Except you don't really know that. Hindsight 20/20 means that the current place seems inevitable. Here's an alternate future:
- People were initially apprehensive of the high price, but a small dedicated fan base bought it up
- Shortly after launch, Google drops the price by a $200
- People deride it's feature set, commenting on the things it "should" have included
- Despite that, the interface is very good
- A year later, the next version is released, fixing all the missing problems people complained about
- The item becomes a must-have tech, front page of Wired articles are written about it, etc, etc
The difference is the original iPhone was actually useful for things people actually wanted to do, and reasonably priced for those uses. They sold 1M units in the first quarter, making it one of the most popular phones in the world at launch.
Apple spent many years creating the iphone. First they created a tablet computer, Jobs rejected it as not ready, not good enough. They then built a phone based on ipod touch wheel. Jobs rejected it as not good enough. He let the tablet team try to build a phone and eventually after much work and improvements, finally shipped it because it actually worked well for consumers, and could do many things consumers wanted (phone, texts, music, web, etc)
Google got glass working and said, what's will consumers use it for? We don't know, so let's dump prototypes on developers and have them figure it out!
Eventually some company, probably Apple, will build something like Glass that consumers will want, but it won't be Google. They don't get consumers (except for high functioning types) and their product development/approval process is a mess.
- People were initially apprehensive of the high price, but a small dedicated fan base bought it up - Shortly after launch, Google drops the price by a $200 - People deride it's feature set, commenting on the things it "should" have included - Despite that, the interface is very good - A year later, the next version is released, fixing all the missing problems people complained about - The item becomes a must-have tech, front page of Wired articles are written about it, etc, etc