The video isn't a negative signal for its daydreaming. It's a negative signal given the history of companies that have put out such videos and the history of the prices they've paid in the marketplace for delivering products that fail to live up to them.
Our musing here is fine; healthy even. It's a remarkably useful form of downtime, compared to others. But if my employer wrapped up my daydreams and marketed them as "our next product", that would be a different thing entirely.
Hm, I guess if we consider it to be marketing in the sense that they want to present themselves as a visionary company making life better for everyone, we could ask why they suddenly think they need such marketing. It could mean their reputation has been heading downwards lately, in which case such videos could be a symptom of problems of the company.
That "analysis" is flawed because I made it with hindsight, having seen a lot of complaints about Google on HN lately. So I am not unbiased (and I don't even know if the HN attitude towards Google is correlated with the common attitude towards Google).
What are examples of companies that failed once they started making such videos? Just because Steve Jobs didn't make such videos doesn't imply that nobody should.
If the issue were just what we thought there would be no problem. The real issue is the impression created in the majority of people (which might include us, of course). If the video creates high anticipations that are not met then Glass might be much less popular than it would otherwise have been.
I still think speculating about it is a little silly, though. We know next to nothing about the technology, next to nothing about which engineers are working on the technology, and next to nothing about Google's intentions. The only things we do know are that Glass is associated with Google X (which seems to be dedicated to long-term projects - space elevators, anyone?) and that Google intends to release something soon. That is very sparse data.
Our musing here is fine; healthy even. It's a remarkably useful form of downtime, compared to others. But if my employer wrapped up my daydreams and marketed them as "our next product", that would be a different thing entirely.