Larry Page is on stage at TED right now. I'm at home watching.
He is not wearing Google Glass.
This fits the new narrative that's going on in my head: that Google doesn't know how to stick with a product. Remember Google Wave? It was a very interesting idea, but Google gave up on it very quickly. Why? Because it was controversial and the execution wasn't good.
Will Google stick with Glass? I'm starting to be very skeptical.
Look at Google+. Has Google fixed what bugs me about the service? No. The first week I asked for real, algorithmic noise filtering (like what Gmail now has). No mas.
I asked for Google+ to stop asking me to follow people who have never posted. No mas.
Google Glass is a deeply flawed product. I wrote about how in my "Google Glass is doomed" post:
But it is getting worse. I've had entrepreneurs tell me that Google is still arguing internally about whether Glass should be used for games and augmented reality (some on the team believe no). It is ridiculous that the team hasn't made a clean decision so everyone can move forward at this late date.
I've had investors tell me (even ones in the "Glass Collective") that they are not gonna invest until Google gives them real answers, like what the price will be for the general public and timelines for when things like APIs will be firmed up (they are not yet) and a real distribution method, er, a store, will be turned on.
It's amazing to me that for a product that was announced nearly two years ago that Google still hasn't signaled to the public what really is going on with this product.
Worse, I see a lack of CEO support of Glass as a very troubling statement. If Larry isn't wearing Glass, it doesn't mean good things for the project.
Can Google really finish something truly paradigm shifting? "We need revolutionary change," Page just said to Charlie Rose. Does he really believe that? Why not wear Glass on stage then? Why not explain where Glass is going?
My skepticism is going up every day I don't hear answers. Google IO is now at the end of June. Will the answers come by then? I sure hope so.
I'm happy that Larry is talking about context and making our devices understand us better, that's the "Age of Context" that Shel Israel and I wrote about last year.
But the context is that Google Glass is a deeply flawed product and I expected a LOT more improvements by now, 11 months after I first got mine.
Robert Scoble is Startup Liaison for Rackspace, the Open Cloud Computing Company.
The best place to contact Robert is on his Facebook page: www.facebook.com/RobertScoble