So word is going around that Google is finally pulling the plug on Glass, or close enough to pulling the plug that everyone's writing it up like a eulogy. Reports say they're about to stop selling the Explorer Edition any day now, the whole "be one of the cool weirdos who paid $1,500 to wear a computer on your face in public" program is winding down, and Glass is getting shuffled out of the X lab into its own division under Ivy Ross, with Tony Fadell (yes, the Nest guy, freshly absorbed into Google) apparently offering pointers. Official line is this isn't a cancellation, it's a "graduation." Sure.
I never bought one. Never even seriously considered it, honestly, and I say that as someone who will absolutely throw money at dumb tech I don't need — I own a smart mug warmer that I use maybe four times a year. But Glass always struck me as solving a problem nobody had while creating several new problems nobody wanted. You looked unapproachable wearing it. You looked like you might be recording someone, because you might be recording someone. A friend of mine in Portland had a pair through some work connection and wore it to a coffee shop once and got asked to leave, not kicked out exactly, just quietly encouraged to take it off or go elsewhere. That's not a hardware failure. That's a social failure, and no amount of software updates fixes a social failure.
Which is kind of the story of the last two years for Glass, isn't it. The tech itself was never really the problem: Explorer Edition units did what they said on the tin, tiny display, bone conduction audio, camera, voice commands, the works. The problem was that Google shipped a $1,500 developer kit straight into consumer culture and let the internet decide what it meant, and the internet decided "glasshole" was funnier and stickier than anything Google's messaging came up with. You can't out-marketing a good insult. I don't think that's fair to the engineers who worked on it, but fair doesn't really enter into it once a word like that catches on.
I keep thinking about this in the context of CES last week too. Vegas was absolutely drowning in wearables this year — smart rings, smart belts, a "smart" hairbrush from Withings that tells you when you're brushing too hard, which, fine, I guess, if that's a problem you have. Everybody's chasing the same idea Glass was chasing, just moved down to your wrist or your finger instead of your face, and mostly with a lot less ambition and a lot less backlash. Turns out people are fine wearing a computer as long as it doesn't look like you're wearing a computer. Nobody's writing thinkpieces about Fitbit ruining coffee shop etiquette.
None of this means Glass is actually dead, to be clear, and the coverage acting like this is some kind of failure obituary is overselling it a bit. Google's framing it as a shift from experiment to product, which, if you squint, is basically what happened with a lot of their stuff: Gmail spent years in beta before anyone took it fully seriously. Enterprise use cases for Glass (warehouses, surgeons, factory floors, places where hands-free heads-up info actually solves a real problem instead of a vanity one) were always the more interesting story anyway, and that part isn't going anywhere as far as I can tell.
I'm mostly just tired of "smart" being the prefix on everything at the moment. Smart thermostat, fine, I get it, that one's actually good. Smart hairbrush is where I get off the train. And I say that fully expecting to eat these words in three years when I'm wearing something on my face that does all the stuff Glass tried to do, except it'll be from Apple and it'll cost twice as much and somehow I'll have convinced myself it's different this time.
Anyway. RIP to the weird little green LED, I guess. Somebody somewhere is still wearing theirs unironically and honestly, good for them.