So this past Monday, January 19th, Google quietly stopped selling Glass through the Explorer Program. No keynote, no confetti, just a line added to the Glass site saying if you want one now you'll have to find a friend who already has one to invite you, same as it's always kind of worked, except now there's a real sense that the door is closing rather than opening. Google's folding the team into a new group reporting up through Tony Fadell (the guy who did Nest), and from what I can tell reading between the lines, that's basically Google admitting the "wear this dorky camera on your face and pay $1,500 for the privilege" phase of Glass is over.
I know, I know — this is not the tech story of the week. Everybody and their cousin is writing about Wednesday's Microsoft event, the free Windows 10 upgrade, that HoloLens headset thing where Satya Nadella's team built actual holographic Minecraft on stage. I watched the stream at my desk with a cold coffee and yeah, it looked genuinely cool, the kind of demo that makes you go "okay but will it work like that when I'm not in a controlled room with perfect lighting." I'm sure half the internet is already doing the play-by-play on that one so I'm going to leave it alone today.
But the Glass thing actually got me thinking more, mostly because I remember exactly where I was the first time I tried a pair on. It was at some meetup in a coworking space back in maybe 2013, and a guy named Marcus (not making that up, that was actually his name) had gotten an invite through the #ifihadglass Twitter campaign. He let a bunch of us pass it around for like ninety seconds each. My honest first reaction was that it was way heavier than it looks in photos, and the little prism display sat just slightly wrong on my face no matter how I adjusted it. Also everyone in the room was staring at whoever had it on, which felt like the opposite of what a wearable is supposed to do. You want to disappear into the background, not become the background.
I never bought one myself, mostly because $1,500 for a beta product with a battery life measured in hours was a hard pass on a freelancer budget, but also because the whole "glasshole" backlash was already in full swing by 2014. Bars in San Francisco were literally putting up signs banning it. That's a rough place for a product to end up, socially speaking, when the thing that's supposed to make you look like you're living in the future instead makes you look like you're recording people without asking.
None of this means wearable computing is dead, obviously. I still think a heads-up display makes sense for warehouse workers, surgeons, maybe delivery drivers — anywhere the value is functional and nobody's worried about looking cool doing it. What didn't work was selling it as a $1,500 fashion-and-lifestyle gadget to early adopters who then had to go be the public face of it in line at Starbucks. That's a hard job to hand a consumer product.
What I actually want to know is whether Fadell's team keeps the Explorer aesthetic at all or starts from a totally blank page. Nest stuff tends to look boring in the best way (it just kind of sits there and does its job without demanding attention) and if Glass 2.0 (or whatever it ends up being called, if it ends up being called anything) goes in that direction, that might actually be the right call. Less "future of computing," more "thing that quietly helps you and gets out of the way."
Anyway. I dug my old notebook out last night looking for something else and found a page from that meetup where I'd scribbled "Glass = neat, not yet, too weird in public" underneath a coffee ring stain. Three-ish years later and I think that's basically still my take, just with a firmer verdict attached. It had a good run as an experiment. I don't think many people are going to miss the actual $1,500 headset. Whatever Fadell's team ships next, I hope it remembers why this version made people uncomfortable, because that part matters more than the specs.