Dive Brief: 

• At SXSW this week, Google exec Astro Teller explained to the crowd that marketing was the downfall of Google Glass, which was shut down in January.  
• Teller is the head of Google X, the company's secretive lab that developed the Google Glass Explorer program to launch the smart glasses. 
• According to Teller, the failure of Google Glass was that it was a prototype—not the final product—and that marketers allowed too much attention to gravitate to the device. 

Dive Insight: 

A large aspect of the Google Glass downfall certainly appears to be related to marketing. The product hit the airways hard, and, for a while, seemed to be all that anyone in the techie community could talk about. What seems odd is that so little of the conversation seemed to portray that the Google Glass everyone was buzzing about what just a prototype.