I’ve spent a lot of time making fun of Google Glass, and the silly, entitled culture and equally entitled protests that have sprung up around said toy. It has been, as a product, little more than an indicator that somebody finds the Internet more interesting than talking to you. Shockingly, that hasn’t made Glass a hit product, something Google has finally admitted.
Well, sort of. You have to know a bit about the inner workings of Google to understand what’s going on in this blog post. But essentially, Glass is going off the market next Monday and being put under the purview of the recently acquired Nest Labs. Google pitches this as “graduating,” but it’s an odd form of “graduation” when a product that’s technically never left beta stops being sold.
This doesn’t mean Glass is entirely dead. Nest Labs is basically Google’s industrial technology arm, and, from the beginning, the appeal of Glass to everyone from first responders to waiters has been obvious. But the $1500 cost made it little more than a toy for rich Bay Area hipsters. If Google can drive down the price, or create tools that make $1500 a pop worth paying, you’ll probably start seeing Glass as a standard uniform in many places in the next few years. You just won’t see it anywhere else.