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Jawbone is being liquidated as its CEO launches a related health startup

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Re: Jawbone is being liquidated as its CEO launches a related health startup

#81

Post by brlewis »

spiralpolitik wrote: post #79
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The days of consumer hardware company's access to startup capital is over. So I haven't worked at a hardware start-up but it seemed pretty difficult even before these companies to raise funding versus a pure software play. I'm not necessarily convinced this makes it easier or harder. Is there a specific reason you think it will be harder now? Also, for what it's worth, Fitbit and GoPro are still going. I'm convince…

Fitbit lost me when they refused to support HealthKit. As it stands I'm not sure they can escape their demise as the market transitions from limited function devices to multi function devices like the Apple Watch. They strike me as getting rolled over the same way Diamond, Archos, and Creative got crushed by the iPod. GoPro has a similar problem. Outside of special circumstances most smartphone cameras are now good e…

Actually the iPod was not a multi-function device. Palm Pilot was. But it turned out the specialized device was the one that transitioned into the multi-function device people wanted.

Re: Jawbone is being liquidated as its CEO launches a related health startup

#82

Post by tpowell »

_qbjt wrote: post #51

Sad to see. I can't speak on their wearables, but I've owned a Jawbone Big Jambox for four years and continue to use it to this day. It may not be the best compared to other bluetooth speakers, but it's a great product nonetheless.

The big jambox is still one of my favorite tech products I've ever owned. I think my red one belongs in MoMA. I finally caved and bought a UE Megaboom for its waterproof abilities, but it still doesn't sound better than my years old jambox. I think think they would have been a great acquisition for Amazon in their heyday.

Re: Jawbone is being liquidated as its CEO launches a related health startup

#83

Post by QML »

pcsanwald wrote: post #38
Hydraulix989 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so easy for Shenzhen to just copy them though. There's nothing defensible about hardware.

honest question: why then did no one copy the iPod, and no one has copied the iPhone with any success? as soon as the iPod came out way back in the day, the criticism was that it would soon be copied. No one ever did, and I worked in the music business at the time and was familiar with everything on the market. nothing ever came close, apple made a ton of money. it's a common thing to say that it's not defensible/can…

Superior hardware is not why people buy Apple products. The reason why it's hard to copy the iPod and iPhone is because it's hard to replicate the Apple brand. That's why there exists a lot of products that have the same functionality but not the same market revenue.

Re: Jawbone is being liquidated as its CEO launches a related health startup

#84

Post by rokhayakebe »

pcsanwald wrote: post #38
Hydraulix989 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so easy for Shenzhen to just copy them though. There's nothing defensible about hardware.

honest question: why then did no one copy the iPod, and no one has copied the iPhone with any success? as soon as the iPod came out way back in the day, the criticism was that it would soon be copied. No one ever did, and I worked in the music business at the time and was familiar with everything on the market. nothing ever came close, apple made a ton of money. it's a common thing to say that it's not defensible/can…

Copying the hardware is easy. Copying the ecosystem is a different challenge.

Re: Jawbone is being liquidated as its CEO launches a related health startup

#85

Post by dboreham »

pcsanwald wrote: post #38
Hydraulix989 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so easy for Shenzhen to just copy them though. There's nothing defensible about hardware.

honest question: why then did no one copy the iPod, and no one has copied the iPhone with any success? as soon as the iPod came out way back in the day, the criticism was that it would soon be copied. No one ever did, and I worked in the music business at the time and was familiar with everything on the market. nothing ever came close, apple made a ton of money. it's a common thing to say that it's not defensible/can…

Wasn't the iPod successful because you could get music online legally and easily for it?

Memory is hazy, but I seem to recall that without the iTunes store/application you had to either mess around ripping CDs, or use illegal downloads.

The one hardware innovation the iPod had was to use the teeny hard drives just coming on to the market at the time, when everyone else was using flash. Flash was the right solution ultimately, but for a while the HD worked around the problem that Flash was too small for a decent set of songs. Reputedly Jobs decided to take most of the volume supply of the small drives initially, preventing copycats from executing.

Re: Jawbone is being liquidated as its CEO launches a related health startup

#86

Post by harpiaharpyja »

nikanj wrote: post #58
pcsanwald wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

honest question: why then did no one copy the iPod, and no one has copied the iPhone with any success? as soon as the iPod came out way back in the day, the criticism was that it would soon be copied. No one ever did, and I worked in the music business at the time and was familiar with everything on the market. nothing ever came close, apple made a ton of money. it's a common thing to say that it's not defensible/can…

I'm under the impression Google/Android had pretty good success in copying the iPhone.

