511–520 of 784 posts
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Fitbit also comes with users, brand recognition and goodwill.
How valuable is the brand these days? It's certainly already declining, and many people consider their products inferior quality. I am currently wearing a fitbit and have already had to deal with it not working twice today, and it's not even noon.
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Google needs a proper smartphone-like smartwatch and they needed a cheap buy to speed up the dev process. They don't need the Garmin market because they want a smartwatch on every person and not on every athletic person. I was always hoping smart glasses come after smart phones but I guess these are even smaller and need even more time than watches to become efficient enough to cover for the small battery.
If this is really the driver behind Google buying them, what do you think are the odds that most - if not all - of the non-watch FitBit products are eventually discontinued? That's how they built up a following, with devices that were inexpensive, and did a few things well, but given the current environment, Google doesn't seem like they are interested in that market.
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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 ste…
>Apple Watch doesn’t natively, and even if it did, you still have to charge it at night The way around that is to charge it earlier in the evening before bed - I do that and it lasts me easily until the following evening. But it's a shame the device doesn't cover sleep natively.
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there are no ads on YT
What? A giant front page ad, one to two pre-roll ads (with accompanying banner ad in the sidebar), semitransparent text ads on the bottom of the video, and another video ad every 4-10 minutes in the video. Personally I think they are great at finding interesting and relevant ads, which is why I don't block the ads. Howerver I hear the experience varies.
Vic Gundotra (VP Google) said back when Microsoft bought Nokia that "two turkeys don't make an eagle". Google officially has become the Microosft of the mid 2000s. Lack of direction and innovation, buying up companies just for the sake of it. Here is a link to Google's anology: https://www.techspot.com/news/42338-google-attacks-nokia-and...
Google has a long and successful history of acquisitions, as also a long history of lack of direction and headless actions even in their youth days. It's probably just natural for a company with too much money to invest that way.
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Unfortunately Google is known for its terrible customer support and sunsetting services early. It could go either way.
Why is Google know for its terrible customer support? I have had great experiences with their support analysts in the past, specially concerning Nexus/Pixel devices and Google admin accounts. I never had to wait more than a few minutes to talk to someone and they are always polite and tried to help as much as they can, but this is all anecdotal. Could you give me examples of their poor customer support? I know that t…
I had the USB-C connector on my Pixel 3XL fail. This failure is covered under warranty. I was in Asia at the time. I asked for a replacement, but they cannot ship internationally (even if I paid for it). So I had them ship it to my dad's place, he was going to be meeting me in Thailand.
Well, they shipped it to the wrong address, and by the time it was returned to sender and they sent my dad another one, he'd already left for Thailand.
When he returned home, he mailed the replacement phone back to Google.
When I returned from Asia, I requested another replacement. Well, my account had gotten into some state where they couldn't issue a replacement. I was escalated to a higher level of tech and told to wait. I waited. And waited. 2 months past. My account was finally "fixed" but by then I'd left for a 3 month trip to Europe.
I had them ship the replacement to my mom in Chicago. Then she mailed the replacement to me in Switzerland.
An incredible hassle all around, made far worse by their very low end customer support folks. Every interaction began with a 20 minute conversation about what had happened followed by them typically saying "you're escalated to a higher tier, there's nothing we can do."
Some of the pain above could be fixed by changing their international shipping policy. But my account being in some state where they couldn't issue a new phone to me for 2 months even when I was in the US was supremely frustrating and intolerable.
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I've had another issue recently. I bought a Pixel 4XL. Google allows trade-ins of old phones, but at the time trading in a Pixel 3XL was not an option (they fully acknowledge this). So I called the next day and asked to add a trade in. Not possible. They suggested I return to sender the phone I bought to avoid the restocking fee (it was too late to cancel the order), and then place another order with a trade in. Well, that wasn't going to work because the phone was sold out.
LAME.
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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…
Is this Thomson merging with Reuters to take on Bloomberg? Everything you describe here sounds like it.
I was mainly thinking, in general, of industries that have experienced significant consolidation.
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Yeah but you really need to buy the IPhone to go with it.
A cheap beat up iPhone SE fulfills this requirement for $75. If you're leaving it at home anyways it doesn't need to be pretty or fast. Just needs to allow you to set up the Apple Watch.
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Do they? Or do they just anonymize it? Companies don't like to destroy assets. I don't think anybody is assuming malice, just incompetence. There are precedents after all.
Disclaimer: I work at Google. And even on the smaller service I work on, we go through privacy review. Generally user-data is coupled to user account identifiers and deleted when accounts are deleted. This is the easiest, as your retention plan is automatically approved this way :) All data stores are mapped to retention plans. So you don't accidentally forget something. For anonymization there is some logic which en…
The data is deleted, but probably not the products developed from the data. For example, Google may pick up from my email that I have a Subaru and if I delete that email, they may lose track of what exact car I have, but I bet they still know I have a car.
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How valuable is the brand these days? It's certainly already declining, and many people consider their products inferior quality. I am currently wearing a fitbit and have already had to deal with it not working twice today, and it's not even noon.
Fitbit maintains #2 market share in fitness watches and has always been a non-premium quality, mid-to-low end entry wearable.
If you buy the first loser, you're just paying more to lose. Also according to this Fitbit is #5 in terms of devices sold (which make them look much worse when you consider how cheap some of their products are), and they have been steadily declining for years. They went from 45% just 5 years ago to 6% this year. That is horrible. Unless Google has an ulterior motive, like primarily using FitBit as a source of data for targeted ads, this is a bad acquisition.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/435944/quarterly-wearabl...