Scoble’s love affair for Google Glass could apparently only last so long. This underscores some of the problems with developing a product out in public, or at least half-way out. Long-lead technical challenges (battery, size, cost) are still hidden below the core design and marketing issues (utility, fashion, desire).

Google at least did a good job of starting the conversation, even if they haven’t yet figured out how to finish it.

Robert Scoble – Last night before Skrillex at Coachella….

Down in the comments, he elaborates on why he doesn’t like them any more and what he thinks Google did wrong:

1. They launched it with WAY too much fanfare that the product simply can’t live up to. Jumping out of a blimp and doing live video on the way down (along with a ton of really well produced videos that promised it would be a great assistant as you walked around) set expectations VERY high and the product hasn’t gotten to that fit and finish yet, even two years later. The product, for instance, still doesn’t do live video (at least not by itself).

2. The team started out very public, with very nice collaborative team members. Then they turned secretive and can’t tell us what’s coming. It’s almost like someone told the team “turn Apple.” That secrecy made developers and influencers feel like they were no longer part of the process of developing this into a real product, which it still is not.

3. Because it was launched at a developer conference (Google IO) expectations were set that this would be mostly for developers, and that a great API would come soon. The API did come, but 18 months later. There still is no real store. The UI is way too simplistic to handle dozens or hundreds of apps. Google refused to answer questions about sensors at the next Google IO.

4. Two years ago the price was announced as $1,500. Today the price is still $1,500. How many tech products stay the same price for two years? Not many. The pricing is now at the point where it seems just wrong. The team even admits it’s artificially high to ensure “only people who really want one get one.” That creates weird distortions in belief about the product too.

5. When people got theirs a year ago we expected a ton of REAL updates to both UI and functionality. The updates we’ve gotten just haven’t met expectations. Compare my drone, which lets me take a photo, see it on my iPhone, AND post it to Facebook and Instagram WHILE IT IS FLYING to Glass. I still can’t post photos to Facebook or Instagram without plugging the Glass in and putting them elsewhere (er, Google+) first. 

6. We expected new designs by now and updated electronics. I’m holding out hope that we’ll see a much better design (battery life sucks, it cuts my ears, it is starting to look quite dated, video is poorly compressed, etc etc) by now.

When I say this was launched poorly Google set way too many expectations on this product and it has failed to meet them. It should have launched much quieter and set expectations that it was only for vertical markets. Then as those showed up, they could have expanded expectations. If Google had done that then the early adopters could have said “hey, these are designed for use in very specific places, like surgery rooms.” That would have kept people from freaking out.

The other thing that sucks is that many of the explorer program members I’ve talked with are tired of being asked to demonstrate them. Google is getting US to pay to test, provide PR, AND demonstrate them to the public. THAT is NOT empathetic at all and is actually quite arrogant on Google’s behalf (a company that makes billions of dollars every year).

It’s not shocking to me that most Google employees I know that have them aren’t wearing them around anymore and that many in the community are grumbling behind the scenes (most won’t write about their concerns because they need to have good relationships with Google).

Give it a try. Build with Chrome.

Europe 24 on Vimeo.

Really nice water demo.

Turns out, all of you who were scared about your fingers being stolen along with your new iPhone can rest assured. Severed fingers won’t work.

No, A Severed Finger Will Not Be Able to Access a Stolen iPhone 5S.

I never quite understood that concern anyway. Thieves probably don’t want your phone for their own use, and they probably don’t want your contact list either. Your credit cards are hopefully not cached, though your account on Newegg could be set to remember your login. But if they really wanted that, then a background trojan passively watching your text entries would be a better bet IMO, meaning they’d want you to keep the phone.

What phone thieves most likely want to do is sell your phone for money, as replacement parts if necessary. And what kind of goofy black market would sell a brand “new” iPhone with some bloody ‘access dongle’ and a nine fingered discount? More likely, thieves would already have a way to reset your phone to factory new so they could wipe it clean and get top dollar.

What about the concern with the government getting your fingerprints? Apple says it doesn’t send or store the actual fingerprint image, but rather just a one-way hash of that data. Good. That only means the government could use your phone like they can today: to record where you go, what you buy, and even potentially what you say in its presence. In this case, they’d at best only have added confidence that it was really you dragging your phone to every strip club in Vegas vs. some other schmuck who “borrowed” it.

The only real concern I have is that of digitally forged fingerprint keys, though I’m sure someone will quickly find a way to spoof you physically, given a latex mold of your finger and some other electronics (that’s probably too much work to be practical).

The key is that the more we rely on a single point of access to validate ourselves, the more someone will try to spoof, copy, or bypass that method. Nothing in cryptography is foolproof, except maybe the old ‘one-time pad’ or its modern quantum equivalents (and even those have circumstantial flaws). If your bank accepts an Apple certificate saying you are who you say you are, at least according to its sensors, it’s that much more tempting for someone to try to forge that certificate. Two or more factor authentication is still the right answer here, but yet a consistently more painful one.

On the other hand, the value prop for the fingerprint sensor will likely win out with Apple’s customers. “You mean I never need to remember my password again? I just need to touch my phone for access to twitbooklinkpin+? Sold!”  [this is probably Apple’s main motivation — becoming the trusted gateway to your data…]

The core question ultimately is not whether the fingerprint method is truly safe or not. It’s kind of like worrying about driving on the new Bay Bridge span, given its too-fragile steel rods. The right question is whether this fingerprint method is safer than the the present method for the vast majority of its users.

Since your mom is using the name of her beloved cat as the password on her main banking site, and since she has probably already clicked that phishing link on Facebook to give said fluffy56 to some Eastern European scammer, I’d say it probably is.

