Talking Schmidt: Google Glass is a long-term project, too important to scrap

If you’ve been following the facts behind the situation with Glass, you know that the project is not seen as even close to being dead within the Mountain View company. Despite the Explorer Program being shut down earlier this year, Google clearly sees potential in the platform. And according to comments recently made by Google’s Eric Schmidt, Glass is just far too important to scrap…

“It is a big and very fundamental platform for Google,” Schmidt said (via The Wall Street Journal). “We ended the Explorer program and the press conflated this into us canceling the whole project, which isn’t true. Google is about taking risks and there’s nothing about adjusting Glass that suggests we’re ending it.”

Schmidt then went on to make a direct comparison between Glass and the company’s self-driving car project. “That’s like saying the self-driving car is a disappointment because it’s not driving me around now,” he said. “These things take time.”

This problem with the public’s perception of Glass being so very far from what Google intended is what Astro Teller pointed out at SXSW last week as the project’s main failure. “The thing that we did not do well, that was closer to a failure, was that we allowed and sometimes even encouraged too much attention for the program,” he said.

Rather than the project being scrapped (as much of the media reported in January), Google refocused Glass and gave it a “fresh strategy,” according to Google CFO Patrick Pichette. Previously a part of Google[x], Google Glass was moved into its own division overseen by iPod father Tony Fadell (while still keeping Ivy Ross as a more direct head of the project).

In case you missed them, be sure to check our recent pair of posts covering the current state of Glass:

• Don’t believe the unbelievers; Google Glass is alive and well
• Don’t believe the unbelievers (Part 2); Google Glass has succeeded through Glass at Work