I opened the article expecting to agree with it, then I got to the part about "does anyone use google flights instead of <i>travelocity</i>" and started to wonder if it was satire.
(2019)<p>Go buy a Fitbit today. Incredibly, against all odds according to this article, you still can. They make new ones every 6 months. They may not have the high-performance 60hz display tech of the AW, but look past that and its a <i>better</i> experience than AW (and I use an iPhone; I still prefer Fitbit).<p>Week long battery life on all models. Truly continuous heart rate monitoring (versus AW's "I'll take a reading maybe once every five minutes unless you're working out"). Great range of devices, from $50 trackers to $300 super-watches (ALL of which are still cheaper than the $400 giga-watches that Apple physically cant not make). Sleep tracking, without worrying about battery life?<p>Apple Watches are a jewelry phone companion. That's what they do, and that has value, for some people. I've never seen that value. My value is specifically in fitness; Fitbit is Just Better at that.
Here's why it doesn't matter that most things that Google buys turn into Garbage: Android.<p>People just really can't get their heads around a high risk / high reward investment strategy.
I agree and mostly disagree with the article.
Youtube was a good buy. Google bought a sat-imaging company that was a good buy. GSuite is good. Android and the Pixel are pretty okay. Google Scholar is dope. There are a lot of things Google is doing well. Google is full and smart people and they have done a lot of good stuff.<p>They also have struck out a lot on new technology ventures as the article mentions.<p>I like what Google is doing with their "X, moonshot factory" but I think, again, there are examples of picking strange things to sink a lot of money into (project Loon for instance).<p>But Google is hardly alone... MS, Yahoo, Facebook, etc. all have their venture failures to counter-balance successes.<p>Overall I think Google is a well run company and generally knows what they are doing on the balance.<p>Meanwhile,the article authors works at Zdnet... just saying.
[Meta]<p>I was wondering why a post from 2019 is appearing now. So I checked out the submitters history. This dude seems to have a hard on for Google's failures.<p>Said person has submitted "How Google will Collapse" no less than 5 times.
I'd love to know the internal strategy, assuming there is any. Because my first question before allowing a FitBit acquisition would be, "how do I know you're not just going to soon abandon your new toy, as was done with WearOS?" I mean, Google <i>had</i> a serviceable OS, that they just seem to have given up on.
To me, Google seems like a company completely run by engineers, and perhaps these techies in their silos compete so much, that they do want to "integrate" their stuff with broader teams.
Like say, Waze team does not want it's features integrated into GMaps.
How else is there so little order? A complete opposite of Apple it seems.
It's certainly possible that Google would kill FitBit, but I have a feeling they're looking far ahead and seeing the potential in being the predominant biometrics company. Biometrics may be the next frontier in how Silicon Valley will make money from our data. Run of the mill internet data mining has been done to death, but if Google can get everyone to wear devices that will provide health data to potential buyers, that seems like a huge win for them.<p>My suspicion as to why Google hasn't grabbed the accelerator on FitBit just yet is they're waiting for other companies like Oura to prematurely release their next "big thing" before they choose to blow that competition out of the water. There's a lot more that these companies could be doing with their fitness trackers, and it's a matter of who does it first at a large enough volume.
I don't know the fate of Fitbit, although I can guess, but the fate of Samsung's <i>anything</i> connected with Tizen is pure DOOM.<p>Why does Tizen spell DOOM? It is a huge C system that traffics exclusively in pointers to void. Yes: it is full of typedefs to void*. Do you need to know anything else?<p>So, in whichever way Google flubs Fitbit, at least Samsung is out of their way.<p>My question is, what has gone so very, very wrong at Samsung as to have led them to pick up Tizen?
It's certainly not the culture which kills many such aquisitions. It's the management, its PM's. It's not a culture problem, it's a structural problem. Culture is extremely good there.
Investing any time in a Google project is a risk, given their track record. I think I'm most sad about Project Ara. That seemed genuinely innovative and environmentally responsible. Axing Hangouts means I'll probably have to use Skype/Zoom/<insert malware here>. Working with Google on an academic project was terrible. They failed to deliver promised features in Google Earth Engine (i.e. the developers personally promised us). Result: I'm blocked from coding and open sourcing the features myself in another big data platform, and we have a completely unreproducible study because we had to rely on a bunch of awful hacks to get it to run.<p><a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25181" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25181</a><p><a href="https://killedbygoogle.com" rel="nofollow">https://killedbygoogle.com</a>
Ok so the article is garbage and the author loves to claim things without data just for the sake of cementing his opinions.<p>Past that, I think it would be interesting to see how Google is going to operate Fitbit moving forward. I personally never found Fitbit attractive (as a product or company) and for the time it was public neither did Wall Street.<p>I think companies like Fitbit and GoPro will always struggle to create a defensible position in their market. On one side you have Apple squeezing pressing with their cult-like brand and high quality, taking all the upper-end of the market.<p>On the other side you have the Chinese brands leveraging thier efficiency to create products that serve the lower-end of the market. They compete on price but also have a lot of upper room to apply their efficiencies and squeeze market out of the middle.<p>And who is the middle? A company like Fitbit that has to compete on both ends while trying to avoid cannibalization.<p>I think Google's opportunity is to fold that wearable business into their smartphone business and attempt to gain terrain with very tight integrations that can't be used by their Chinese competitors. I don't see any other way for them to win with this acquisition.
I've exited the Fitbit ecosystem since they started to charge to charge for the data service and I've been happy with Withings => Nokia => Withings.