In the world of business and technology, you can’t always back winners. For every BluRay out there, there’s an HDDVD that didn’t quite cut the mustard.
Google has announced that, as of Monday, it’ll be pulling its highly contentious Google Glass product from consumer shelves, effectively spelling the end of the much maligned product.
The Glass, if you’ll remember, was a wearing HUD interface that could record video and do a bunch of other fancy stuff, whilst simultaneously being a remarkably effective method of identifying dorks from a distance.
Google remains quite insistent that the Glass will live on, and that they’re moving away from it being a consumer-based product to one more closely suited for development. But some experts believe that this is the beginning of the end. Though, opinion (as always) comes in a bit split in that regard.
The bottom line here is that for the last little while, Google has been quietly de-emphasising the priority they previously put in the product as an end-user item. Several key figures who championed the Glass have left the company over the course of the past twelve months, and the announcement today includes the news that the technology will move out of the highly secretive Google X research labs and into home automation company Nest Labs – a third party organisation acquired by Google around twelve months ago.
But just as an example as to how ~highly~ regarded the product is held within technological circles, Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg decided to throw a little shade earlier this week.
“I think it’s pretty easy to imagine that in the future we will have something that we can wear. It will look just like normal glasses – it won’t look weird like some of the stuff that exists today.“
So the Google Glass is no more. If you’ve been umming and ahhing over whether or not to get one for the past eighteen months or so, you’ve got till Monday to run out and drop the $1500 on one.
Goodnight, sweet prince. We barely knew thee.
Photo: Gareth Copley via Getty Images.
via SMH.
