Google Glass Shatters, Apple Watches With Delight

It's all in the wrist.

The Wearable War has taken an unexpected turn: Google has decided to no longer market Glass, the eyewear it launched with great fanfare just under three years ago.

This is no typical end-of-life story for a Google beta project. Glass was touted as the future, and Google until now had given every indication it was firmly behind the tech. The virtual abandonment of Glass might rival Buzz as the company's biggest misfire (Despite conventional wisdom to the contrary, Motorola Mobility may have been a wash).

Which means, among other things, score one for Apple. Oh, to be at One Infinite Loop this afternoon …

There is absolutely no love lost between the two companies. Steve Jobs was beside himself about Google speaking to an Apple Town Hall I was lucky enough to have a source at in 2010. For a delicious read about the feud pick up Fred Vogelstein's Dogfight.

Officially, Glass remains a research product in a division that will be headed up by Tony Fadell, who's something of a legend in the business: He was one of the "fathers" of the iPod at Apple and later created Nest, a smart thermostat company Google purchased for $3.2 billion a year ago.

But instead of becoming the mainstream consumer item Google positioned Glass to be, it's now at best a hobby. There is really no way to, ahem, save face.

The timing for Apple could not be better. Apple Watch is expected this spring. Despite a lot of activity in the space last year, there is no breakout winner, even for Android. Wired's Tayven James wrote that neither is anything which debuted at CES this month likely to give Apple Watch a run for its money.

Perhaps the handwriting was on the wall last July, when the creator of Google Glass, Babak Parviz, left the company to join Amazon. Two month earlier Glass went on sale to the general public. No sales figures have been released.

Until last May Glass had been available only to people known as "Explorers" who got on a waiting list and were invited at some point to fork over $1,500 for a pair — an amount Influencer Shane Snow observed was "the cost of a month's rent in Brooklyn." One of the problems with Glass surely was the price, which was not lowered when it became a consumer item.

For early adopters, for a while, it was a no brainer nevertheless. In the interest of full disclosure I was among the wide-eyed optimists. "Where does Google Glass fit in on this spectrum of possibilities?" I wrote for Wired. "There was a predictable range of reactions when Google pulled the veil off its R&D baby on Apr. 4. I’d put them into two broad categories: people who embrace the beautifully improbable, and party poopers."

I counted myself among the former.

But by the time I got my invitation I had fallen in love instead with my Pebble smartwatch — and the world had changed. A lot. Early evangelist Robert Scoble soured on Glass, Explorers were being called "Glassholes" and attacked on the streets of San Francisco. Sarah Slocum, one such set-upon Explorer, recounted her tale on LinkedIn.

I had come to believe Glass was more Segway than iPhone. Now it's more Tucker.

Meanwhile, while basically nobody else joined Google in the face race, smartwatches bloomed. As Wired reported:

2014 brought huge advances in the field of wearable technology, moving us from E-Ink displays and proprietary software to more powerful, touchscreen watches running on stable platforms like Android Wear. Products like the LG G Watch, Motorola’s Moto 360, and Asus ZenWatch have raised the bar considerably in terms of functionality and styling. In short, they’ve helped bring smartwatches into the mainstream at a manageable price point.

And now Tim Cook's two-year-old musings about Glass are even more interesting to parse. He had a bit of fun at Google's expense at the All Things D conference in 2013 — a year before rumors of an iWatch materialized as Apple Watch:

“I think there are some positive points in the product,” Cook said. “I think it’s probably more likely to appeal to certain vertical markets. … I wear glasses because I have to. I don’t know a lot of people that wear them that don’t have to. They want them to be light and unobtrusive and reflect their fashion. … I think from a mainstream point of view [glasses as wearable computing devices] are difficult to see. I think the wrist is interesting. The wrist is natural.”

We'll see if Apple can do what nobody's been able to do yet: Turn smartwatches into a mainstream option. Full disclosure again: At the rollout I wrote that Apple Watch "has the potential to be yet another transformative device for the company."

"It’s the ammunition needed to put to rest the Haunted Empire/Apple-After-Steve-Is-Dead meme if not once and for all, at least until this time next year when the restless tech press will almost certainly ask: "What have you done for me lately?"

But one thing is for sure: While Glass wasn't likely to be a real competitor for dollars its persistence as a possibility was … complicating. Now it's pretty clear that that the category killer, if there ever is one, won't be right in front of our eyes, but at arm's length.