Ok. Not every product is a winner for every company, and Google Glass is in the non-winning category, according to MIT.
http://goo.gl/vV0vYc
But there is a deeper issue in play here than Glass itself; a deeper problem in the system that is pandemic across the Valley: deliver early- others will finish it.
Deliver early is part of that larger, conceited, construct which idolizes failure as a totem and guide for arriving at the best product- a realtime Darwinism.
Delivering functionality incrementally to the user is now acceptable to developers (I doubt clients feel the same way.) but I hope this doesn't migrate into the car buying experience, though. "We're still working on that heater functionality, ma'am."
Failing early is now accepted as a development method because of its Darwinist weeding out of the bad things from the good. Of course, in the olden days engineers provided this same winnowing in a more erudite and predictable way.
Of course, now we can hoist up half-baked ideas like Glass and Google Apps for Business and then reward developers with a kegger.
This approach seems to work well in the marginally technical reaches of software development, but I wouldn't want to ride on a space vehicle created this way.
How did we arrive here? I squarely place the blame onAgile methodologies and practices.
Early attempts to deliver software solutions by mimicking conventional industrial methods (waterfall, Boehm, etc) failed, so we simply discounted the existing practices and created the dark-matter universe of stripped down development- XP, RUP, etc- which finally landed back to earth as Agile.
We couldn't figure out a way to deliver against classical requirements, so we invented the user story. We could never deliver incrementally against a calendar, so we invented sprints and a ship something, dammit mentality.
What we really created was an environment for throwing our spaghetti on the wall to see what stuck. Hooray! Kegger!
No engineering. No examination. No peer review. Just crowd surfing software.
Applying this Agile mindset to product development, such as Glass, can produce unexpected results. Sometimes the product is a total failure, and sometimes the product provides some of the capability we intended.
For incomplete products we apply the final conceit oflet-George-do-it and proudly release an SDK with great fanfare then blame the third parties for failing to rise to the occasion.
I guess in a world limited to 140 character thought bites, this approach to product development should not come as a surprise. Kegger!!
#googleglass #agiledevelopment #waterfall #boehm #softwaredevelopment #failearly #disruptive #conceit
