The pain of innovation for tech corporates

After the announcement of the Snap Specs at AWE, I saw a lot of criticism around the latest glasses released by Snap, and this triggered me a bit. Let me rant with you a bit about that.

The critics about Snap

Right after Snap announced Specs at AWE, the press and the online tech community started criticizing or making various memes about the Specs. The device was defined as pricey and bulky, and many people started mocking the appearance of Evan Spiegel with the device on. Then people started comparing it with the cheaper and more lightweight Ray-Ban Meta glasses, and saying Snap was releasing something ridiculous.

I think this is totally ingenerous. Snap glasses are not perfect, and for sure they are not ready for mainstream adoption: they are indeed too big and too pricey. But still, for the current technological moment, they are a very interesting device. They are an all-in-one AR device, but not a headset like HoloLens: they actually are glasses. Big glasses, but still glasses. This is a huge achievement that those who have not been in the field for a long time can’t appreciate enough.

It’s been 10 years since Snap released its first glasses, originally calling them Spectacles and then Specs (if we continue with this naming progression, the next unit will just be called “S”). And every time they release a new unit, they get criticized: for instance, the first Spectacles had a ridiculous battery life and were just able to shoot media, so the press wondered what these glasses were for. But it’s been 10 years that every unit is better than the previous one and gets closer and closer to the vision of having mainstream AR glasses. If you see the progression from the first Spectacles to the current Specs, it is impressive, but it is like no one is considering that.

And while I appreciate the memes (I always do!), and I totally agree with the fair criticism (the Specs are far from being perfect), I am getting annoyed by all the negativity around this release from the general tech community. It seems to me very myopic.

The critics about innovations

Unfortunately, this is not the first time that a company trying to release something innovative has received heavy criticism.

Meta is still bashed for its chase of the “metaverse”. While we all hate that Meta “stole” the word metaverse from us, we have to recognize that it was trying to chase a vision similar to the one that we all share (with a few big exceptions, like the data harvesting part). Many people conflated Horizon Worlds with Meta’s vision of the Metaverse, but if you remember well all the videos that Zuck shared when he tried to explain the metaverse for one hour, you for sure remember that they were full of examples in mixed and augmented reality. And in fact, the company always aimed at building augmented reality glasses, and its showcase stunt of Orion is proof of that.

I strongly believe the metaverse is the future, and I appreciate Meta’s heavy investments in trying to make it real. But still, that word was ridiculed so much by online communities that now it is unusable in any context.

Apple released the Vision Pro as its first mixed reality headset. It is a device that introduced interesting innovations like the gaze-and-pinch interactions. Again, it is not perfect (we all know about its comfort issues), but still it’s a good device. And it was great to see Apple finally launching a new product line with it. But then all the tech journalists started a personal challenge of who was saying “Apple abandoned the Vision Pro” the most times.

If we go back in time, to when I started with XR, we can find the Google Glasses. Google launched these glasses in 2014: if you think about it, it is kinda crazy that they tried to release some consumer-oriented glasses that people could wear on the street more than 10 years ago. They were so much ahead of their time. But then, we all know about the “glasshole” story.

There are many examples of that. It seems that the moment a big corporation tries to innovate in the open, it just exposes itself to huge criticism.

The communication errors

I wouldn’t be fair if I just criticized the “tech community” for this critical behaviour. The corporates have their share of responsibility, especially when it comes to the communication around their innovations.

Let’s start with Snap: Evan Spiegel last year pre-announced the Specs, defining them as “the first consumer-oriented AR glasses”. Well, they are not. No consumer is going to spend $2,200 for glasses with no use case. And no one is going to wear such thick glasses in the streets. The moment you set this expectation, then you have to deliver on that promise. I guess the comparison with Ray-Ban Meta also comes from the fact that Meta’s glasses are really consumer-oriented, while Snap’s are not. They are just another dev-kit: a very fancy dev-kit, but still a dev-kit.

Also, Snap announced the new Specs glasses, but then it’s making everyone try the old glasses, which are bulkier and uglier. People are confusing the two things, so many have tried the old model, convinced that it is the new one, and they are writing online, “oh look how heavy and big the new Specs are”. And this is ruining the reputation of the new glasses even more. It’s so frustrating to see this happening. I don’t know how Snap managed to make such a PR disaster with its demos.

