The reputed Google Barge under construction along a pier on Treasure Island. A San Francisco TV station is reporting the structure will house showrooms for selling Google Glass. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
When Apple hired Burberry’s CEO to head its retail operation, it looked like clear sailing ahead. One thing the company probably didn’t expect to see was challenge on the horizon from a giant barge.
Before you groan over our nautical metaphors, you should realize they’re more than metaphors: Google is apparently building a massive floating store for Google Glass on San Francisco Bay.
San Francisco CBS affiliate KPIX reported last night that this Google barge would include “luxury showrooms and a party deck for the tech giant to market Google Glass and other gadgets to invitation-only clients.” Though the station cited only anonymous sources, its story is the most definitive since CNET launched a mini-media frenzy by speculating that Google seemed to be building a floating data center in the shadow of the Bay Bridge.
Apparently, the mysterious structure moored off Treasure Island had started prompting questions around the time the bridge’s new eastern span opened over Labor Day weekend. But the Google connection was slowly and tenuously pieced together, and the company has not commented. It did not respond to inquiries we made as far back as last week.
According to KPIX, the project was led by Google’s secretive research lab, Google X. And the structure really does sound quite ingenious. The station reports that the barge is built from “interchangeable 40-foot shipping containers that can be assembled and disassembled at will, allowing it to be placed on barges, trucks or rail cars and taken anywhere in the world.” But let’s be clear: The same part of Google that’s reportedly worked on self-driving cars, balloon-based internet service, and airborne wind turbines was also apparently creating a floating store. Which of these does not sound like a moonshot?
That said, it was Google X that originally developed Google Glass.
But even if Google’s barge doesn’t have the hard sci-fi seriousness of, say, a space elevator, it still sounds like one giant leap for Google into the retail realm, turf that for years it has almost entirely ceded to Apple. If Google really does plan on taking a serious run at Apple with physical stores, why not start out by making a splash?
Much as the merely incremental improvements in new iPhone models have worried shareholders even as Apple continues to sell them by the tens of millions, the company’s struggle to find stable leadership for its retail division has led to a sense of stagnation, even as its stores continue to thrive. The Apple Store experience still trumps nearly any other brick-and-mortar outlet at the mall. But during the lull while its new head of retail Angela Ahrendts figures out the way forward, Apple is uniquely vulnerable to a competitor who comes along and radically changes the sense of what’s possible.
With a glamorous, modular showroom to sell what could be the most radical advance in wearable communication technology ever, Google may have done just that. Until Apple puts a Genius Bar on the moon, its stores are in serious danger of looking like the past. If its floating store is real, Google looks like the one barging in on the future.
via apple - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNFuWxwWJOff_2PrcSov13Ft18hJ7A&url=http://www.wired.com/business/2013/11/google-barge/
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