Fitbit is doomed: Here's why everything Google buys turns to garbage (2019)

https://www.zdnet.com/article/fitbit-is-doomed-why-everything-google-buys-turns-to-garbage/

by partingshots • 5 years ago

97 74 5 years ago

trollied• 5 years ago

Article is from 2019.

chanmad29• 5 years ago

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.

Judgmentality2• 5 years ago

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.

asdfasgasdgasdg• 5 years ago

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.

CarelessExpert• 5 years ago

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.

iujjkfjdkkdkf2• 5 years ago

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.

ballenf• 5 years ago

In 2019, I'd argue that was true.

ar_lan• 5 years ago

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.

ghaff2• 5 years ago

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.

pards• 5 years ago

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).

DavidAdams• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

nicbou• 5 years ago

Google Travel was also great if you wanted to get a quick overview of what to see in a new city.

mikestew• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

v7p1Qbt1im2• 5 years ago

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.

vagrantJin• 5 years ago

The price of success.

1996• 5 years ago

Google is the new Yahoo: where acquired startups go to die.

milesward• 5 years ago

What a weird hit piece. The counterpoints are... legion. Youtube? Doubleclick? Android?

taeric• 5 years ago

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.

red_trumpet• 5 years ago

The article clearly distinguishes acquirations in the last 12 years, and before that.

ruined• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

Android and Youtube are garbage.

fallingknife• 5 years ago

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.

asah2• 5 years ago

...and YouTube

asah2• 5 years ago

...and Applied Semantics

https://digiday.com/media/today-in-history-google-buys-appli...

easton_s• 5 years ago

Firebase also survived and has thrived as a brand.

nharada• 5 years ago

I'm not convinced on all of these examples. I don't actually know but I suspect DeepMind has paid for itself by now.

ncmncm• 5 years ago

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?

ehvatum• 5 years ago

Wait until you write your first win32 program! WPARAM and LPARAM! Integer or pointer or unused?

lgomezma• 5 years ago

Well VirusTotal was acquired by Google and is thriving, so not everything turns to garbage.

ravenstine• 5 years ago

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.

danaris3• 5 years ago

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.

cashsterling• 5 years ago

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.

willtemperley3• 5 years ago

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

danaris3• 5 years ago

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

willtemperley3• 5 years ago

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.

015a• 5 years ago

(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• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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?

nradov2• 5 years ago

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"?

anonuser123456• 5 years ago

I trust Apple over Epic. Hell, I trust Apple over my doctor.

rufus_foreman2• 5 years ago

What I want is a fitness tracker that doesn't require me to create an account or store data in the cloud, where I can just transfer the data to my computer using USB or Bluetooth or something like that. Apparently I'm the only one because such a thing doesn't seem to exist.

angrais2• 5 years ago

Such things do exist, particularly for medical purposes. What type of "fitness tracker" are you after? Explain more and I am certain that i can offer at least three sensing devices that suit your needs that record data offline.

abdabab• 5 years ago

Apple Watch is more of a mini-computer with apps than a heartbeat tracker. You can install separate fitness tracker apps for tracking fitness.

A heartbeat tracker doesn’t provide the same amount of value.

rurban• 5 years ago

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.

nodesocket• 5 years ago

We can add Nest to this list. My Nest stuff hasn’t seen updates in years.

whoisjuan• 5 years ago

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.

esturk• 5 years ago

[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• 5 years ago

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.

nikolay2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

I have no idea why Nokia sold Withings after acquiring it. I’m glad Withings still exists. Such a great watch maker.

nikolay2• 5 years ago

Totally! I can't live w/o my Withings watch with the Nokia logo. It's so energy efficient, it wakes me up, tracks my physical activity and heartbeat - it's an engineering marvel!

Fitbit is doomed: Here's why everything Google buys turns to garbage (2019)

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