WHEN I THINK of Google Glass, it makes me think of some of the greatest stories ever told – like the Emperor’s New Clothes and Icarus who flew too close to the sun – and some of my favourite tech-based tragicomedies of recent decades, like the Sinclair C5 and the Segway.

It also reminds me of the time I met the guy who was heading up the communications for Google Glass, at his house in San Francisco.

I was in town to give a talk at Google’s headquarters, the Googleplex. Whenever I tell people that – and I’m not backward about mentioning it, as you can tell – their eyes sparkle a little, and they ask, expectantly, “What’s it like?”

It says a lot about Google that people get excited about their offices. Always seems a shame to let them down. But once you look past the free coffee, smoothies and food, the volleyball court, the pool tables and the ping-pong tables, it’s really a bunch of squat, grey, boxy buildings in an out-of-town business centre. It’s just an another place of work. And one where most people are IT nerds. I’ve never been to an office where so many people wear the company’s free t-shirts.

The day before the talk was Superbowl Sunday, and I got invited to this guy Chris’s house. It was, as they say out there, awesome. Four floors of big TVs and beer and corn chips and Silicon Valley thirty- and forty-somethings getting excited about the game. They were all Googlers or ex-Googlers – headhunted by Facebook or Pinterest, or working at a start-up. I got talking with a French guy who told me he hadn’t worked for six months. Ever the Englishman, I expressed sympathy. And then he told me it was part of the contract when he sold his tech business, how many millions he’d sold it up for, and, what his next plan was for world domination.

Silicon Valley is like that, for these people at least. People all round the world use the services they make here. And these services are changing the lives of billions for the better, and they’re making a lot of people very rich. It’s a heady mix, and it’s catching. Even on the plane back to Blighty, that sense of possibility stayed with me: maybe I could have an idea and start it up and make the world a better place and make a valley load of money.

So what happened with Google Glass, and why does it remind me of all those great stories? It’s the Emperor’s New Clothes because it never really existed in the way they said it did. It’s Icarus because we love to watch a hero fall. It’s the Sinclair C5 and the Segway because their inventors told us these things were going to change the world.

As a journalist, I’ve heard a lot of hyperbole. Every press release and product launch promises the earth. Most deliver mud. I once saw Audi launch a car with rock music, dry ice, a revolving stage, and the Asian girl from Ally McBeal. A man told us that what we were looking at was an entirely new car. But, er, actually, mate, it wasn’t. Two seats at the front, two at the back, a steering wheel, and four wheels – this looked just like almost every car I’d ever seen.

The most important tool a journalist should use is a bullshit detector: what are they trying to sell me? Is it true? Do I believe it? Sometimes, that goes missing, especially when people follow a cognitive bias called the halo effect: when someone’s good at one thing, we think they’ll be good at other things too. Looks like that’s what happened with Google Glass.

Since Google can make sense of the incomprehensibly large web, and since we all feel so familiar with the brand, and since we’re also impressed by their exceptionally deep pockets (Google has more than $60 billion in the bank), lots of usually smart people thought they could do this too.

The marketing team behind Google Glass was more than happy to let them think that – but forgot to listen to the team who were actually making the glasses, and who couldn’t keep up with the soaring expectations. It would be a bit like Wright brothers having a team of marketers, and those marketers claiming they could fly people from Los Angeles to New York – before the brothers had made a successful flight. And so Google Glass flew into public consciousness, and then, like a not-yet-ready spacecraft, crashed and exploded very publicly.

Add to all that a whiff of infighting and love interest – the Google founder behind the project, Sergey Brin, fell in love with one of Google Glass’s marketers and left his wife – and you have a soap-opera storyline that’s easy to scoff at, and commentators enjoying their moment of Schadenfreude on the sidelines.

But then, as Theodore Roosevelt once said, it’s not the critic who counts, it’s the person who gets dusty and dirty and knocked down, but who gets back up and tries all over again.

There’s nothing wrong, in other words, with failure. As the economist Joseph Schumpeter observed, it’s an inherent, positive, and very exciting part of capitalism. To have the creation, you need the destruction. To get the good stuff, you need the failures.

And if you’re reading this and thinking “but the entire project was ridiculous from the start”, consider something the Financial Times’s tech expert Jonathan Margolis once said to me: “If you’re looking for tomorrow’s big ‘un, it’s probably the stuff that sounds unremarkable, ostentatious or mad right now.”

Mobile phones looked ridiculous in 1989. Not so embarrassed by yours now though, are you? And driverless cars sounded crazy when I first started talking about them back in 2007. But now, we’re testing them on British roads, and the government is backing the idea.

So don’t sit on the sidelines laughing at Google Glass. Instead, cut those brave and foolish people some slack. Because what they – and everyone else inventing new things – are doing is part of the greatest human story of all time: tinkering, manipulating and changing the world around us to make life better and more fun.

ENDS

James Wallman is a trend forecaster and the author of the recently published book on the decline of materialism and the growth of the experience economy, Stuffocation: Living More With Less (Penguin)