In 2013, Google released a product that promised to revolutionise personal technology: a pair of smart glasses with a built-in camera, voice commands, and augmented reality display. Google Glass had everything going for it – a $1,500 price tag that signalled premium innovation, celebrity endorsements, and breathless media coverage. Two years later, Google quietly discontinued production. The world wasn’t ready to normalise being constantly recorded by strangers’ eyewear.
In 2024, Meta released nearly identical technology. Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses feature the same core capabilities – recording, voice commands, integrated display. By mid-2025, they’d sold over two million units. Sales revenue tripled year-over-year. The smart glasses market grew 210% in 2024, driven almost entirely by Ray-Ban Meta’s success.
Same technology. Same privacy implications. Eleven years apart. One spectacular failure, one commercial triumph. The difference wasn’t product quality or marketing budget. It was timing.
Clayton Christensen, the late Harvard professor who coined “disruptive innovation,” estimated that 95% of new products fail. But here’s the uncomfortable truth most post-mortems miss: many of those failures weren’t bad products. They were good products launched at the wrong moment – too early for a market that couldn’t yet comprehend them, or too late into a window that had already closed.
Weather Window Parallel
Pilots understand something most business strategists don’t: weather windows. A perfect aircraft with a skilled pilot still crashes if it takes off into conditions the flight can’t survive. The window opens, the window closes, and no amount of engineering excellence changes atmospheric reality.
Product launches work the same way. The market is the weather. Your product is the aircraft. And the launch window – that narrow period when cultural readiness, regulatory environment, economic conditions, and competitive landscape align – determines whether you soar or spiral.
Google Glass crashed into antagonistic timing: privacy concerns were peaking in 2013, wearable technology was unfamiliar and threatening, and the cultural moment actively rejected what they were selling. People who wore them in public were labelled “Glassholes.” Bars and restaurants banned them. The product worked perfectly. The weather was impossible.
By 2024, that weather had changed. A decade of smartphone ubiquity had normalised constant documentation. Social media had fundamentally shifted privacy expectations. AirPods had made face-adjacent technology mundane. Meta didn’t build better glasses – they launched into better conditions.
Why Timing Fails
Timing failures are psychologically invisible to the teams that make them. This isn’t incompetence – it’s cognitive architecture working against us.
The curse of knowledge. Product teams spend months or years immersed in their innovation. They understand its value intuitively. They forget that the market hasn’t taken that journey with them. What feels obviously useful to the team feels confusing or threatening to everyone else. Google’s engineers saw Glass as a natural evolution; consumers saw an invasion.
Sunk cost escalation. After significant investment, the pressure to launch becomes about recovering costs rather than reading market signals. Research from the Journal of Product Innovation Management confirms that development momentum often overrides market assessment. The launch date becomes an internal deadline rather than a strategic calculation.
Availability bias. Teams remember successful launches more than failed ones. They see competitors rushing to market and feel urgency to match. Meta’s Threads launched in July 2023 specifically to capitalise on X’s turmoil – a classic timing pressure decision. The result? 100 million sign-ups in five days, followed by 80% user abandonment within two weeks. The opportunity felt too good to miss, so they launched with an incomplete product.
3 Timing Scenarios That Determine Your Fate
Research published in the Journal of Marketing by Robinson and Veresiu identifies three distinct timing situations. Understanding which one you’re facing changes everything about your launch strategy.
Synergistic timing is the ideal: both your organisation and your market are ready. Ray-Ban Meta hit this – Meta had the technology refined, and consumers had spent a decade getting comfortable with wearables. When both sides are prepared, execution becomes the differentiator.
Inflexible timing means your product is ready but your market isn’t. This is where most B2B launches fail. Decision-makers need extensive preparation before accepting innovation – proof it won’t disrupt their carefully constructed processes, evidence it’s been validated elsewhere, assurance the risk is manageable. Pushing into inflexible timing without market preparation is like trying to sell snow shovels in July. The product makes sense; the moment doesn’t.
