Google Glass is no more, if it ever was

“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.

“The Glass project received the enthusiastic backing of Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin. He presided over a spectacular unveiling which saw skydivers jump out of an aircraft wearing Glass and beam what they were seeing to a conference in San Francisco,” The Beeb reports. “But he and others soon tired of Glass, complaining that it was not evolving in the ways that had been promised. There were also concerns about privacy and safety, with some bars and restaurants banning the use of the smart glasses on their premises.”

“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.]