Remember when people were talking about Google Glass and how it was going to change EVERYTHING? Well that may have been what caused the experiment to fail, according to Google’s Astro Teller, who claims that the company’s failure to curb the hype surrounding its smartglasses and give people more realistic expectations was the device’s downfall.
Google Inc. was wrong to let expectations about its Glass wearable gadget get overheated, the head of the Google X research lab said on Tuesday. The Internet company did not do enough to make clear that the $1,500 computer that mounts to a pair of eyeglasses was merely a prototype and not a finished product, Google’s Astro Teller said during a talk at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin. “We allowed and sometimes even encouraged too much attention for the program,” said Teller, whose official title at Google is Captain of Moonshots, during a talk that focused on how his group has learned from some of its failures. Google stopped selling Glass to consumers earlier this year, noting that it was time for a “pause” and a strategy “reset.” The company still sells Glass to businesses.