Talking about Meta… we all know the PR problems, too. The concept of the “metaverse” was not explained well, and it generated a lot of confusion about what the hell it did mean. That was the period that people were contacting me over LinkedIn saying, “Oh, I saw Meta is doing the metaverse, I want to do metaverse too, can you do some metaverse for me?” People wanted the metaverse without knowing what it was, and then when the metaverse-whatever-it-meant didn’t come true, they started saying that it was dead. Not to mention the fact that Meta’s communication team blurred the lines between Horizon Worlds and the general metaverse, and so people started to think that Horizon Worlds was the metaverse. To make things even worse, Zuck thought it was a good idea to publish the famous infamous selfie with the Sagrada Familia and the Tour Eiffel in the background. I hope he was drunk when he did that.

Even Google Glass had a huge communication problem. I entered the XR field because I was watching the Google Glass commercials on YouTube and I fell in love with the possibilities they could offer. Those ads were so amazing we all thought we were in the future. But the problem is that, technically, the glasses were just an early prototype that could do maybe 5% of what was advertised. So many people like me bought them, spending a lot of money, just to realize they were just useless. They should have been advertised as a devkit and stayed niche as a device for nerds. Instead, they were advertised as the new tech that allowed everyone to do a lot of new things, and the results were a disaster: the only new thing they unlocked is that people called you a glasshole.

Probably the only company I’m not blaming here is Apple: they advertised the Vision Pro as a device for who wants to have the future today. They never marketed it as something for consumers and never oversold it much.

Anyway, what you can see is that while it is true that the tech community can be unforgiving, a lot of times it is also the companies’ fault for receiving such bad reactions.

How do we solve all of this?

I personally think it’s important to have innovation in the open. We need companies that try to release innovative devices, so these units can be tested by early innovators who give real feedback so that the next versions can be better. This is the agile way of working: you can’t just evolve a product secretly in the lab for 20 years and hope that when you release it, it is an instant success. You need real users’ data, you need to have a developer community, you need to have real feedback. So we need companies making bold moves and coming out publicly with products that are not ready. And we should all accept that the early versions of these products are full of problems.

This is how we can have innovations. Otherwise, if we keep scaring companies about innovating, we just deserve a world where nothing changes. I keep reading that Snap should have just invested the Specs money in its ads business, because it is what makes money, and the same goes for Meta. But if a company has to spend on what makes money today, it means that they should never innovate. According to this theory, in 50 years from now, Meta and Snap should still just have their damn social apps and sell data with it. But is this the future we really want? Where companies just keep investing money in the same things that make money today?

I personally think it would be terrible. I always appreciate every entrepreneur who tries something new, who uses his own money to try to innovate. I may not like the product, but still I have more esteem for who tried to do something new and failed than for who just stayed with the same thing forever and ever. Because this is how we evolve as a society.

So I think that on our side, we should all have a bit more patience and respect for who is doing something new. Which doesn’t mean not criticizing: again, at AWE I spoke with many people at Snap telling about the problems with their device and their communication. And a few memes are also fine. But we should not mock the efforts that these companies are making.

At the same time, I think companies should be less detached from the rest of the world. They should understand that the community should be educated: not everyone is an XR expert, so you can’t expect ordinary people to understand the difference between smartglasses like Ray-Ban Meta and AR glasses like Specs. You can’t expect people to understand the difference between the old model of Spectacles and the new model of Specs. Communication and PR should be clear and easy to understand for everyone, avoiding any possible confusion. And also, innovative products shouldn’t be sold as products for consumers. Because the moment you set unrealistic expectations, you just face the consequences of your statements. And, last but not least, you should be ware of taking selfies. After all the memes with Evan Spiegel wearing Specs, I understand why Tim Cook waited so long to show a public photo of him wearing the Vision Pro. And he did that on Vanity Fair with pictures that were carefully studied in the Apple Labs to look nice.

In the end, I think we should all create a better ecosystem for innovation to take place. It’s a pity we are in a moment where social media algorithms favor bold views (doom or gloom) that generate engagement, and not smart reasoning about the new products. This doesn’t help at all to have fair conversations about new products. And it’s kinda ironic that many of these XR products that are being criticized on social media are actually released by the companies that control social media themselves…

(Header image by CNBC)

This article was originally published on skarredghost.com