[HN Gopher] Fitbit is doomed: Here's why everything Google buys ...
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Fitbit is doomed: Here's why everything Google buys turns to
garbage (2019)
Author : partingshots
Score : 79 points
Date : 2021-03-12 16:50 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.zdnet.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.zdnet.com)
| nikolay wrote:
| 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.
| nojvek wrote:
| I have no idea why Nokia sold Withings after acquiring it. I'm
| glad Withings still exists. Such a great watch maker.
| milesward wrote:
| What a weird hit piece. The counterpoints are... legion. Youtube?
| Doubleclick? Android?
| ruined wrote:
| youtube has perhaps an even bigger malinformation problem than
| most social media. doubleclick was purely an anticompetitive
| acquisition, and was never a net positive for the internet
| anyway. and they are doing their best to wall in and destroy
| all the things that made android a good choice over ios, while
| falling behind in all the areas ios is advancing.
| leetcrew wrote:
| youtube certainly has its problems, but I wouldn't call it
| garbage. just yesterday I came across this gem [0] that
| really changed my perception of pop music (I'm one of those
| people who ordinarily wouldn't listen to anything that plays
| on the radio). I was taken aback by the level of effort,
| knowledge, and production that went into it. content like
| this simply did not exist fifteen years ago.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-XSTSnqXxo
| ppf wrote:
| Android and Youtube are garbage.
| taeric wrote:
| I'm not sure that phrase fits with your examples. Google has
| some products it has purchased that are doing well. But... Only
| a small number compared to the things they have purchased that
| they killed. Such that the legion is likely on the other side.
| Now, they have some behemoths that they bought.
|
| The general feeling I get, is if a product I have bought had
| the parent company change hands, I can expect greatly
| diminished support.
|
| With Google, it is super frustrating. They seem to gas light
| products/markets, and then just walk away when the initial
| flare up doesn't immediately take off. I liken it to trying to
| make a camp fire by just throwing kindling at the fire pit and
| then not doing anything else.
| canadianfella wrote:
| Google has earned far more on the small number of successes
| than lost on the large number of failures.
|
| Edit: I know my comments aren't always great, bit can someone
| please confirm that I'm not shadow banned?
| red_trumpet wrote:
| The article clearly distinguishes acquirations in the last 12
| years, and before that.
| iujjkfjdkkdkf wrote:
| I opened the article expecting to agree with it, then I got to
| the part about "does anyone use google flights instead of
| _travelocity_ " and started to wonder if it was satire.
| DavidAdams wrote:
| I had the exact same thought: #1 I use Google Flights all the
| time. Daily, sometimes. #2 Google Flights and Travelocity
| aren't comparable in their utility.
| Twixes wrote:
| Flights is my fourth favorite Google product after Search,
| Maps, and Translate. I used it all the time when travel was a
| bit more feasible and I hope to make use of it a lot in the
| future. As a traveler, it's powerful.
| ar_lan wrote:
| > does anyone use google flights instead of travelocity
|
| Yes, absolutely. I don't even know what Travelocity is :)
|
| What surprises me is that people still use Expedia.
|
| Agreed, this is probably satire.
| ghaff wrote:
| Why wouldn't people use Expedia? Honest question. I don't use
| it a lot; I usually book air and hotel direct. I do use other
| services as well on occasion but Expedia can be useful for
| discovery if nothing else.
| iujjkfjdkkdkf wrote:
| All personal anecdotes but:
|
| Flights - wierd fare classes that dont have the normal
| options re changes and cancellation, no recourse through
| the airline if there are any issues
|
| Customer service - hours on hold, and you have to call them
| to change anything, the hotel/ airline wants nothing to do
| with you
|
| Hotels- treated like a 3rd class citizen, no points, cant
| use your status if you have it, worst room, I have been
| charged extra "urban fees" at the hotel on these fares.
| Hotels (business hotels anyway) dont want you to use
| Expedia and treat you like shit if you do.
|
| I expect they have a niche for infrequent, budget
| sensitive, travelers as I have seen deals on there, but if
| you travel regularly, or expect plans to change, stay away.
|
| What I like about google flights is how minimally
| commercial it is, it really looks just like its reporting
| fares, not flashing promoted bundles of things in your
| face.
| nucleardog wrote:
| I've had exactly one experience with Expedia. I'm firmly
| in the "book directly" camp for all the reasons you
| mention but my wife booked a hotel in Beijing with them.
