Buried under all the Windows 10 noise this week (HoloLens! A talking Cortana! Free upgrades for basically everyone running Windows 7 or 8!) there was a smaller announcement that I don't think got nearly enough attention: Google shut down the Glass Explorer program. Sales stopped this past Monday, the 19th. If you wanted to hand over $1,500 for a pair of internet glasses, that window is closed now.
The bigger part of the story, honestly, is what happens to the team. Glass is getting pulled out from under Google[x] and turned into its own standalone division, reporting to Tony Fadell — the guy who built the iPod, then went off and started Nest, then got bought by Google for $3.2 billion and is now apparently in charge of cleaning up Glass. That's a pretty telling reporting line. You don't hand a project to the Nest guy because it's going great.
I never bought one, for what it's worth. I did try a friend's pair exactly once, at a going-away party in late 2013, and it was about as awkward as everyone said it would be. You had to tilt your head up at this weird angle to see the display, the battery died in what felt like two hours of actual use, and the whole time I wore it I was aware that everyone around me had gone quiet and started talking a little more carefully. Nobody in that kitchen wanted to be recorded, and fair enough — I wouldn't either. The whole "glasshole" thing that got attached to Glass wearers wasn't really about the tech, it was about the fact that you couldn't tell if the thing was on. Bars in San Francisco put up actual signs banning them. That's not a marketing problem you fix with a firmware update.
None of this means wearables are done, and I want to be clear about that because I think there's a temptation to write the eulogy for the whole category right now. Pebble is still selling watches and doing fine. The Apple Watch hasn't even shipped yet (that's coming later this year, supposedly) and I'd bet real money it outsells everything Glass ever moved, just because it looks like a watch and does watch things instead of asking you to strap a camera to your face and call it fashion. Glass tried to skip about three product generations of "people get used to a new form factor" and just landed straight in uncanny-valley territory. $1,500 for the privilege didn't help either: that's not early-adopter pricing, that's "we don't actually want normal people buying this yet" pricing, and I think Google knew that going in.
What's interesting is that Google isn't actually killing Glass, they're just admitting the consumer Explorer framing didn't work. There's still a whole "Glass at Work" push aimed at warehouses, hospitals, factory floors: places where hands-free information display is genuinely useful and nobody cares if you look a little odd doing your job. That part might actually stick around long after most people have forgotten the $1,500 sunglasses ever existed. Enterprise hardware doesn't need to be cool. It just needs to save somebody twenty minutes a shift.
I keep coming back to the pricing, actually, because I think that's the real lesson here and not the "wearables are hard" one everyone's going to write. Google put out a product, called the buyers "Explorers" like it was some kind of honor, and then charged them full retail-plus for the honor of being a beta tester in public. People noticed. Nobody minds paying to be first if the thing basically works. Glass didn't, not for a phone-in-your-pocket-does-this-better price point anyway.
Anyway. RIP to the dorkiest pair of glasses I ever tried on at a party.