“Google is ending its experimental Google Glass programme,” The BBC reports. “The company insists it is still committed to launching the smart glasses as a consumer product, but will stop producing Glass in its present form. Instead it will focus on ‘future versions of Glass.'”
“From next week, the search firm will stop taking orders for the product but it says it will continue to support companies that are using Glass,” The Beeb reports. “The Glass team will also move out of the Google X division which engages in ‘blue sky’ research, and become a separate undertaking, under its current manager Ivy Ross. She and the Glass team will report to Tony Fadell, the chief executive of the home automation business Nest, acquired by Google a year ago.”
MacDailyNews Take: “Blue Sky?” “Pie in the sky” is more like it.
“Google has tried to present this announcement as just another step in the evolution of an amazing innovation. But make no mistake – Google Glass is dead, at least in its present form,” The Beeb reports. “Google will now have to deal with a disgruntled community of Explorers who paid a large sum for a device which they must have believed would eventually evolve into something more useful.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote last week:
Our Lady of Perpetual Beta’s pie-in-the-sky products aren’t innovation, they’re just mental-masturbatory marketing ploys.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “CaptainWhizz” for the heads up.]
I love the text under the picture.
A Glasshole.
And it only cost Sergey his ex-wife and a few hundred million in Google expenses.
Welcome to MDN! I think you’ll like it here. 🙂
That guy is the biggest douche ever seen in a tech company. He thinks he is a god when he speaks. Delusion is a dangerous condition. Nothing but ill will to google.
joe blo: love it. You’re bang on. He is a huge douche loser geek and I also wish Google nothing but ill will. Bunch of geeks that have no idea what people actually want.
Even his family think he’s a giant douche and won’t be seen dead socializing with him in public. And his beard is fake.
What Steve Jobs said about Microsoft having no taste equally applies to Google. Google Glass was socially offensive. Creepy nerds trying to set fashion trends.
What is “offensive” is its blatant “obviousness.” Stay tuned, as Apple (or a third-party working closely with Apple) releases a discreet “wearable” camera that works in perfect unison with iPhone (and Apple Watch if present). iPhone supplies the “brains and brawn,” local data storage, and Internet connectivity, while “Apple Cam” provides iPhone with the user’s-eye-view of the world (and other interactive capability). Developers supply the creativity to use this new iPhone enhancement, just as they are doing now for Apple Watch.
Computer glasses will one day be a thing. After people get used to wearing a computer watch, what’s one other thing that most people wear some form of that you could fit a tiny computer into? Glasses or sunglasses. But they need to be fashionable or people won’t wear them. Apple could get this part right, but I don’t think Google, Microsoft or Samsung would ever be able to.
Nah!
People don’t (usually) wear sunglasses except when the sun is bright. I don’t ever foresee people wanting to wear glasses for the sole reason of putting a computer on their head.
I can foresee lots of applications for wearing a computer on your head. If it’s no heavier than a pair of glasses/sunglasses and has the power to do real-time augmented reality and the battery lasts all day…then there are literally thousands of applications for the technology. You must not be very creative if you can’t foresee any. I see it as inevitable. Like it or not, 10 years from now everyone will be wearing a computer of some type, probably multiple computers.
Your point about applications is taken. Surely there will be many.
But if we think of what makes for a successful technology product, it’s more than just pure usefulness. In order to become truly mainstream (and thus successful), it has to satisfy several things such as:
• Is it useful?
• Is it attractive? (especially if you’re wearing it)
• Is it easy to use?
• Does it do something that other devices can’t do?
• Does it do things other devices do, but way better?
• Does it fit into our culture? (this is where privacy issues might be hard to overcome)
• If it does not fit into our culture, are its promises compelling enough to cause a change in said culture?
I think it’s clear thus far that Glass in its current form is a security/privacy nightmare and is pretty ugly — and it doesn’t do anything well enough to overcome these things so far. I believe it will be many years before that changes.
Obviously, Google Glass isn’t meeting the criteria you list. Not only is the technology nowhere near that point yet, we as a society are not ready for that kind of hamfisted, intrusive, and culturally insensitive approach that Google takes with its products. At least not with something as personal as wearable computing on our faces.
However, I do think that (someday) the technology and our society will advance to the point where something like that becomes commonplace. It scares me to think about now, but hopefully it will be done by a company with a lot more taste and a lot more respect for individual needs and rights than Google. In theory, a worn HUD-style computing device has the potential to meet ALL of your criteria in an unprecedented way.
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should and let’s be honest with glasses with the expectation Glass set it simply can’t not will it for the gorse able future. As for perception I have real difficulty imagining a society has actually advanced by finding such devices a positive in their lives. There is a strong diference between technology that can help and support and one that is intrusively part of your very existence as something like Glass demands. It has specialist uses there is no doubt but a society where that device is the norm will be one that has totally lost its way or any sane view of of technology. Hey maybe it even explains why no technologically advanced society survives long enough to populate the Galaxy as professor Brian Cox predicts to be the case. But then there is a certain amusing irony in a company claiming to not to do evil doing anything but.
…. Because my post was all about Google and why Google Glass was a good idea that just didn’t pan out right now. Oh, wait, that’s not at all what I said.