|
| We travel from where we are in China to Beijing, show up
| to the hotel, and they have no idea who we are. They're
| really apologetic but they show us the Expedia interface
| they have that definitely doesn't have us on it, we
| double-check our booking and make sure we're at the right
| place, etc.
|
| So we call Expedia. They're like "Oh so sorry, we'll have
| to call the hotel. Please hold." They come back and say
| no one answered. We're standing there with the front desk
| staff in front of the phone and we all saw it very
| obviously not ring. We confirm the number with the staff,
| they say they'll try again. Still nothing. They hang up
| on us.
|
| We call the hotel's number from our own phone, it rings.
|
| We call Expedia back and try again. They try calling the
| hotel a few more times and finally tell us there's
| nothing they can do. So I tell them to just cancel the
| reservation then since it's obviously useless.
|
| They tell us they'll have to escalate it to some other
| department who will contact the hotel and determine
| whether we're eligible to cancel without penalty due to
| the short timeframe for the cancellation. I told them if
| the charge hit my credit card I'd dispute it, but they're
| welcome to do whatever they feel is necessary.
|
| So in summary: Booked hotel. They did not put booking
| through. They were unable to rectify the situation. They
| told us they may choose to charge us anyway. It cost me
| like $15 in international roaming charges.
| randycupertino wrote:
| > What I like about google flights is how minimally
| commercial it is, it really looks just like its reporting
| fares, not flashing promoted bundles of things in your
| face.
|
| Exactly! I use it because it is the craigslist of
| flights. I don't want to be sold a zillion things, I want
| to simply plug in the trips I'm considering and view the
| best available options. Flights is great for that!
| andi999 wrote:
| Last time I used it, you get results shown which eventually
| you can't buy, and I remember surprising surcharges (like
| for paying with cc or so). Was so annoyed never used it
| again.
| ghaff wrote:
| They can have some dark patterns but it seems to work
| well enough for me when I use it.
| pards wrote:
| TD Bank in Canada require the use of Expedia to redeem travel
| points on some of their credit cards. They run their own
| version of it, too, under the sketchy "tdrewards.com" domain
| (instead of the unspoofable rewards.td.com).
| ballenf wrote:
| In 2019, I'd argue that was true.
| rtrdea wrote:
| I've used Google flights since it was that other company they
| bought
| [deleted]
| nharada wrote:
| I'm not convinced on all of these examples. I don't actually know
| but I suspect DeepMind has paid for itself by now.
| whoisjuan wrote:
| Ok so the article is garbage and the author loves to claim things
| without data just for the sake of cementing his opinions.
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| And who is the middle? A company like Fitbit that has to compete
| on both ends while trying to avoid cannibalization.
|
| 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.
| mikestew wrote:
| 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 _had_ a
| serviceable OS, that they just seem to have given up on.
| ortusdux wrote:
| Strangely, Samsung is toying with the idea of switching to
| WearOS in their new Galaxy 4 watch. I did buy a Galaxy 3, and
| even though I own a Galaxy phone, I did not like the experience
| and eventually returned the watch. I was optimistic about the
| possibility of a new OS on the 4th gen, until I looked into the
| current state of WearOS. I would like to imagine that google
| might use some of their newly acquired talent and IP to revamp
| WearOS in time for the launch of the Galaxy 4, but I am not
| holding my breath.
|
| https://www.tomsguide.com/news/samsung-galaxy-watch-4-switch...
| TheAdamAndChe wrote:
| It seems to me like their goal with FitBit is data acquisition.
| They already have a massive amount of location and purchase
| information from millions if not billions of people around the
| planet from Android, Google Search, and YouTube. If they can
| get information on health status too, they can probably further
| improve their advertising system to improve ad relevancy. They
| can use that information to make targeted investments. Plus
| that data would be worth an incredible amount to insurers and
| three-letter security agencies.
| v7p1Qbt1im wrote:
| Even if Google were to actually sell data (which they don't
| and never have. Selling targeting is way more profitable).
| They straight up legally couldn't with health data because of
| regulation like HIPAA.
| nradov wrote:
| Google isn't a HIPAA covered entity in this context. The
| data gathered by consumer fitness trackers isn't legally
| considered protected health information under current
| federal regulation.
| v7p1Qbt1im wrote:
| Oh. I wasn't aware. Good to know, thx. That seems like an
| oversight.
| esturk wrote:
| [Meta]
|
| 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.
|
| Said person has submitted "How Google will Collapse" no less than
| 5 times.
