In a town hall meeting at Intuit‘s (INTU) headquarters on Friday, company chairman and long time Apple (AAPL) board member Bill Campbell aired his views on a number of topics, including that of incorporating wearable technology to devices he referred to as “intimate.” Noting that he was not at liberty to discuss specifics of Apple’s pipeline, Campbell, who is viewed by many in the tech world as a legendary business adviser to a generation of Silicon Valley innovators, including the founders of Google (GOOG) and Twitter, pointed to Google Glass as one such “intimate” device.
[via BW] “It’s a phenomenal breakthrough,” he said. “When you start to think about glasses or watches, they become as intimate as the cell phone was.”
Apple is rumored to be working on a smartwatch, dubbed the ‘iWatch’, just like the sort of “intimate” device that Campbell is referring to. Rumors point to a device that is made of a type of glass that’s incredibly thin and bends with the movement of the human wrist and that can perform many of the tasks currently dominated by the iPhone and iPad.
Campbell also praised iPod godfather Tony Fadell, the CEO of Nest Labs that makes the advanced internet-connected Nest Learning Thermostat, as well saying technology product managers “should not just be barking down commands about what features a new product should and shouldn’t have. They should work in close concert with the engineers and act more or less as editors, guiding features along the way.”
He pointed to Steve Jobs and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey specifically as two of the top such editors of their day.
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