If you think Google Glass is dead, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt would like to tell you you’re wrong.
“It is a big and very fundamental platform for Google,” Schmidt recently told the Wall Street Journal. “We ended the Explorer program and the press conflated this into us canceling the whole project, which isn’t true. Google is about taking risks and there’s nothing about adjusting Glass that suggests we’re ending it.”
“That’s like saying the self-driving car is a disappointment because it’s not driving me around now, These things take time.”
He added that Google Glass is being “made ready for users.”
When Google made the decision to pull Glass off the market most realized that Google wasn’t going to can the whole thing. Google said that the whole program was being restructured. It moved out of the Google X “moonshot” lab and became its own department, led by Ivy Ross. The chain of command doesn’t end there, however, as the whole Glass unit reports to Nest CEO Tony Fadell.
Glass as we knew it could be dead, but it’s clear Google has no intentions of abandoning the project.
In fact, Glass will probably hit the market again when it’s perfect. And not a day before that.
This is from a New York Times piece on Glass from last month:
“Early Glass efforts have broken ground and allowed us to learn what’s important to consumers and enterprises alike,” Mr. Fadell said in a statement. “I’m excited to be working with Ivy to provide direction and support as she leads the team and we work together to integrate those learnings into future products.”
Several people with knowledge of Mr. Fadell’s plans for Glass said he was going to redesign the product from scratch and would not release it until it was complete. “There will be no public experimentation,” one adviser to Mr. Fadell said. “Tony is a product guy and he’s not going to release something until it’s perfect.”
Google X exec Astro Teller recently blamed Google Glass’ early failure on bad marketing – specifically inviting too much attention to a device that was pretty much still at prototype phase.
Image via Google