Back in 2012, Google took the wraps off their Google Glass wearable. For a moment there it looked like it be the next big thing, but unfortunately the product took too long to reach the market, not to mention its asking price to be part of the Explorer program was too prohibitive for most people, which is why it didn’t exactly come as a shock to see Google shutting the Explorer program down.However with the shutdown, many were wondering about the fate of the wearable which has since been transferred over to a new division run by Nest’s Tony Fadell, and in Google’s recent earnings call for Q4 2014, Google’s CFO Patrick Pichette finally offered a bit of insight as to what’s going on with their Google Glass program.
According to Pichette, it seems that Glass did not have the kind of impact that Google was looking for, which ultimately forced them to put the project on hold and to reset their strategy. “When teams aren’t able to [leap] hurdles, but we think there’s still a lot of promise, we might ask them to take a pause and take the time to reset their strategy, as we recently did in the case of Glass. [A]nd in those situations where projects don’t have the impact we hope for, we do take the tough calls, we make the decision to cancel them, and you’ve seen us do this time and time again.”
Of course it remains to be seen what Google will eventually do with their Glass program, but as TechCrunch points out, it is likely that when the project does resurface, it could take a completely new form that none of us would have recognized or predicted.
Filed in . Read more about Google, Google Glass and Wearable Tech.