Google had its Apple moment. Some think that was its new Goggle Glass project. I think it was WebRTC.
Jon Evans wrote on Tech Crunch over a month ago that Google Glass is Google’s Apple moment:
Google did what Apple has done thrice, with the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Granted, Apple announces products that ship immediately, while Google merely allowed a few thousand I/O attendees to pre-order a beta version that wouldn’t ship until next year; but don’t let the mechanics distract you from the heart of the matter. Google Glass isn’t just a new product, it’s a whole new product category, and it has every chance of being every bit as revolutionary as Apple’s Big Three.
I do believe that Google Glass is interesting, but I don’t see it hitting the market in any substantial way in the next couple of years. For such a product to work well, it requires the artificial intelligence we’d expect from Apple’s Siri service, but don’t really get.
With interaction that requires the context that Google Glass does, with a voice and maybe a bit of gesture interface that it uses, there’s no real way of controlling it in any proper way.
Sure. We will see it productized and played with in the next couple of years. Other companies will announce similar products, but at the end of the day, it will look like Microsoft’s first couple of stabs at tablets. They will be clunky to work with and in the end – they will fail. Until someone will crack the user interface problem there.
In the same Google I/O conference that Google Glass was introduced, they also introduced WebRTC. It made less of a ripple effect, but it is steadily growing and being played with. It will affect the market in 2013 already, with several startups offering new products, as well as large corporations that will start adopting this technology. It will disrupt voice and video communications in new ways that haven’t been done before.
It is going to be an Apple moment, played by Google.