| arunc wrote:
| Before anyone jumps on to trashing that person, may be the
| person didn't realize it themselves and your comment would give
| them a chance to realize it and remove the bias if any.
| 015a wrote:
| (2019)
|
| 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 _better_ experience than AW (and
| I use an iPhone; I still prefer Fitbit).
|
| 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?
|
| 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.
| nltrace wrote:
| Why do people give their health data to Silicon Valley
| corporations? I just don't get it.
|
| Didn't people train before the advent of "smart" watches?
| toomuchredbull wrote:
| I actually have the opposite complaint. I would like my
| doctor to have access to info from my Apple Watch. Certainly
| I trained before a smart watch but I didn't necessarily know
| how fast I was going, if my metrics (like v02 max) were
| improving, how its affecting my heart, etc. Why would I care
| if Tim Cook could theoretically look up my resting bpm?
| mrkeen wrote:
| Substitute 'Tim Cook' for 'law enforcement',
| 'theoretically' for 'warrantless fishing expedition',
| 'resting bpm' for 'location' & 'known associates' & 'search
| terms' & 'browser history'.
| moistbar wrote:
| > Why would I care if Tim Cook could theoretically look up
| my resting bpm?
|
| Because a company can tie the timestamp of your BPM reading
| to your activity on your phone/desktop/what have you and
| judge your emotional response to whatever you're doing at
| the time. Psychotic as this may sound, it opens the door
| for a lot of particularly Orwellian mass surveillance under
| the guise of targeted ads. They wouldn't be knowing just
| what you do or buy, they'd know how you feel about it too.
| angelbar wrote:
| Insurance?.... Job seeking?....
| anonuser123456 wrote:
| I trust Apple over Epic. Hell, I trust Apple over my doctor.
| nradov wrote:
| Some of the largest players in the fitness tracker market
| such as Garmin, Suunto, Samsung, and Coros are hardly
| "Silicon Valley" companies. Sure it's possible to train
| without a smart watch, but having one makes it much easier to
| follow a structured training program, measure your progress,
| and share data with coaches and friends.
|
| Didn't people travel before the advent of the "wheel"?
| vagrantJin wrote:
| The price of success.
| [deleted]
| nodesocket wrote:
| We can add Nest to this list. My Nest stuff hasn't seen updates
| in years.
| cashsterling wrote:
| 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.
|
| They also have struck out a lot on new technology ventures as the
| article mentions.
|
| 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).
|
| But Google is hardly alone... MS, Yahoo, Facebook, etc. all have
| their venture failures to counter-balance successes.
|
| Overall I think Google is a well run company and generally knows
| what they are doing on the balance.
|
| Meanwhile,the article authors works at Zdnet... just saying.
| ncmncm wrote:
| I don't know the fate of Fitbit, although I can guess, but the
| fate of Samsung's _anything_ connected with Tizen is pure DOOM.
|
| 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?
|
| So, in whichever way Google flubs Fitbit, at least Samsung is out
| of their way.
|
| My question is, what has gone so very, very wrong at Samsung as
| to have led them to pick up Tizen?
| 1996 wrote:
| Google is the new Yahoo: where acquired startups go to die.
| willtemperley wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25181
|
| https://killedbygoogle.com
| danaris wrote:
| Hangouts is the one I'm most personally frustrated by, too, but
| what I'd really love to see rise up to replace it is an open
| _protocol_ with a reference implementation client that 's
| similar to Discord (broadly, anyone can create a "server"
| that's independent of actual physical servers, each server can
| have more-or-less arbitrary channels, most importantly _both
| text and voice /video_, supporting inlining of images and some
| other nice modern QoL features that, say, IRC lacks). It
| frustrates me no end that all our common "modern"
| communications platforms belong entirely to one company or
| another, and will only be allowed to exist as long as those
| companies can continue leveraging them to maintain an income
| (one way or another).
|
| I've heard _some_ good things about Matrix[0], but I 'm even a
| bit wary of any "open" protocol that's backed by a single for-
| profit company. However, I don't know of anything out there
| that's better right now.
|
| The trouble, as always, is getting the people you want to
| communicate with to agree to use it, too...
|
| [0] https://matrix.org
| willtemperley wrote:
| Matrix is interesting, I'll have a look, thanks. Signal is
| the only video call capable chat app I know of I would
| genuinely trust.