And another futurist, who has no idea what tomorrow holds, never mind the next ten years, shoots his mouth off. Do you even understand what an advancement is?
If it had had an X-ray vision app, ala those glasses they used to sell in the back of comic books, then it would have been a hit for sure!
Extremely unlikely, ‘computer glasses’ will never serve more than specialized purposes for specialized individuals or industries. I honestly doubt that even watches will catch fire the way phones have – most people are fine carrying an item with them, as opposed to wearing one, because you can put the item down. It’s too much of an encumbrance to have any gadget of any type or size perpetually mounted on the body. This has been proven time and time again. I very much doubt Google Glass will make it back into public awareness, it was always just a pre-pubescent, geeky, science fiction pipe dream. People want devices that are actually useful and that are unobtrusive.
3D television and cinemas have been around for a while, but the thing that everybody is trying to crack is a way of viewing 3D without needing to wear special glasses.
Having to wear special glasses is the biggest drawback with viewing 3D systems and Google has demonstrated that it’s also a major drawback with wearable computing too.
With a new technology, the technology itself is only one aspect of making it successful. You also need to get the emotional reaction to it right, the need for the technology should be self-evident and the advantages must greatly outweigh any disadvantages. Google failed on all of those fronts.
sergey was too busy buying his mistress new shoes
“The Glass team will also move out of the Google X division which engages in ‘blue sky’ research, and become a separate undertaking,”
Which will make it easer to sell the project (and the Bozo team) off to another company.
Google Glass will indeed find a second life. In the porn industry. A wearable camera will give a new twist on those POV movies they always do. Glassholes will have a whole new world to explore!
An inadequate glasshole in a porno movie would be very awkward.
the next version is a drinking glass with “Google” printed on it
Actually not dead. They’ve moved it to another division. Stopped the Explorer program and are a step closer to release. I’m looking forward to using the eventual product with my Apple ecosystem! I think it’s a cool idea.
Google glass success? This is more likely:
“Reports are coming in that a horde of beer crazed Sasquatch have invaded the northern British Columbia town of White Rock… “.
If Apple comes through with it someday, I’d buy it. If Google sells one and it works with my iPhone, I’ll buy it. It will move us closer to ubiquitous computing. It doesn’t need to be a runaway success, they just need to sell enough of them to make a profit and move this category forward!
I don’t want to diss you too hard as your posts are polite but the big problem of Goog Glass is not technology (eventually I suppose they will be able to fix the power, the memory, the weight, the heat issues) but social.
People don’t like others sticking a camera in their face. (try using a big Canon SLR on a bus or restaurant shooting others and you’ll get what I mean instantly). Goog glasses users say they stopped using them as even their friends are disturbed when they wear them.
Brin and Page can’t understand it as they can’t understand ‘privacy’ as since schooldays they have made billions invading others privacy from scanning gmail to recording web searches. It’s so ingrained in them that ‘privacy is no concern’ that they are no longer socially conscious…
You make good points! Culturally things will have to change if this product is going to be viable. However I still want a contextual personal assistant with me all the time everywhere that I can make an appointment I can take a picture I can send an email with minimal interaction. Call me a dreamer!
My iPhone will do all those things. I guess it depends on what you mean by minimal interaction but, as long as you aren’t driving or walking crossing a busy intersection, you can work on an iPhone with minimal interaction.
Culturally, things will never change in this aspect. That is something you can take to the bank. And predicting that it will underscores just how little so many geeks understand about psychology.
I think Google deserves a ton of credit for trying this and other ideas. It appears to have failed, but at least they tried something new and probably learned a few things from it. That’s pretty much the definition of innovation, even if it doesn’t succeed, and even—gasp!!—if it’s not Apple doing it.
Oh no! I started saving money to buy this POS. I spent months saving for it. Now what will I do with the 30 cents I’ve saved up so far so that one day I can buy it and be one of the Glassholes out there. 😝
“Google will now have to deal with a disgruntled community of Explorers who paid a large sum for a device which they must have believed would eventually evolve into something more useful.”
Fixed that.
No I didn’t. The word ‘more’ should be deleted.
Glass was just another sideshow to distract people from Google’s real business which is to collect as much data about you as possible and sell it.
Or, more evilly, a failed vector OF acquiring everyone’s personal data and selling it. Why not have hordes of Glassholes roaming the street with eye-level views of everyone and everything?
A version of Glass (one’s that look like regular glasses or contacts) might find a niche if the device can present compelling 3D, augmented images in a normal field of view. The hurdle to mass acceptance will be the design and the user interface. Tapping or sliding a finger on it, or controlling it via voice commands are not user-friendly input methods. It might be accepted one day if it can quickly read brainwaves, correctly translate from all the noise and then transmit the desired results. But, it can not look like a Borg implement. It has to be fashionable and/or non-threatening.
3D Augmented Reality Virtual Assistant
You don’t understand other people, do you? The appearance of it being non-threatening is not the issue. The reality of it as a threat is the issue — a threat to privacy.
I was just starting to enjoy watching IT doofuses taking street beatings. Payback for forcing people to use shit software is cruel but necessary.