By its very nature that question constrains the possibilities of Glass by attempting to label it. Falling into that trap leads to less insight, not more.
By way of analogy, one could say a car was a faster horse-and-buggy, but an airplane was something new & different. A telegram was a faster form of mail, but a telephone was new & different.
A good example of the lack of insight that kind of question leads to is the apocryphal quote[1] by IBM's CEO Thomas J. Watson: I think there is a world market for maybe five computers. Even if he didn't say it, the point was that those who shared that view had labelled computers as "massive calculating machines". That was true, but missed the bigger picture.
"By its very nature that question constrains the possibilities of Glass by attempting to label it. Falling into that trap leads to less insight, not more."
Haha, that's a nice piece of rhetorical sophistry.
It is good to keep an open mind on the different possibilities. However, the art of strategic thinking requires you to make decisions in the face of uncertainty. Until you can fill in that blank, you can't make decisions right now and place your bets.
That is the point of this exercise. There is a key insight in the article, and it can be applied to something like the Google Glasses. If you cannot discern it, you're more likely to be running off of unexamined emotions instead of a vision of what's to come.
By way of analogy, one could say a car was a faster horse-and-buggy, but an airplane was something new & different. A telegram was a faster form of mail, but a telephone was new & different.
A good example of the lack of insight that kind of question leads to is the apocryphal quote[1] by IBM's CEO Thomas J. Watson: I think there is a world market for maybe five computers. Even if he didn't say it, the point was that those who shared that view had labelled computers as "massive calculating machines". That was true, but missed the bigger picture.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Watson#Famous_misquot...