With the popularity of the fictional show “Breaking Bad”, I’ve seen one too many posts about how Walter White would make a great founder or CEO. Anyone who thinks that belongs in a TV show. I don’t mean starring in — I mean living in…

Spoilers ahead

Here’s the theory, if you can call it that. WW went from mild high school teacher with terminal cancer to a successful criminal mastermind. He dealt with every obstacle, built a lucrative business, engineered a very popular product, built a brand, took out his competition and can now “retire.”

Bullshit.

Ok. Let’s leave aside the morality and legality of making and selling methamphetamine, which would otherwise end our fantasy right there. Let’s start though with intentionally engineering a product that literally kills your customers.

Smokes, guns, and oil are the most notable examples of products in this category (oil is certainly less direct), and they all require massive lobbying of and cooperation from authorities, as opposed to secrecy and evasion. Otherwise, though, meth dealing might be roughly on par. WW may even be ahead in terms of innovation…

However, the meth cooking business, no matter how pure your product, doesn’t scale. Gus had done a much better job engineering distribution and dealing with authorities, and even he had to invoke a near miracle to survive his “coopetition” in the form of a brutal Cartel (if only temporarily). To succeed, WW would have needed to become a politician, legalize drugs, and then sell meth at every 7/11 (which might not be that much of a stretch, except for the legalization part). And there’s still the end result of killing your customers in short order.

Some say WW did a great job learning from his mistakes. Again, bullshit. He had his wealthy co-founders offering to pay for his medical bills or pay him to simply hang around. His pride took over. He saw the pain he was causing to his wife, to Jesse and others, and he continued to bully, lie and manipulate and always make it worse. He actually caused most of the horrible situations he had to get himself out of. And the only lesson he really learned from all that is to kill everyone sooner — “no more half measures,” as Mike taught him. Poor Mike.

At the bottom of it all, WW is a psychopath. Psychopaths do not make great CEOs. They are not more rational and therefore better at making hard decisions. They simply have less empathy. They see other people as objects to be used. They will tend to make decisions that are good for them, not the company, because the company exists for them. They will take out all perceived threats, cause mistrust in everyone else, and drive people away.

High functioning psychopaths, like Francis Underwood (and wife) in “House of Cards” can do much better in life than Walt, but still often have many behaviors that undermine themselves in the long run. Watch the British version (with the magnificent Sir Ian Richardson) if you want to skip ahead.

Of course, the beauty of Breaking Bad is exactly in how WW causes his own misery and overcomes each obstacle. Great fiction requires conflict, obstacles, and suffering (just ask George R.R. Martin). But let’s not take these lessons into our workplace.

Real life is dramatic enough.

File this under ‘no shit sherlock’

Google admits its famous job interview questions were a ‘complete waste of time’ | Death and Taxes.

When I decided to finally leave Microsoft last year, I interviewed at both Google and Amazon. I like both companies, but the interviews were worlds apart. Google mainly asked me two kinds of questions: 1. if we hired you and you could start up any new project, what would it be? 2. Why do traffic cones have holes on top?(*)

Both questions are complete wastes of time, unless I was being given a blank check to do anything I wanted, perhaps involving traffic cones. The first kind of question also has an appearance of “fishing for ideas,” esp. if they don’t hire you, that is best to avoid.

Amazon, on the other hand, used behavioral interviews very consistently. “Tell me about an actual situation where X happened, what did you do, what was the result?” Amazon made it clear up front that even when you made mistakes, you hopefully learned from them. So what were those mistakes and what did you learn? (btw, this is reflected in at least one of their leadership principles: “vocally self critical” — none of this “my main flaw is I work too hard” bullshit.)

The difference in the quality of the interviews was night and day. One Amazon interviewer even asked me for honest feedback on how the interview was being conducted, right in the interview (my only nit: Amazon interviewers often take copious notes on their laptops, making them appear less engaged. But I later learned why the notes are so vital to their process).

So when we’re interviewing people at Syntertainment, we obviously use the behavioral variety of questions. We’ve done a few technical interviews as well, and there the best measure is not coding at a whiteboard (who ever does this in real life?). Rather, we ask to take an hour (or two, if needed) to write a program on an actual computer that does X, Y and Z and then let’s talk about the choices you made. It’s even okay to use Google, as long as you don’t copy code.

Turns out all those Googlers who know all about the history of traffic cones are still very good at building search engines. Good on them.

_________

(*) The Director who asked that “traffic cone” question was apparently looking for the answer “because that’s where you put the lights.” Huh? I admitted that while I’d seen plenty of orange barrels and T-shaped thingys with blinking lights on them, I’d never seen an actual cone with a light on top. In fact, my answer was that the hole on top was likely an original engineering side-effect, rather than a design feature. I figured that prior to injection molding, it was just easier to roll some material into a cone shape, resulting in a natural hole on top (unless you try really hard to form a point). But having a hole proved great for both air flow (when you try to separate a stack of these) and as a finger hole to lift the cone. That’s often how things evolve, from simple ideas to more refined ones. On the other hand, nowadays, the holes are actually standardized for a plastic attachment called a “boss” which is useful for wrapping police tape, etc… So there’s some truth to the “standard attachments” theory. Mostly, I figure, it’s rare to observe lights on cones, because cones are generally short and are meant to collapse when you drive over them. Putting rigid and breakable objects on top tends to defeat the purpose and are better reserved for more rigid barrels or poles. But what do I know?

Contact Lens Computer: Like Google Glass, without the Glasses | MIT Technology Review.

This is a great step forward.