I'm assuming this is just while the product is in testing? They can't really expect to get much software made for the product when it's released if developers have no obvious way to make money from it.
In several ways its actually worse than that, you can't release an app showing other user generated content, because a spammer could result in serving up advertisements, which aren't allowed. So no apps involving communication with other people. Even worse you can't make an app capable of displaying any 3rd party internet content because the 3rd party might embed an advertisement.
So you're limited exclusively to content owned/licensed by the app developer. It can't involve social networking or user provided content in any way.
This was my take as well. Surprised it took me so long to scroll down to find someone who agreed. This has limited predictive power of what glass will look like when in prime time.
That's true and there will probably be some cool software built for it but there is a limit to the amount of investment people will put into developing software for it for free. There will be people with great ideas who need VC backing to turn them into products but they won't be able to get it without an obvious way to create revenue.
The problem will be even greater for Google when another company (Apple or Microsoft presumably) comes out with a simliar product which runs incredible new software that just isn't feasible on the Google Glasses due to this policy.
Surely you're joking... you act as if great software only comes from paying people, that's simply not true. Sure, some developers will avoid the platform because they can't make any money "directly" from it; others will be smarter and see there are many ways to make money indirectly via reputation as the guy who did X on glass.
That's not what I'm saying. You can build great software for free. However there are certain things that need money thrown at them, things which require a lot of R&D (e.g. Siri). Unless you have a way to gain financially from the software you won't get the money to put into the R&D and the product won't get built. Basically I'm not saying that great software won't be built for free but that there are taking a risk as there is are a lot of things that can't be built for free.
You implicitly assume that it's better to have a larger count of apps ("much software"). Looking at current app stores, this isn't really true. Not only are most apps terrible or useless, but among the somewhat useful ones, most of them are copies of each other's functionality.
A hundred fart apps and ten todo apps might be 110 apps, but even taken together they aren't any better than just the best todo app.
