Google pulls the plug on Google Glass
19 Jan 2015
With its announcement that the Google Glass would no longer be available, Google dashed the expectations of Australians who had waited for two years to lay their hands on the device, the online edition of Business Review Weekly reported.
The company effectively pulled the plug on the device on Friday, taking developers and early customers in the US and the UK, who had spent $1,500 on being first to own the devices.
Users who had paid for early versions of the device in order to develop applications came to know of the development on the Google Glass Explorer program.
Google said in a blog post that it was time for Glass to ''graduate'' from the Google X lab, where the company worked on secret projects, to having its own division. The company added, the Explorer program would end on 19 January and no further devices could be bought. Future smart glasses would be released at an unspecified time later.
Meanwhile, Google insisted it was still committed to launching the smart glasses as a consumer product, but would stop producing Glass in its present form, BBC reported.
Google said it would focus on "future versions of Glass" and the work on it would be done by different division.
The Explorer programme, under which software developers could by the Glass for $1,500 would close.
Following the launch of the programme in the US in 2013, it was then opened up to anyone and was launched in the UK last summer.
It was expected that it would be followed in due course by a full consumer launch.
The search firm would, from next week, stop taking orders for the product, but says it world continue to support companies that were using Glass.
The Glass team too would move out of the Google X division which engaged in "blue sky" research, and form a separate undertaking, under its current manager Ivy Ross.
Ross and the Glass team would report to Tony Fadell, the chief executive of the home automation business Nest, which the company acquired a year ago.
