Google Glass Signs Deal With Ray Ban's Parent Company

sfcrazy (1542989) writes with news that fancier Google Glasswear is coming soon "Google has signed a deal with The Luxottica Group, the world's largest eyewear company (controlling 80% of the eyewear market). Luxottica owns Ray-Ban, Oakley, Vogue-Eyewear, Persol, Oliver Peoples, Alain Mikli, and Arnette. The deal shows how serious Google is about Glass, contrary to the skepticism raised by high-profiled users like Robert Scoble who spelled doom for the device."

80% of market in terms of what?

[captainpanic]

Many people wear cheap sunglasses - I guess "80% of the eyewear market" is in terms of value, not volume, since 1 Ray-ban costs about as much as 100 cheap sunglasses?

Re:fuck me

[Anonymous Coward]

Docs was at least partly based on Google's acquisition of Upstartle, though Google have added substantially to it since. It isn't that unique though. MS Office Web-apps and others offer much of the same. Gmail was developed internally, but I would argue that the main driver for success was the marketing genius of offering 1 GB storage and large attachments at at time when others had like 2MB which was constant pain-point for users. And the invite-only launch, which not only generated interest and demand, but also helped to keep spam down.

Re:fuck me

[LordThyGod]

The portability, sharing and collaboration of Gdocs is light years ahead of the others. Nobody I know gives a rats ass about "professional" editing.

Yay!

[Maury Markowitz]

So one near monopoly with 80% market share is getting together with another near monopoly with a 90% market share?

What could possibly go wrong?

Re:fuck me

[postbigbang]

The OS is only part of it. I am not a fanboi, but Apple does several things nicely:

-it creates reality distortion fields of billion dollar size
-it has consistent build quality that reflects serious engineering feats, and vendor liaison and supply-chain discipline
-it has remarkable consistency, good and bad, mostly good
-they are very good at supporting their users and are very connected/focused on their users
-they are masters, perhaps wizards at meme control.

The OS is very important, but that's not why they get top dollar for their goods. Their assets don't depreciate as rapidly, and they are fiendishly consistent.