That said, this is a company that has massively succeeded with other bets that were "absolutely predictable they would never work." So just because something looks questionable doesn't mean it gets shot down.
(Now, IMO, Glass was a mistake - but for entirely different reasons than you describe. An elite fashion product cuts against Google's reputation as something for everybody, even IF it had succeeded.)
Sometimes it's the pressure "if you can't sell them in millions, we don't want to do it at Google". This means Google is a great company to make acquisitions that they can scale e.g docs, maps, YouTube, Android.
Google has so much money than they know what to do with it. They can't experiment like a startup because failed products hurt their brand.
Their best bet is to invest in startups that use their stack and if successful, acquire and scale the shit out of them.
This is a good point. I bet the team that made glass looks at what a technical achievement Glass is and rate the project as a complete success. I don't know how many millions they spent to get the form factor so small but I really would be surprised if anyone caught any flack for it.
Unless you believe that he's an omniscient psychic who somehow has insider knowledge of his hiring process.
Needless to say, I didn't get the job. It was really funny to watch Glass (which is a cool technology) totally fail because it's a stupid consumer product. And, I'm no Steve Jobs. It was absolutely predictable that Glass would never work as a consumer product.
And, if you want to make it work for manufacturing, I think you'll need to scale up the form factor. Why wouldn't you make it a safety goggle too? Think about all of the engineering effort that went into shrinking this into a small, completely impractical, package.
Anyway, I think that this was not only predictable but it also shows a company culture where people can't tell the emperor that he's naked. It's not like I was the only person that took one look at glass and knew you couldn't leave the house wearing one. But, that message was pretty actively suppressed at Google.