded Google with a high price/earnings ratio, five points higher than Apple.
The "lightness” by Google is daughter of the QE who is living the last days of revelry. With the announced end of QE in the US also the mood of its own. di Wall Street longed changing. In fact, what happened to Google is not the result of chance or circumstances. In Mountain View has arrived, as the new financial director, a bigwig di Wall Street. It is Ruth Borat who has held a similar position at the investment bank since 2010 Morgan Stanley, renamed “Margin Stanley” under the management of Porat. From 26 May 2015 Porat will take the post di Patrick Pickette, 52, CFO of Google since 2008 e authentic googler in appearance and spirit.
In a post much discussed, which left the same stunned Larry Page, Pichette recounted how she matured decision di to leave its location a Google. After a nocturnal climb to the summit of Kilimanjaro together with his wife Tamar, with the majestic plain of the Serengeti at his feet (actually it is 325 kilometers away and cannot be seen from there), he understood that the time had come for the "Carpe Diem”. His post is true wise di Googolian candor. He also inspired the caustic pen of Lucy Kellaway in the "Financial Times" which had already lambasted Larry Page for some declarationi on the occasion of the acquisition of Motorola Mobility.
Google's new CFO will have a mission precise: it will have to lead under control le expense Google's disheveled in the business of Research and Development that so far not are you succeed a affect on business of the search engine that it depends still for the Present in several = 95% laid down by the dealer, a territory towards which the powerful army of Facebook, Another darling di Wall Street which is rewarding it with a price/earnings ratio double that of Google. If we look at how Facebook is taking away from Google the news business, one must give credence to what he claims Peter Thiel when he says that Internet monopolies are not real monopolies, as we know them historically, but gods transient monopolies, created by technology and swept away by the erosive action of a most advanced technology. Farhad Manjoo, the tech columnist of the "New York Times", in an article entitled Google, Mighty Now, but Not Forever he hypothesized and discussed a potential Google decline right in its core business, that of online advertising, which is likely to migrate to services is connect directly le people, such as social media. It is a remote possibility, but not entirely excluded.
Since easy money is running out, it is necessary in the future to avoid what is success with Google Glass, a classic of the googolian comedy that the impeccable Nick Bilton he recounted in great detail on his blog "Bit" in the NYTimes. The technological fairy tales are the specialty of the young columnist of the New York newspaper. She has already written one on Twitter, Hatching Twitter, from which Lionsgate is drawing a television series. From New York he moved to San Francisco to be closer to the events scene. Our collaborator Giuseppe di Pirro translated Bilton's article into Italian, Why Google Glass Broke, in which Nick tells the unusual story of Google Glass. A story that describes the Google method at its peak and that features one of its founders, Sergey Brin trained in a Montessori school.
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Molto rumore per nulla
This is one Story which calls into question a big one public intriguea futuristic technology to wear, a secret laboratory, models, skydivers and a love triangle born inside the offices that ended a billionaire's marriage. This is the story of Google Glass.
Before we begin, this would be the part of the story where I should perhaps explain what Google Glass is. Except I don't have to. THE Google Glass they just never came into the world. Instead, they exploded with the clamor and the pump usually reserved to a Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), iSomething.
Since their first presentation in 2012, they have been considered the gadgets of gadgets, coveted by everyone from nerds to executives, chefs to fashionistas. They were the must-have trinket that was preparing to represent the comparison terms for a new genre of wearable computer.
Magazine "Time” defined them as one of the “best inventions of the year“. They got twelve pages of advertising in the magazine “Vogue”. The Simpsons dedicated an episode to Google Glass, although Homer called them "Oogle Goggles". The Glass have been making the rounds daytime and evening shows, and have been the subject of numerous comedy sketches, including those of the “Saturday Night Live", The"The Colbert Report“and countless videos on YouTube. The greats of the whole world have them tested. Prince Charles wore a pair. As did Oprah, Beyoncé, Jennifer Lawrence and Bill Murray.
There was also an episode at New York Fashion Week in 2012, when Diane von Furstenberg he sported a couple of red color and sent his models down the catwalk with specimens of different colors. Later, in a promptly produced video, von Furstenberg (wearing a new pair created by DVF | Made for Glass) confessed to Isabelle Olsson, the glass designer, "We revealed Google Glass to the world."
And another index of their cultural significance, "The New Yorkerposted an article by 5.000 words about thing meant wear them, written by a so-called Google Glass Explorer invited by Google to test the product. Here, Gary Shteyngart humorously relates an impromptu product demonstration he gave on the New York City Subway train line six. “Are they the ones?” a businessman asked him. “It's so inspiring,” says one college student. "You are lucky".
But perhaps the greatest feeling came last week when, from nothing, Google has announced that Glass, as we know them, were close to disappearing.
Puff! Gone. All that fanfare for nothing.
In the opinion of former and current Google employees involved in the Google Glass project, this was not the right conclusion of the project.
The Google X laboratory is born
To understand what went awry, we have to indietro torture di a few years in Mountain View, California, well inside the elegant Google offices. There, amid the colorful campus logos and swaying plane trees, the company's founders and a handful of trusted executives drew up a list di a hundred futuristic ideas.
Among these were a indoor GPS and a project called Google brain. But the greatest enthusiasm was reserved for a new genre of wearable computers which could be connected to the skin or possibly worn like glasses.
Towards the end of 2009, Eric Schmidt, then CEO of Google, approached Sebastian thrun, a genius multidisciplinary researcher at Stanford University, and lo he recruited for develop these ideas. Thrun, tasked with coming up with a catchy name, temporarily called the laboratory "Google X“, hoping to opt for something better later.
