...and all the Fitbit data on ~100,000,000 people.
Google Buys Fitbit for $2.1B
261–270 of 784 posts
Re: Google Buys Fitbit for $2.1B
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
80-90% of Google's revenue derives from organizing your personal information and selling ad products derived from it. It's not a direct transfer of data into cash. I'm not sure people really need biometrics data to advertise to you more effectively.
Well... what else does Fitbit's cloud store? How often you exercise? Where you do it? What sorts of exercise? Check out these running shorts, keep cool in the summer! Carbon fibre kayak paddles are on sale! Or, when it's noticed a lull, and kmows you're influencable: Hire this personal trainer to get you back exercising!
Yes hiring personal trainer ads is the market Google was so desperately after all these years
Re: Google Buys Fitbit for $2.1B
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm confused by this comment. To me, Garmin is the only company here that does a good job with the "hardcore fitness" market, but why does that matter in the first place? The better market to compete in is the "fitness amateur" market, which I see as being many times the former in size. Fitbit competes well here, and Google has no offering to speak of. Seems like a successful diversification move for Alphabet's portf…
I think the point you're missing is everyone levels up. Even amateur fitness users want a better fitness wearable. Which is why Garmin and Apple have the lion's share of the market. Fitbit is still seen as a step tracker level device, even if they do more. Garmin wearables are laser focused to the workout market and most buyers seem to lust over the idea of needing a more capable fitness device. Garmin and Apple both…
Apple Watch battery lasts a day at most. My Fitbit can go without a charge for 6 days. Fitbit offers sleep tracking.. Apple Watch doesn’t natively, and even if it did, you still have to charge it at night. Fitbits are more minimalistic. They’re so nice. I don’t want a Garmin wearable. A lot of people who use Fitbits don’t use them for the fitness aspect. We use them to avoid the sedentary lifestyle by viewing our steps, and occasionally going on a run. I hope Google doesn’t ruin Fitbit. But judging by their past moves, my Charge 3 will be useless in a matter of 2-3 years
Re: Google Buys Fitbit for $2.1B
#264Garmin and Apple have the fitness market covered. Fitbit never had the hardcore fitness market Garmin executed into and Apple has always had a product that works well across the wearable and fitness. Between these two companies I can't imagine there's much of a niche Fitbit does better. On the extreme hardcore triathlon user even Garmin has taken a lot of market from Suunto and the like. I've owned a handful of Garmi…
I'm confused by this comment. To me, Garmin is the only company here that does a good job with the "hardcore fitness" market, but why does that matter in the first place? The better market to compete in is the "fitness amateur" market, which I see as being many times the former in size. Fitbit competes well here, and Google has no offering to speak of. Seems like a successful diversification move for Alphabet's portf…
> "fitness amateur" market ... Fitbit competes well here
I'm not so sure about that.
For simple activity monitoring by way of step counting, movement time, sleep time, and similar simple metrics, there is a lot of competition. This isn't just from the extremely cheap (but probably not very good) options, there are several devices out there at about half the price of FitBit's cheapest that seem to do the job just as well (caveat: I'm basing this mainly on anecdotal evidence from friends/family and online).
For very little more than their cheapest watch & step-counter you can get a TomTom sports watch which has built-in GPS for accurate run/cycle/other tracking, breadcrumb mapping, and so on. The price difference for adding a wrist-based heard-rate monitor is about the same in both ranges.
Moving away from the casual fitness market towards people like me[†], their only GPS capable device[‡] costs more than Garmin's 235 which is a more capable device, more than twice the price of the aforementioned TomTom units, in fact you can usually get a Fenix 3 for the same price as the Ioinc, and there are a couple of other well regarded competitors with similar feature sets at that sort of price level too.
Their key advantage is name recognition, at the casual end of the market at least, though that doesn't necessarily help. People often call cheap-n-dirty activity trackers "cheap fitbits" rather than an activity tracker, watch, or other name including the products official name, but they still buy them instead of the actual fitbit. They did in the past seem to have that part of the market cornered, but seem to have let it slip considerably in recent years.
