re: Google Glass essentially flopped...

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This gets a giggle out of me. You said they were taking wearables where they always wanted to go. Why didn't they take them there in the first place? Why would they need to pause and reset in order to do so? To me-and I'd like to think I'm reasonable-a "pause and reset" would mean you aren't going where you want to, and you need to "pause and reset" in order to do it.

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Where they want to go is not a particular product or a particular version of a product. For the third time, they are taking wearables toward profit. Is this sinking in yet?

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I'll mention like the Cad fella here that it's not just me calling Glass a failure. It's thousands of different news outlets and writers-I'm sure they're all trash and ignorant and have no experience or understanding or depth of knowledge compared to you though-have used the exact same term to describe what happened with Glass.

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Crying "failure" over something one of the largest companies in the world does is a great way to get pageviews, don't you think? You seem to have a lot of trouble looking below the surface of things.

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I absolutely do believe that [Google thought Glass would make money].

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Why would they sell a product that cost $80 to make

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They cost much more than $80 each. $80 worth of individual components, maybe, but then you have to assemble them, plus throw in huge R&D costs for a very limited run of production.

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for $1,500

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Yeah, seems like they could have sold a lot more of them if they were priced around $300, right? Don't you think they priced them that high on purpose to limit sales? Don't you think they knew Glass wasn't ready for the masses? Google rolls out Android updates very slowly for the same reason. Is all of this still flying right over your head, or are you starting to realize that every move Google makes is calculated?

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and then "drop" the price to $1,000? Is that some type of deal?

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When did the price drop? As far as I know, they were $1500 until the last day.

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They took a page out of Apple's premium pricing for the product.

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Uh, no. With the Nexus 6, maybe. With Glass, no.

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They paid the blogosphere millions to promote it and trotted out their founder to ride on a Subway and be pictured with it, nevermind to get out in front of the trendsetters and kingmakers at TED and talk about it's virtues.

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Yep, and here we are still talking about it, even though it is supposedly a dead project.

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Do you think they were taking the "long run" and planning for it not to make money by doing all that early stage effort?

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Absolutely. Glass has been a test project from day 1. And yeah, even test projects require marketing. Especially for products whose success depends on third party app developers.

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Look at Project Ara, and look at Google Glass...Which one had more hype, PR, and general oomph behind it from Google? It's obvious...They thought that Google Glass would be the killer product

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No, they knew that Glass would require a lot of marketing to get as far as it did. Also, Glass and Ara are targeted at two totally different demographics. Like, there is basically zero overlap between them, and guess which one the US falls under?

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that helped them leap forward and compete with Apple as a hardware/software maker in one that had a hot piece of premium tech that was first-to-market in the space.

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Google has always and likely will always make their money on advertisements. Any hardware/software they make and sell has essentially the sole purpose of expanding their audience. The Nexus line, while they probably don't increase the use of Android much directly, it certainly guides manufacturers in a direction Google wants them to go. Chromecast, Nexus Player... eyeballs. fricking self-driving cars?! People will eventually spend those hours browsing the web and seeing ads rather than driving.

So, no, Google was not trying to out-Apple Apple with Glass. If they were, you said yourself that the BOM was low enough that they could have cut the price down to $3/4/500 or so, sold a lot more, and that would still be a "premium" price for a gadget. But they didn't because that wasn't the goal.

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Seriously...They were selling it to the public for a grand and a half...but it cost $80...If they weren't trying to make money off of it WTF were they doing?

Sheesh...

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I explained before, but I get the feeling you might need to hear it again. $1500 was the price at which Google could sell enough units to get the data they needed. It should be crystal fricking clear by now that they could have sold a whole lot more units at a lower price, and could have been much less in the red (and maybe even in the black), but they did not want to. The product was NOT ready for the masses, and Google knew that.

If that doesn't convince you that Google did not fail to reach their goals with Glass, then you don't want to be convinced. If that's the case, then I have to write this off as a troll thread.