So Android announced Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean), the next version of the operating system with much awaited performance improvements and some new (marginal) features, available to Galaxy Nexus users in mid-July and the remaining 99% of the Android ecosystem sometime between a year and never. Along with the new version of Android, Google announced several other products and services, including their Nexus 7″ tablet, which I won’t cover in this post. What I am going to focus on is Nexus Q, the first product designed exclusively by Google, a ‘social’ media player that is, intriguingly, manufactured in the U.S and costs almost $300. This is not representative of a new class of devices, it’s not even functionally all that impressive either: it’s a device that connects to speakers and TVs, like countless before it. The difference in the case of the Nexus Q lies in its impressive industrial design and the fact that 1. it can stream data from Google Play and 2) it can allow local Android devices to ‘share’ the content they hold in their local memory. Google, borrowing from the Apple cue-card of shoving features into products without really caring about what people really want or need, created a product aimed solely at increasing the impact and the revenue of their online media store (Google Play) and added a small cherry on top that makes use of the networked nature, ubiquity and storage capacity of modern smartphones. Of course, even the ‘social’ aspect of the device is not exactly groundbreaking either. The functionality has been available, one way or another, albeit in more ‘technically challenging’ forms for years. But what’s important to note about the Q is that it doesn’t really cover what is probably the number one request (or, if your prefer, the number one pet peeve) people have about for other locked down devices of this kind (yes, Apple TV is a prime example): the ability to stream content stored in existing home networked devices, such as another computers or NAS devices on the local network, using standard or widely-used protocols such as DLNA/uPNP, DAAP/Airplay or even SMB/NFS. With the Nexus Q, Google demonstrates the same denial it’s got with that of the success, or rather lack thereof, of Google+. And in their attempt to convince people that the botched Nexus Q is worth paying the huge premium they’re asking (other devices of the same kind cost 2-3 times less), their enthusiasm for silly features like overlay mustaches in Hangouts, their desire to marry profits with openness and openness, they lose the mark. They fail to deliver the extremely seductive walled-garden, locked-down experience that allows Apple to thrive at the cost of openness and empowering products and services and, at the same time, they lose the geekcred that made Google so affable in the first place. Google largely knows this and they have been performing a balancing act for years: the ‘openness’ of Android, that of ‘the social graph’, their contribution to the public via open source software. The company is cognizant of its differences to other players of the market; yet, there with today’s announcement of the Nexus Q there is a paradox: today we have so much technology available to us, often of high quality and free, in the form of open source software, powerful and affordable hardware. Google, like Apple and everyone else in between, realise this and have been struggling to trap the cat inside their new shiny new boxes. The Nexus Q could have been a great little device, and maybe it will be one as soon as people start ‘tinkering with its internals’. Yet it would have been much better if Google had shipped it like that instead of ‘tolerating’ hackability by the community. By blatantly promoting its own cloud based offerings instead of trying to marry them with locally stored content, Google is crippling its product.
In the end, like Microsoft a few days ago, Google is copying Steve Jobs’s style and strategy; provide a platform and tools, but focus on content and lock-down as a monetisation technique to counter technology commoditisation. Gundotra’s presentation of Google+ Events reeks of vintage early 2000s Jobsian technique, with the preset graphics and the sildeshow features. With everyone and their dog showcasing complete lack of tech culture in the face of a dominant resurgent Apple, the world treads in dangerous territory: a technology monoculture in the corporate space that bases its profitability on polished jailhouses instead of innovation and increased freedoms. In this context, the cloud remains a key technology that can help liberate us from the burdens of backups and local storage, but also imprison us in a world where a few corporations control all of our information.
Which brings us to Glass. The Sergey Brin, Project Glass segment was super fun and very impressive. If anything, it shows that Google is well-humoured and daring and works on interesting technology. Of course the demo and the features they showed are not exactly representative of the product, its potential or its usefulness. The segment which followed the breathtaking landing on Moscone and Brin’s introduction was stale and unconvincing: I doubt a mom would want to ‘make contact’ with her baby looking like the Borg, or that everyone would think twice before relegating their ‘Glass’ to a drawer and never using it, its novelty quickly overshadowed by its unnatural and intruding appearance. It’d be a shame if Google really thought that people want to look like futuristic soldiers from a second tier sci-fi movie. Sure, the concept is nice and perhaps as technology progresses it will be easier to integrate such functionality in more human-friendly prodcuts, like contact lenses or integrated with optical glasses. As it stands, Project Glass is only an unappealing curiosity that serves better as a tech demo than a product right now.
