Google’s digital glasses, rejected by consumers three years ago as an elite, privacy-invading toy, have picked up a lunchpail and gone to work.

The research arm that produced Google Glass, known as X and led by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, has focused on a corporate version targeted at workers ranging from doctors to warehouse managers.

But to create meaningful revenue for its parent company, Google will have to find a way to get the product into a market in which its only experience is selling cloud computing and digital advertising.

Google in the past has sold the unit for a price of $1,500, while a report from the market research firm Forrester Research predicts 14.4 million American workers will be using them by 2025.

Given those assumptions, the market for augmented-reality glasses like Google Glass could be worth between $1 billion to $2 billion in eight years — if the product captures between 50 percent and 100 percent of it.

By way of comparison, Alphabet booked $90.3 billion in revenue last year, and Google’s non-advertising businesses (including enterprise and Google Play) collectively booked just over $10 billion in 2016.

An email from CNBC to Google asking for the latest price on the device was not immediately returned.

To get there, Google will need to either find a distribution partner (or partners) with experience getting hardware into the enterprise or find a new way to market them at small- to mid-sized businesses.

Its current plan, according to a blog post by Jay Kothari, who leads the Google Glass project, is “collaborating with the Google Cloud team and our partners to help customers across a variety of business sectors make the most of Glass.”

After years of trying, however, Google’s cloud unit remains a distant third behind rivals Amazon and Microsoft.

Source: Tech CNBC
Best case, Google Glass for work could add billion a year to Alphabet's annual revenue