Google says Glass team ‘hit hurdles’ and needed a ‘reset’

Google has explained its reasons for discontinuing the Google Glass headset in its current form and spinning off the project into a new division.

The firm surprised many observers by announcing it was halting the Explorer program this month and placing the future of Glass under the leadership of Nest founder Tony Fadell.

Now, following its quarterly earnings call on Thursday, Google’s Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pichette has claimed (via TechCrunch) Google had made a ‘tough call’ to take stock before moving forward with Glass.

He said: “When teams aren’t able to [leap] hurdles, but we think there’s still a lot of promise, we might ask them to take a pause and take the time to reset their strategy, as we recently did in the case of Glass.

“In those situations where projects don’t have the impact we hope for, we do take the tough calls, we make the decision to cancel them, and you’ve seen us do this time and time again.”

Today’s statement may be telling for the future of Glass due to Pichette’s use of the word ‘cancel’ rather than, say, ‘postpone.’ Does this mean Glass will never get a consumer launch?

Read more: Google Glass is gone – farewell to the Glassholes

Elsewhere in the earnings call, Google cited the chronic shortage of the Nexus 6 device as once of the reasons for the firm’s stunted growth.

Pichette said: “…while the Nexus 6 was well received as a new phone, we had real issues and were unable to secure sufficient inventory to meet the demand that we had forecasted.”

Google’s profits were up 30 per cent to $4.76bn (£3.16bn) compared to the same period last year, but the firm still missed Wall Street expectations. The company blamed the strength of the US dollar for the misstep.