At Google’s I/O conference in 2012, thousands of people watched a free fall through the eyes of skydivers wearing Glass, a tiny computer with a small screen above the right eye, as they dropped toward the roof of San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Sergey Brin, the Google co-founder who backed the project, presided.
In 2013 Google began selling Glass in the United States to early buyers it called Explorers, for $1,500. The product, Wired’s Steven Levy later wrote, was “nowhere near ready for reliable use,” and the name was Google’s way of admitting it. First impressions were glowing anyway. Time named Glass one of the best products of the year. The tech blogger Robert Scoble said he could not imagine a day without it, and was photographed wearing it in the shower. Later the program was opened to anyone, and in the summer of 2014 it launched in the UK.
Then the excitement wore off. Glass was buggy, it felt awkward, and it had no clear function. Scoble and others tired of it, complaining that it wasn’t evolving as promised. People near a wearer worried about being filmed, and some bars and restaurants banned it. In January 2015 Google said it would stop taking orders and close the Explorer program. Its website read, “Thanks for exploring with us.”
Not every Explorer was a consumer, though. Some companies had begun buying Explorer units and pairing them with custom software for specific tasks. One was AGCO, a farm equipment maker whose tractor factory in Jackson, Minnesota, bought a single unit in 2013. Nearly every machine there was custom-ordered, and workers checked each one’s specifications on laptops about 50 feet from their stations. Even heavy-duty tablets typically lasted only a week on the floor. With a Belgian software firm, Proceedix, AGCO spent months on security, device tracking and safety. Workers saw each step on the tiny screen and said “OK, Glass, proceed” to move to the next.
Google noticed. “We talked to all of our explorers and we realized that the enterprise space had a lot of legs,” Jay Kothari, the project lead for the workplace version, told Wired. Astro Teller, who runs Alphabet’s X division, put the earlier mistake bluntly: “Where we got a little off track was trying to jump all the way to the consumer applications.” Then he added, “We got more than a little off track.”
A separate team built Glass Enterprise Edition. The electronics clipped onto safety glasses or ordinary frames, the wifi and security were stronger, the battery lasted longer, and a green light came on while it recorded video. In January 2015, the month consumer sales ended, it began shipping to “solution partners” that sold complete hardware and software packages to companies. Google asked customers not to reveal it existed.
When Google announced it publicly in July 2017, more than 50 businesses, including AGCO, DHL, Boeing and Volkswagen, had been using Glass, according to X. AGCO had just over 100 units and planned to order 500 to 1,000 more within 18 months. Some older, very experienced workers had doubted it at first. At AGCO, following the on-screen instructions became a required part of the job, “like a torque tool,” one manager said.
Google released a new $999 version in 2019. On March 15, 2023, it stopped selling Glass Enterprise, and said software support would end that September.