Late last year in my post on My Year as a Google Glass Explorer, I spoke about (and fully agreed with) the growing belief that Glass in its current form would not end up seeing a widespread consumer release, but would shift to an enterprise focus. And what do you know, here it is!
Today, Google Glass has announced via a post on Google+ that the Explorer program will officially close on January 19, with the Explorer edition no longer for sale from that date. With the consumer program closing, at least for the time being, Google will be continuing to focus on supporting companies who are using Glass.
The value Glass delivers to healthcare workplaces was reinforced earlier this week when Augmedix announced their $16M funding round for their Glass-powered medical records program, and I’m happy to confirm that Epic Pharmacy is moving full steam ahead after receiving our approval to utilise Glass for the scenarios we have proposed.
We firmly believe the ability to deliver and capture line-of-sight information while being able to keep both hands free is an invaluable workplace tool, and we’re really excited to be rolling out our initial use case scenarios in the near future. A number of our team were engaged in training for this only yesterday!
Glass isn’t the first piece of tech that tried the consumer route first but needed to double back to enterprise before widespread adoption was achieved. Remember, the PC was initially envisaged as a consumer device, but consumers didn’t broadly engage until they got used to PCs being part of their daily activities at work. Then they looped back and saw the personal and home use cases.
The next consumer version will undoubtedly look and feel very different to the Explorer edition, and I’m excited to see what that becomes. In the meantime, it’s been an honour and a privilege to be part of the Glass Explorer program, and an opportunity I wouldn’t have missed for the world.
We’ll definitely be keeping you updated with our Glass at Epic Pharmacy activities, some of our initial use cases will succeed, some will no doubt fail, and plenty of additional ideas and scenarios will be conceived as we dive deeper. Innovation and change is never a linear pathway, but that’s what keeps life interesting!