According to several Google staffers who worked on the early stages of Project X (all agreed to discuss the project only under the promise of anonymity because they were still working or in business with the company), the laboratory he soon found one secret location within the Google campuses, occupying the second floor of a nondescript building at 1489 Charleston Avenue. There, the first project of the lab: sort of stuff like virtual reality which would later become known as Google Glass.
Thrun recruited a large number of scientists e researchers di very first level to work at Glass, including astro teller e Babak parviz, both at the forefront of wearable computing, and Isabelle Olsson, senior industrial designer. Soon, Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, joined them to help them push X forward.
Sergey Brin's role at Google X
It is important to note here two things about Brin. At that time he was married with Anna Wojcicki, mother of her two children and an entrepreneur in the field of genetic testing. Bryn, had a reputation at Google for having what was commonly referred to as “attention deficit disorder project“, it became obsessed from a project then throw yourself on following e abandon it (Brin declined to comment on this article).
With Brin and Thrun at the helm, Google X and the eyewear project has managed to stick around secrets for more than one year. “Google employees walked past us every day without having a clue what was going on inside X,” said one Google employee.
That was the case, until 2011 when my colleague Claire Cain Miller and I have given the news about the secret of Google X Lab, describing in detail some of the projects under construction at X.
At the time, unknown to anyone outside of X, a red-hot was brewing fracture between the engineers of X in about the functions more elementary of the Google Glass. One faction argued that they should to wear all day, as a "trendy device“, while others felt they should lead only for specific practical purposes. Yet, almost all to X they agreed that the prototype in use was simply this: a prototype, with big imperfections to delete.
There was a prominent dissenter. Brin knew the Google Glass was not a finished product and needed further work, but He wanted that this it happened publicly, not in a top-secret lab. Brin argued that X should have to release the Glass ai consumers and use theirs feedback for reiterate and improve la design.
Improving and enhancing the Glass thus became a public work in progress made with the help of users. So Google decided to not sell the Glass in shops to the public, but limit it ai Glass Explorers, a select group of tech geeks and journalists who would pay $1500 for the privilege of being among the first to adopt it.
A counterproductive strategy
The strategy revealed itself counterproductive. THE'exclusivity added to the fort interest of the public more extensive, with the press organs clamoring for their own piece of history. when theexcitement public blew up, Google not only fomented le flames, but doused them with jet fuel.
“The Google X team knew that the product not was minimally close to being soon for the debut“said a former Google employee. The team marketing by Google and Brin they had other floors.
At a Google developer convention in June 2012, for example, skydivers wearing Glass landed on top of the auditorium, racing motorcycles from the roof up to the conference room to thunderous applause. (I was there and it was unlike any other presentation I've ever seen.) Brin sembrava cheer of attention and was labeled as the Tony Stark of real life, from the comic book character Iron Man. Later that year, Brin sat in first row on the occasion of parade of von Furstenberg, proudly equipped with a couple of Glass.
This not was wrong mode for to introduce the Googles Glass. This it was not theexperiment confidential that Google X engineers had hoped for. It was like watching someone blurt out a secret into a bullhorn.
But skydivers and models could do no more than that, and they did sparkle start soon to to fade when i tech blogs, who had finally gotten their hands on the Glass, there they described as "iWorst product of all time", rightly noting that the battery lasted for nothing and that it was "a buggy product“. Some were raised stocks inherent the privacy, people they feared to be monitored during intimate moments, as at the urinal, as I have experienced at another Google conference where I was surrounded by people wearing Glass. They were also prohibited in bar, in the movies, in the casino of Las Vegas and other places where customers were not wanted to be surreptitiously monitored.
A story worthy of Beautiful
Then, in early 2014, one scandal da rotogravure hit the laboratories of Google X. Between 3-D printers and microchips, one was born love story between Brin and Amanda Rosenberga marketing manager of Google Glass who had helped organize the Diane von Furstenberg fashion show. Brin it stood pulling away laid down by the wife is preferably used for Rosenberg, which in turn stood leaving his fiance, who also worked at Google. With an even more unique twist reported by “Vanity Fair”, it was found that the Brine's wife was amica of Rosenberg.
From that moment, the Google Glass seemed to wither. Early employees dropped X, including Parviz, that raised the curtains at the time of Amazon. Brin, who was dealing with the consequences of her romantic relationship, he stopped even of to wear i Glass in public.
And this is how we arrive at March 2015, when Google has suddenly announced That was dropping il curtain on his Glass Explorer program. This represents the death knell for Glass. But maybe that's not the case.
A new beginning?
Tony Fadell, ex-Apple, took over the direction of the Google Glass project. Here with its Nest smart thermostat. Perhaps this device is one of the most coveted products by the general public who find it hard to understand how these objects work.
In their new life, the Glass are supervised by Ivy Ross, a jewelry designer who runs the smart eyewear division by Google, e Tony Fadell, former Apple executive e creator of Nest, the smart thermostat.
“The first Glass efforts were pioneering and they allowed us to learn what is very important for consumers and companies“Fadell said in a statement. “I am excited to work with Ivy to provide direction and support as she leads the team and we work together to integrate those acquisitions into future products.”
Many people aware of the Piani di Fadell about the Glass they reported that he was going to redesign il produced from scratch and that not he would released until it was completed. A consultant to Fadell said:
There will be no public trial. Tony is a product guy and he's not going to release anything until it's perfect.
As for the von Furstenberg, has no regrets. In an interview, you stated that Google Glass was nothing short of revolutionary:
It was the first time we talked about wearable technology. Technology is advancing faster and faster, and Google Glass will always be a part of history.
