Goodbye, Google Glass (again). Au revoir, AltspaceVR. We say ‘so long’ to these and other tech products and platforms that met their end this year.
Each year, it’s in with the new and out with the old in the world of tech. And in a rare instance this year, it’s out once again for a product that tried to come back and failed a second time. There are plenty of year-end best lists you can peruse as 2023 winds to a close, but we’d also like to pause before the year is out and pay our final respects to the tech that died.
The reasons are manifold for why a product can meet its end. Perhaps it was old and simply outdated. Maybe it was risky and flopped. Or it could be a simple case of an eccentric billionaire destroying it just because.
This year, we saw history repeat itself and Google discontinue its Google Glass AR headset again. We also witnessed Microsoft shutter AltspaceVR, its social VR platform. A couple of health and fitness products from big names also met their end, and Netflix shipped its last DVD, putting an end to the red envelope era that many assumed had been over for years. The Twitter name is dead, although the platform still lives on under a new name (read: letter) despite CEO Elon Musk killing off many of its features.