Antagonistic timing is launch suicide: low market readiness combined with poor internal coordination. Google Glass hit this perfectly. Privacy concerns were peaking, wearable tech was unfamiliar, and Google’s own teams weren’t aligned on positioning. The Segway faced similar conditions – promised to be “to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy,” but launched into a world with no infrastructure, hostile regulations, and no clear use case. Both products worked. Both were fundamentally wrong for their moment.
4 Product Launch Timing Indicators to Audit First
Before setting a launch date, assess these four dimensions. Get them wrong, and no amount of marketing spend recovers the mistake.
Cultural-cognitive readiness. Can your target market conceptually understand what you’re offering? The Segway failed partly because people couldn’t mentally categorise it – too fast for sidewalks, too slow for roads, too expensive for novelty, not essential enough for investment. In psychological terms, products without clear mental models face what researchers call “category confusion” – the brain literally doesn’t know where to file the information.
Regulatory readiness. Are the legal and institutional structures in place? The Segway was banned from sidewalks and roads in many cities because it didn’t fit existing transportation categories. The product worked perfectly; the regulatory environment wasn’t ready for the category to exist. In 2001, protected bike lanes were rare. By 2017, when Bird and Lime launched electric scooters, infrastructure had evolved. Same concept, different regulatory weather.
Economic readiness. Can your target afford it at the price point needed for profitability? Microsoft’s Zune launched in 2006 against an iPod that had already devoured the market. Technical merit was irrelevant – the timing window had closed behind Apple’s first-mover advantage. Economic readiness isn’t just affordability; it’s whether the value proposition makes sense against established alternatives.
Competitive readiness. Is there space in the current landscape? Research by Golder and Tellis across 500 brands found that true market pioneers had a 47% failure rate and averaged only 10% market share. “Early leaders” – firms that entered after pioneers but during growth phases – had failure rates around 8% and averaged 28% market share. Being first isn’t an advantage if you’re first into conditions that can’t support you.
Assessment Most Companies Skip
Here’s a diagnostic most businesses never conduct: surveying stakeholders about their readiness before announcing launch dates. Research from the American Marketing Association suggests asking prospects directly:
Do you actively watch for new technology releases in this category? How do prospective innovations in this space make you feel – excited, worried, sceptical? What would need to change for you to feel ready to adopt this?
A B2B medical device company used this framework before launching AI diagnostic tools. Their survey revealed doctors weren’t worried about AI accuracy – they were terrified of liability. That single insight shifted their entire go-to-market strategy from performance metrics to legal protection and professional indemnity. They delayed launch by six months to allow regulatory clarity. When they finally launched, adoption rates exceeded projections by 340%.
The delay wasn’t weakness. It was intelligence.
When Competitors’ Timing Beats Your Product
Zero100 analysis of 2024 earnings calls found that 46% of brands discussed product innovation, but few addressed timing strategy. Nike mentioned innovation ahead of the Paris Olympics – strategic timing aligned with global attention on athletic performance. Estée Lauder discussed accelerating speed-to-market – recognising that timing windows close faster than product development cycles.
The companies winning aren’t necessarily building better products. They’re launching at moments when market readiness, competitive landscape, and stakeholder psychology align. Sometimes that means delaying a ready product. Sometimes it means launching imperfect versions to establish category position before the window closes. Meta’s recovery with Threads – clawing back to 350 million users by 2025 – only worked because they had resources to survive the initial timing miscalculation. Most companies don’t get that second chance.
The expensive mistake is treating your launch date as the endpoint of product development rather than the result of market readiness calculation.
Wondering if your market is ready for what you’re building? A Go-To-Market Strategy consultation can audit your timing across cultural, regulatory, economic, and competitive readiness before you commit budget to a launch that might be six months too early – or six months too late.
Sometimes the hardest part of marketing isn’t building awareness – it’s recognising when the market is ready to listen. Book a consultation to stop guessing about timing and start measuring readiness.
