Jack Dorsey Talks Square and Wearable Devices
Many technology enthusiasts have had their eye on Glass, Google's monocle that looks like something out of Star Trek. But the Internet-connected eyewear doesn't really pique the interest of Jack Dorsey, chief executive of the mobile payment system Square and a co-founder of Twitter.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google's eyewear has been building toward this moment since 9to5Google's December 2011 leak of the Google X heads-up display, and by late April 2013 the Explorer-era drumbeat is loud: Google has published the GPL kernel source for Glass, and Engadget's Tim Stevens is wearing one full-time for review. Enthusiast attention, in other words, is at a peak.
Jack Dorsey's dismissal cuts against that current from an unusual position: he runs two companies on opposite sides of the question. Square is the kind of transaction layer a wearable could carry, while TechCrunch's syndicated pickup reports Twitter is already testing an official Google Glass app in the wild — so the CEO's stated indifference sits awkwardly next to his own company's apparent experiments.
First-order effects
- Dorsey is signaling that Square's roadmap stays anchored to phones and point-of-sale rather than chasing the eyewear form factor, keeping the payments company out of the Glass developer gold rush.
- Twitter's reported in-the-wild Glass app testing puts the company publicly at odds with its co-founder's framing, forcing it to justify developer resources on a device its own leadership calls uninteresting.
Second-order effects
- Other platform owners watching Dorsey get a data point that even sympathetic Silicon Valley founders see no near-term utility in Glass, which pressures Google to prove demand beyond enthusiasts like Engadget's reviewer.
- Payment and social rivals deciding whether to build native wearable apps now have cover to wait — if Square and Twitter treat Glass as peripheral, the cost of skipping the first hardware wave drops.
Third-order effects
- If influential platform chiefs keep ranking wearables below their core products, the category's fate will be decided less by hardware novelty than by whether utility-first apps — payments, messaging, notifications — ever migrate off the smartphone.
- A pattern of platform leaders hedging on new form factors would push Google toward courting independent developers harder, making early access programs and open sourcing (like the Glass kernel release) the levers that matter.
The trend: The wearable market's trajectory is being set as much by which platforms choose to build for new form factors as by the hardware itself, with Glass as the first test case.