It was the year 2013and Google presented what may have been his device more futuristic always: i Google Glass. Of the smart glasses equipped with a small display on which to read the notifications received from the connected phone, with which it was possible to interact via voice commands; in addition, the Google Glass also had a camera, to record photos and especially videos with an unusual first-person perspective. A device of nichereleased only in the USA to a small number of users, and also sold to dear pricebut so unique that we could not resist the temptation to review it.
Within a few years, the project foundered, for too long a series of reasons to list them all here: price, availability, applications, user experience and, last but not least, not exactly effective marketing by Google. What’s worse is the fact that subsequent updates made the first generation of Google Glass almost unusableleaving the (few) buyers with a bitter taste.
The company therefore tried to recycle them within the company, perhaps for those jobs where it is convenient to have certain data at hand when one’s hands are full, launching the Enterprise Editionwhich for a time also seemed to proceed expeditiously with new releases. Thanks to the advent of the pandemic, we had also forgotten about them, convinced that their use would continue in certain areas. And instead…
Google not only has discontinued from March 15, 2023 sales of the Glass Enterprise Edition 2, but will cease support altogether on September 15, 2023, so very soon. After this last date the Glass Enterprise Editions will still remain functional, but will no longer receive any software updates, and installed apps “they may stop working anytime after September 15th“. Let’s talk about a device launched in 2019 and sold for a thousand dollarsjust to better contextualize.
It is difficult not to link this closure, like that of Stadia, to the profound crisis that the entire tech sector is facing, with massive layoffs in all major companies (excluding Apple, for now), including Alphabet.
A Google spokesman reiterated a The Verge all the company’s commitment in the field of augmented reality (for the avoidance of doubt by Glass Not they were an AR device), but it is clear however that even the Glass Enterprises must not have obtained the desired results. Let’s just hope that somehow they served as a lesson for those future devices that should”bring new and innovative AR experiences across Google’s product portfolio“.
Maybe it was too soon, or maybe, as futuristic as it sounds, this is not the tomorrow that awaits usthe fact is that this new tombstone in Google graveyard he also engraved the name of the company itself on it: the haruspices would have something to predict about it for years.
The final nail in the coffin of Glass, the monumental failure of Google