While factually true, I think that misses GP's point?

If you take a look at the context of their question, they are asking why no one has killed the iPod by copying it.

I suppose the answer is probably as said by rokhayakebe elsewhere in this thread, "Copying the hardware is easy. Copying the ecosystem is a different challenge."

Re: Jawbone is being liquidated as its CEO launches a related health startup

#87

Post by orbitingpluto »

draw_down wrote: post #57
dankohn1 wrote: post #56

Sorry to come off as a fanboy, but I blew through hundreds of dollars on multiple generations of Jawbone bluetooth headsets that never worked well enough. By contrast, my AirPods work incredibly well.

My Jambox is a frequent pain in my butt, and I only ever use it with one device.

Removing ALL voice files on the Jambox helps with reliability.

(Just keep hard and soft resetting until the voices disappear.)

Re: Jawbone is being liquidated as its CEO launches a related health startup

#88

Post by danso »

shas3 wrote: post #48
stingrae wrote: post #11

The days of consumer hardware company's access to startup capital is over. With so many high profile VC backed (Fitbit, GoPro, Hello, Juicero, Coin, Pearl, ect.) and kickstarted (Lily.ai, Pebble) failures, no one is willing to risk it.

I think the problem with hardware startups is more subtle. Unless you open up a fundamentally new market segment or find a niche application, your product is asking to be commodified. Smartwatches and fitness trackers were too obvious a category and Samsung, Apple, etc. were sure to swoop in and win. There really is no distinguishing feature for Jawbone or Fitbit. Other hardware startups like Anki are doing stuff tha…

What about hardware that doesn't so directly rely on an information network, such as sous vide (Anova was recently acquired [0]) and appliances like the Roomba? e.g. I'm sure Google engineers could eventually design a great sous vide, but not much about a sous vide does is amplified by the Google ecosystem. I suppose those kinds of things, as useful and coveted as they are by their fans, could reach elite status in their niche markets, but the highest potential valuation would be too small beans for some VC.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/06/anova-electrolux/

Re: Jawbone is being liquidated as its CEO launches a related health startup

#89

Post by ineedasername »

joshvm wrote: post #62
yueq wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smart hardware belongs to big players only. A hardware company needs to deal with, Design, Engineering, Marketing, Production, Sales, Customer services, etc... If any of those step is messed up, the product is over. This is why I don't recommend anyone to get involved in this kind of business.

The reasons that these products fail is usually feature creep. Whether due to Kickstarter stretch goals, or pressure from VCs, people don't know when to draw the line and ship. That's followed closely by underestimating costs and under-pricing products. After that you have the risk of developing the product you want, not the product that everyone else needs. I would never suggest anyone starts a hardware business unt…

As a complete outsider, my sense is that things like under costing are partially the result of modern tear-down cost estimates. Where you get a new phone, open it up, and write an article that the $700 msrp iPhone "only costs $135 to build!". No mention of scale to get those component costs, labor cost to assemble, labor cost to design, lengthy prototype phases to idepedently test new ideas and then integration test... just cost of parts. It would be like costing a cloud startup from idea to product solely based on your expected AWS charges.

Re: Jawbone is being liquidated as its CEO launches a related health startup

#90

Post by ma2rten »

hammock wrote: post #21
stingrae wrote: post #11

The days of consumer hardware company's access to startup capital is over. With so many high profile VC backed (Fitbit, GoPro, Hello, Juicero, Coin, Pearl, ect.) and kickstarted (Lily.ai, Pebble) failures, no one is willing to risk it.

Why do the big corps succeed (Google, Apple, Amazon) and the startups fail. I guess all three of those have had failed hardware products and successful one as well. So they can afford a failure? Startups just need more runway?

I would say:

Amazon is putting large ads on the amazon.com homepage for it's products. I don't think if a startup had build exactly the same product they would have been succesful.

Apple had Steve Jobs, who had both a great vision and a cult of personality that made people buy apple products. Apple didn't have another major successful new product since Steve passed.

Google doesn't really have that many successful hardware products, except maybe Chromecast (which benefits integrations with youtube, chrome, etc.), Pixel (which benefited from good timing, the biggest competitor had to recall their flagship phone) and Home (which has less market share than alexa and benefits from Google's NLP technogloy).

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