A Retreat for Google Glass and a Case Study in the Perils of Making Hardware

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Attendees wearing Google Glass devices at a Google developers event in San Francisco in June.Credit Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

You won’t have Glass to kick around anymore. At least not for a while.

On Thursday, Google announced that it would stop selling its much ridiculed Google Glass smart glasses, and that the product would no longer be developed in Google X, the company’s research division.

In a blog post on the Google Plus social network, Google said Glass was graduating from X. It will still be available to “certified partners” and for commercial trials in places like hospitals and factories. But the Explorer program, in which software developers and gadget nerds could buy a test version of the product, is over.

The company isn’t abandoning Glass – but it is at least pressing the reset button. In an unusual arrangement, the company said Glass would stay within Google, but that its chief, Ivy Ross, would report to Tony Fadell, who helped design and create Apple’s iPod before inventing the Nest thermostat. Google acquired Nest early last year.

“Google decided that they need to turn this product over to someone who knows how to bring a consumer product to market, both from a design perspective and a marketing perspective,” J.P. Gownder, an analyst at Forrester Research, said.

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Tony Fadell helped design and create Apple’s iPod and iPhone before inventing the Nest thermostat.Credit Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile, via Getty Images

The move signals a humbling retreat for Glass, the Internet-connected glasses that allow users to do things like snap pictures with a blink of an eye or send emails with their voice. A little more than two years ago, Glass was the star of Google’s annual developer conference, Google I/O, and a central piece of the company’s efforts to move deeper into selling hardware.

At that conference, I/O, Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, had a live video chat with a couple of wing-suited sky divers as they jumped out of a plane. Later that year, Time named Glass one of the best innovations of 2012. Some people called it fashion and others used it for art.

Today, Glass is more like a case study in the perils of developing hardware whose purpose isn’t clear. Unlike, say, the iPhone — which cleverly combined products people already understood and used — consumers weren’t quite sure what to make of Glass. That creeped some people out.

The device was pre-emptively banned by bars and large parts of Las Vegas. Legislators in West Virginia tried to make it illegal to use the gadget while driving.

“There’s no vision for why people actually need this device,” Mr. Gownder said. “That’s a problem. When you don’t have that, people fill that in with their own assumptions, and right now the assumption is that this is a device for recording people.”

Glass also highlights Google’s uneven track record when it comes to consumer products. Google TV faced poor reviews and delays. At the same conference where Mr. Brin showed off Glass, Google engineers took the stage to introduce the Nexus Q, a black ball that cost $299 and was meant to stream music. A few weeks later, Google postponed shipment of the product and later shelved it.

Google wanted to own a company that made smartphones, at least until it didn’t.

With its mission to organize all the world’s information, Google would like to be the gateway through which people live every aspect of their lives — whether searching, socializing, reading, shopping, exercising or sleeping.

As tech moves off of computers and onto phones, watches and even mundane items like thermostats, that means getting a toehold in hardware. Google’s lucrative advertising business is built on watching the way people behave online, so gaining visibility into people’s habits beyond computers and phones — like how they walk wearing Google Glass — gives a fuller picture of users.

But getting people to buy your hardware means creating products that aren’t just useful but have more ethereal qualities like beauty and coolness. Last year, the chairman of Luxottica, one of Glass’s most important partners, said he would never wear Glass himself. Or not exactly never. He said it would be “O.K. in the disco.”

Google is not without some hardware successes, like Chromebook computers, whose primary selling point is price. There is also the Chromecast, a $35 streaming device. But Chromecast isn’t about fashion. Its elegance rests in being a barely noticeable conduit for putting Google’s strong software products onto televisions.

Google’s defense of Glass usually comes down to some version of well, you know, it’s still pretty cool that only a few years ago, Glass was “little more than a scuba mask attached to a laptop” as Google reiterated in its news release on Thursday. This is undoubtedly true.

But Glass also came with substantial hype. And it’s not as if technology was the main issue. According to Mr. Gownder, Glass left consumers fascinated but also leery. In a recent survey of consumers, Forrester found that 43 percent of consumers had an interest in Glass – but 50 percent also had privacy concerns.

“From the privacy perspective, we are of course pleased to see Google drop this product,” Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, wrote in an email. “And it is a very big deal when Google backs down, particularly after its big push.”

He continued: “But it is also speaks to a larger issue in tech design about privacy. Eyeglass-mounted web display and phone for those who wanted it? Not really a problem. Surveillance and recording of those around the user? Yeah, that’s a problem.”