  In this note, we critically discuss the issue of the possible finiteness of
the turbulence lifetime in subcritical transition to turbulence in shear flows,
which attracted a lot of interest recently. We briefly review recent
experimental and numerical results, as well as theoretical proposals, and
compare the difficulties arising in assessing this issue in subcritical shear
flow with that encountered in the study of the glass transition. In order to go
beyond the purely methodological similarities, we further elaborate on this
analogy and propose a qualitative mapping between these two apparently
unrelated situations, which could possibly foster new directions of research in
subcritical shear flows.
