A year ago, Snapchat was so excited about its first hardware product that it renamed itself Snap Inc. With the launch of Spectacles, CEO Evan Spiegel decided, the company would no longer be defined solely by the Snapchat app. It was not a social media company, he told the Wall Street Journal, but a camera company. Internet-connected photography, he philosophized, necessitated a “a reinvention of the camera.”
Yeah, not so much. Citing “two people close to the company,” the Information reported Monday that Snap had “badly overestimated demand” and now has “hundreds of thousands of unsold units sitting in warehouses, either fully assembled or in parts.” This comes just weeks after Spiegel said at a Vanity Fair summit that Spectacles sales had “exceeded our expectations,” topping 150,000. If the Information’s reporting is accurate, then Spiegel’s claim, well … isn’t. (A Snap spokesperson declined my request for comment.)
Regardless of who’s telling the truth, it already seemed clear from Snap’s first two earnings reports that Spectacles were fizzling. As Business Insider pointed out in August, the company reported just $5.4 million in “other” revenue in its second quarter, down from $8.3 million in its first quarter. Spectacles are presumed to make up the bulk of revenue in this category. It’s one thing to only sell 150,000 of a product in its first year, as long as sales are growing. If they’re already tailing off, that suggests the product might be doomed.
It probably shouldn’t shock anyone that Spectacles haven’t taken off. Like Google Glass before them, they look goofy—a handicap that was not overcome by Snap’s effort to make them look intentionally goofy, rather than accidentally so. Anyway, there was no more reason to believe that normal people wanted cameras on their faces in 2016 than there had been in 2013, when Google launched its ill-fated augmented-reality device.
Skim Twitter today and you might get the impression that pretty much everyone in the tech industry saw this coming from a mile away. Yet if you had read it a year ago, when Spectacles launched, you would have gotten a very different picture. Spiegel had earned a reputation for successfully defying conventional wisdom, and a lot of influential people bought into the hype that he was about to do it again.
Let’s put on our hindsight goggles and go for a stroll, shall we?
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"there could be far-reaching implications if @Snapchat can seize the means of image production" http://www.wsj.com/articles/snapchat-releases-first-hardware-product-spectacles-1474682719 … Snapchat Spectacles:
Wish you a successful life!
Tejas Parab
(nomadict_soul)