Rudimentary Perfection

I find the knee-jerk, negative responses to Google Glass interesting. I have a feeling they’re mostly coming from the 30+ demographic I’m a part of, but I have no proof.
I agree with John Gruber that Sergey Brin is a hypocrite when he stands on stage at TED with his stupid-looking Google glasses on and calls cellphones “emasculating”, but I wouldn’t go so far as say Google Glass isn’t the answer.
Google might be run by engineers and nerds and not always as cool as Apple, but they’re not afraid of shipping 1.0 versions of anything. In fact I think “Beta” should be permanently set below the Google logo. This is, in fact, a quality they share with Apple.
Mat Mullenweg on the rudimentary perfection of Apple:

Many entrepreneurs idolize Steve Jobs. He’s such a perfectionist, they say. Nothing leaves the doors of 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino without a polish and finish that makes geeks everywhere drool. No compromise!

I like Apple for the opposite reason: they’re not afraid of getting a rudimentary 1.0 out into the world.
Now that Google has Glass out in the real world they can start making it better, the same as Apple did when it launched a very beautiful but very 1.0 iPhone in 2007.
Google and Apple are both skating to where the puck is going, and the puck is moving away keyboards and touchscreens and towards natural speech and our other senses. Google is doing this with Now and Glass. Apple is doing this with Siri (and whatever might be in the works for an iWatch?).This isn’t to say traditional input methods are necessarily being phased out, we’re just getting more options for how we interact with our computers.
So Gruber may be right that Google Glass isn’t the answer right now, but let’s see what happens in a few years.

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Human Experience

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You Can’t Do It Alone

My latest essay is up at Stemmings:

Mothers and Fathers of Inventions. Mad Scientists. Innovators. We always hear about the lone wolves, but rarely do they act alone.
Check it out.

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Words

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Beauty Literally Moves Us

At the NYTimes, Lance Hosey on why we love beautiful things:

Great design, the management expert Gary Hamel once said, is like Justice Potter Stewart’s famous definition of pornography — you know it when you see it. You want it, too: brain scan studies reveal that the sight of an attractive product can trigger the part of the motor cerebellum that governs hand movement. Instinctively, we reach out for attractive things; beauty literally moves us.

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Human Experience

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