|
| Unfortunately the killer P2P protocol, BitTorrent, has been a
| victim of its own success, I imagine it'd ge tricky to get a
| BitTorrent protocol based video app into the Apple App Store,
| for instance.
|
| I suppose it's the App Store in question that defines the
| limitations of a P2P video/chat app, I realise I don't have
| enough knowledge of those limitations to comment further.
| danaris wrote:
| I'm not sure if BitTorrent is a reasonable solution to the
| problem of P2P video _chatting_ , since the power of
| BitTorrent is in having many nodes all sharing the same
| content and able to send parts of it to a new node seeking
| that content.
|
| Realtime chat doesn't seem amenable to that type of
| optimization.
|
| In any case, I don't think the problem here is primarily in
| the technologies being used; I wouldn't exactly call real-
| time video chat a _solved_ problem (I 'm sure there's room
| for plenty more optimizations in it over the next few
| decades), but at least as I understand it, it's definitely
| one for which there are plenty of available open-source
| stacks available.
|
| The problem is in a) designing a robust protocol/API that
| can be implemented by many clients and servers (that
| fulfills my basic requirements above of "basically Discord,
| but not controlled by one company"), b) writing a solid
| reference implementation of both the client and the server,
| and c) (perhaps most importantly) getting other people to
| adopt it so it's more than just Failed Competing Standard
| #27.
| willtemperley wrote:
| Looks like BitTorrent tried it, with Bleep [0], but it
| disappeared in 2015 leaving barely a trace. I agree with
| all your points though.
|
| [0] https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-
| bittorr...
| ravenstine wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
| danaris wrote:
| > Biometrics may be the next frontier in how Silicon Valley
| will make money from our data.
|
| If that's the case, it's only likely to be so for a very few
| years before we start seeing at least the more progressive
| jurisdictions like California putting severe restrictions on
| how that data can be used--not just "with consent", but "at
| all", given how easy it is for them to tack any kind of "and we
| get to sell all your data" clause into a user agreement.
| rurban wrote:
| 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.
| trollied wrote:
| Article is from 2019.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Here's why it doesn't matter that most things that Google buys
| turn into Garbage: Android.
|
| People just really can't get their heads around a high risk /
| high reward investment strategy.
| asah wrote:
| ...and YouTube
| asah wrote:
| ...and Applied Semantics
|
| https://digiday.com/media/today-in-history-google-buys-
| appli...
| easton_s wrote:
| Firebase also survived and has thrived as a brand.
| beagle3 wrote:
| As did Waze.
|
| Google maps, google docs and a few others were also bought,
| but have been integrated and are not considered trash by
| the majority of people - quite the opposite.
| lgomezma wrote:
| Well VirusTotal was acquired by Google and is thriving, so not
| everything turns to garbage.
| chanmad29 wrote:
| 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.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| Google is very much a company run by PMs. It's just the PMs are
| rewarded for launching products, and not maintaining them. In
| other words, the larger the Google graveyard, the more bonuses
| are being handed out. People are doing what they're being
| incentivized to do.
|
| Google's culture is fundamentally broken. I don't think it's
| possible for them to fix this. I'll probably take a short
| position on Google in the medium future.
| CarelessExpert wrote:
| Eh, I'd hold on that short position for now.
|
| To me the real question is: what will come of these antitrust
| investigations into their targeted ad business?
|
| That's the cash cow upon which their stock price is
| ultimately based. They've been able to get away with a _lot_
| of failures because ultimately advertising is such a huge
| business for them.
|
| But if there's any move to break apart that business or
| regulate it in a way to create more competition in the
| market, to me that could be the thing that could start to
| undermine their share price.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| I think a better question is how much of online advertising
| is just straight-up bullshit?
|
| https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-2/
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| I wouldn't take a short position in a company based on the
| frequent closure of trivial, money-losing sub-ventures,
| especially if their main money-making businesses were healthy
| and growing. It'd be like shorting Apple based on the poor
| performance of the XServe business in 2009.
|
| Also, it can be really expensive to hold on to a short
| position for a long time so it might not be a good idea even
| if there were more substantial reasons to take one.
| stinkytaco wrote:
| Especially when they have tons of counter examples:
| Android, Youtube, Gmail, Docs, Drive (and all the
| educational contracts those include), Cloud... I'd be
| willing to bet that if I wanted to use the Internet and not
| interact with Google I probably couldn't do it for long. At
| the very least I'm willing to bet that some organization I
| need to interact with is using Gmail for Business.
| [deleted]
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