David Brown

He believes the future of smart glasses is in looking boring instead of futuristic and doing less instead of more.

All he needs to do now is wait for glass to break.

It's January 2015.

The news out of Mountain View is everywhere.

Google is pulling Glass from the market, just two years after its debut.

It plans to retool the product and re-release it later under the guidance of legendary product designer Tony Fadell.

At least Glass will be in great hands.

Fadell helped create the iPod, the iPhone, and the home monitoring system, Nest.

In the announcement, Google tries to put a cheery face on this decision.

After all, Fidel is design royalty, a perfect choice to revamp the product.

But even Fidel's name can't obscure the grim reality of this moment.

Less than three years after those skydivers descended on the Moscone Center, Google Glass is effectively dead.

And during that time, Glass completely failed to hit its targets.

While Google never releases sales numbers, analysts once predicted glass sales would be in the millions by 2016.

Instead, even the most aggressive estimates for actual sales top out at less than 900,000 units total, with many analysts agreeing the real number is probably closer to 300,000.

So, what happened?

Was it the glass hole effect?

Or is something else going on?

At 2015's South by Southwest conference, the head of Google's Moonshot factory, a man named Astro Teller, gives Glass a public autopsy.

He says that Glass's real problem was in everyone's heightened expectations.