(NOTE: I'm in the UK. Relative pricing of manufacturers/models may differ in different markets.)
[†] I'm a recreational runner, far from the top of any particular class though in recent years I've knocked of a couple road marathons and multi-day trail challenges so I consider myself to be good at putting one foot in front of the other without tripping over either!
[‡] I generally discount phone-based GPS tracking by wrist-mounted devices due to the battery drain on the phone, and I never found it terribly reliable though that may have improved since
Re: Google Buys Fitbit for $2.1B
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know that that analogy follows, because agglomerations of thousands of people doing a complex task really aren't that comparable to two people doing one simple task. Taking one example I know of second-hand: My brother worked for the #2 company in his industry at the time they acquired #3 in an effort to overtake the market leader. It worked out disastrously. It turns out that #3, despite being the less profi…
> But it just isn't that simple - this was a large multinational with ossified internal procedures that were baked into the very infrastructure (both physical and IT) of the company. Things were never going to change overnight. I mean, it could have been that simple: #2 could have just entirely liquidated #3 and taken over their brands, marques, and physical assets like buildings, without retaining a single employee…
> I mean, it could have been that simple: #2 could have just entirely liquidated #3 and taken over their brands, marques, and physical assets like buildings, without retaining a single employee or officer of #3
Oh my goodness.
So, they would have bought this existing large multinational, with a huge existing client list, base of installed product, all sorts of SLAs and support contracts, all sorts of infrastructure for supporting all of that, etc, and immediately fired everyone who knows how to manage it all!?!?!? And what, then just immediately hire several thousand people to replace them 24 hours later, and have every single one of them up and running and productive in a jiffy?
> This would mean that #3 would be essentially erased from the marketplace at the moment of acquisition
Yep. . . followed by #2 being erased from the marketplace by lawsuits within a year or two.
Re: Google Buys Fitbit for $2.1B
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have seen a lot more Fitbits then Garmins or Apple Watches. I would argue that the hardcore market, while the most loyal, isn't the largest revenue generator. It's everyone who wants something "smart" without breaking the bank (or tied to iOS).
Fitbits are a quarter of the price; same reason you see way more Androids than iPhones.
I wouldn’t have bought an Apple Watch even if I wanted to spend the extra money. Battery life, minimal build, and sleep tracking are the selling points for many people.
Re: Google Buys Fitbit for $2.1B
#267So, the concerning thing is, if Company A has been collecting data on users but not doing much with it, then gets absorbed by Company B who is notorious for infringing on everyone's privacy, do users even get a choice to prevent their data (that was collected by Company A) from being seen/used by Company B?
Refer to what has happened (albeit slowly) with Nest... basically as an end user you get no say or choice in what happens to your data, and you can either give up on it or accept the new terms.
Re: Google Buys Fitbit for $2.1B
#268And here I was considering getting fitbit... Could anyone suggest an alternative? I really have no trust that google will keep promise not to use the data. edit: thanks all, I have too look into it all back home.
Mi 3 or 4
IMHO giving your health data to China is worse than giving to Google.
Re: Google Buys Fitbit for $2.1B
#269And here I was considering getting fitbit... Could anyone suggest an alternative? I really have no trust that google will keep promise not to use the data. edit: thanks all, I have too look into it all back home.
Garmin vívosmart® 4.
This! I had Fitbit before, but it stopped syncing (common story). I love the Garmin - nicer hardware, software, flawless syncing, lots of integrations with other apps which is nice.
Re: Google Buys Fitbit for $2.1B
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think this analogy really works here, the reason the Nokia acquisition didn't work is because it was too late. Microsoft was simply too late to make the necessary changes to compete on the OS level and they kept changing development kits entirely driving away developers and consumers.
I don't see how it could have been too late. Nokia switched to MS way before the acquisition. It wasn't successful for a lot of reasons and I don't think an earlier acquisition would have really changed that.
I didn't say the acquisition was too late, I said Microsoft pivoted too slowly in mobile.