The fate of Google Glass has been up in the air these past few months, as developers seem to have stopped paying attention to the new-age eyewear and Glasshole sightings have decreased significantly. But Glass isn’t done yet: Google’s announcing today Glass is “graduating” from the Google X experimental projects incubator to become its own independent division — a division that will report into Nest’s Tony Fadell. Current Glass head Ivy Ross will retain day-to-day authority, but she’ll report to Fadell. Nest itself will remain separate and independent, and Tony will still be in charge there as well.
TAKING OVER GLASS REPRESENTS THE FIRST SIGNIFICANT EXPANSION OF FADELL’S AUTHORITY AT GOOGLE
Growing up means leaving some things behind, though: the Google Glass Explorer program is being shut down after two years, and there’s no word on what the next Glass products might look like. Google says the Glass At Work program will carry on, but overall the company isn’t giving any timelines on new products.
More broadly, taking over Glass represents the first significant expansion of Fadell’s authority since Google bought Nest for $3.2 billion almost exactly a year ago. It always seemed a given that Google would try and make better use of Fadell’s hardware expertise — before Nest, Fadell was in charge of the iPod and iPhone projects at Apple — and the troubled Glass project is an interesting place to use his skills to try and crack a new market. (Just think about it: Tony making the HTC- and Motorola-built Nexus phones slightly better won’t do a lot, but if he can figure out Glass Google will open up entirely new ways of computing.) If nothing else, it’s going to be interesting.