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Google Buys Fitbit for $2.1B

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Re: Google Buys Fitbit for $2.1B

#441
post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don’t care about the product in so much as they care about the avenue to suck up more data, no?

Actually, no. I find this whole "they're selling your data" trope to be trite and just annoying at this point. I actually expect this more a reaction to Apple's pivot into health with the Apple Watch (people seem to forget the ex-Burberry CEO positioned the Apple Watch 1 as a luxury product--anyone remember the Apple Watch Edition for $10k?--health came later).

Right, but they’re not going to make money off the hardware, it’s going to be the services and ad targeting based off of the data. You think chromecast is to make a profit?

Re: Google Buys Fitbit for $2.1B

#442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Growth" = ?

Growth implies success, but you can be successful without growth. Just running a profitable business that's not losing market share is enough for most people's definition of success.

> Growth implies success

there's a very famous counterexample, namely cancer. are there others?

Re: Google Buys Fitbit for $2.1B

#443
post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who works at Google and who used to think these things were true, I can say that most of this is simply not true. We store hardly any data about users. Far from everything we get. Of the things we store, hardly anything gets stored longer than 30 days. So, no, we do not store a constant audio stream from everything in your house for all of eternity. We don't store every website you visit in chrome for all…

I think it is not about storing data but it is about learning from it. After you learn that I'm into fitness (or vice versa) and manage to serve me an article in a news feed and direct me to a health blog (served by Google ad sense), then job of the data is done.

Every model I know about is retained from scratch on the raw data as often as possible. There are several reasons for this:

Anything derived from PII is also PII unless it is anonymized by aggregation. Everything that is PII is aggressively TTL'd from the time of its collection from the user. The privacy review team knows what they're doing and won't let you get away with clever lifetime extension tricks. If there is a model specifically for you, it isn't going to be causally connected to anything that's aged out.

You can delete individual items and categories from your history. It would be an unimaginable pain in the ass, both mathematically and engineering-wise, to propagate the updates for individual deletions through an incremental pipeline. Even worse, I can't imagine how you'd possibly argue that such an operation would satisfy a legal deletion request (HIPPA, GDPR).

If you need to change your learner - say you found a bug in your training code - but all you have is a trained network and no data, you're screwed. You lose all your history and your user's search, spam-filtering, or voice recognition quality tanks, and people really care about those things. Pure incremental pipelines are incredibly brittle.

All of these problems are trivially solved by retraining from the raw data. Disk is cheap. Compute is cheap. Engineer time is expensive. Fancy infrastructure is expensive. Mathematicians are super expensive. Legal compliance is fantastically expensive and grows in cost incredibly quickly with increased engineering complexity.

I work at Google. My views are not the views of my employer and so on and so forth. I build data quality infra for the knowledge graph. I haven't worked on a ton of projects that dealt with PII for public users, but even so the privacy reviews for the tools and pipelines I build get reviewed and occasionally changes are demanded to protect tool-use information about employees that use the infrastructure that I build.

Re: Google Buys Fitbit for $2.1B

#444
post #31

https://news.yahoo.com/google-acquiring-fitbit-130619853.htm... "Google has struggled to make much of a dent in the wearables category..." "Fitbit, meanwhile, has had issues maintaining growth in recent years." Failure + failure = success?

A large established and (based on personal connections) loyal fan base is a failure? Growth is not everything. Growth isn’t even really sustainable over a long enough time span, and Fitbit’s been around awhile.

I've gone through two Fitbits and I'll never buy one again. Horrible customer service, horrible build quality, band just kept breaking under REALLY light usage, and they refused to replace it the 2nd time because I was out of warranty (even though it was a replacement band that lasted So yeah, I'm with others below, I'm looking at everything else. Just bought a Withings on a whim, and I'm really happy with it so far. May spring for the ECG model once it passes FDA approval.

Re: Google Buys Fitbit for $2.1B

#445
post #325

Oof. Goodbye Fitbit. Or, rather, welcome to the world where you're a pawn in internal politics. You may think you have a product but you don't. If your product survives (as in, Google didn't buy you just for the team), your product schedule will have to survive the interests of every other PA/team in Google. - You think you have software to run your products? Ha. The Android team will have a different opinion. - Even…

> as in, Google didn't buy you just for the team 2.1B isn't an acquihire. They want the customers, the team, and the manufacturing chain at the very least.

You missed "Data"

Re: Google Buys Fitbit for $2.1B

#446
post #325

Oof. Goodbye Fitbit. Or, rather, welcome to the world where you're a pawn in internal politics. You may think you have a product but you don't. If your product survives (as in, Google didn't buy you just for the team), your product schedule will have to survive the interests of every other PA/team in Google. - You think you have software to run your products? Ha. The Android team will have a different opinion. - Even…

> as in, Google didn't buy you just for the team 2.1B isn't an acquihire. They want the customers, the team, and the manufacturing chain at the very least.

Nah, what they want is me, ie. my data. I'm throwing away that fitbit (Google Personal information gathering device) and deleting my account. I'm informed enough to make that decision. Unfortunately thousands of users that just got sold out are not.

Fuck Google.

Re: Google Buys Fitbit for $2.1B

#448
post #31

https://news.yahoo.com/google-acquiring-fitbit-130619853.htm... "Google has struggled to make much of a dent in the wearables category..." "Fitbit, meanwhile, has had issues maintaining growth in recent years." Failure + failure = success?

This reminds me when Microsoft acquired Nokia for some reason.

That was a fantastic deal - for Nokia. They offloaded a large underperforming business whilst retaining all the valuable IP.

Re: Google Buys Fitbit for $2.1B

#450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair I don't think they are trying to make Pixel world-wide popular. If they did, they would sell it to more places (can't buy it here in Slovenia).

It's not about them trying , they don't have the competence that it takes to sell phones worldwide. It takes years to build relationships with the carriers -- where most phones are sold.

You mean the carriers they have relationships with for Fi? https://fi.google.com/about/international-rates/
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