I'm guessing Nike isn't abandoning the FuelBand (or Nike+), just their in-house hardware team. Wristbands are commodities now, so someone in management might have decided to outsource.
Nike fires majority of FuelBand team, will stop making wearable hardware
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Re: Nike fires majority of FuelBand team, will stop making wearable hardware
#72I liked the FuelBand, but never bought one. Hopefully Nike either partners with Apple or they make an App.
Me too.
I've yet to find a wearable device I can take to the gym and extract the data from myself. Most of them use online sites and proprietry/undocumented storage formats.
Re: Nike fires majority of FuelBand team, will stop making wearable hardware
#73[deleted]
Re: Nike fires majority of FuelBand team, will stop making wearable hardware
#74It's surprising to see it so early, but they probably see the writing on the wall. Once Android Wear and Apple wearables start rolling out, it's going to be a slaughter out there. Apple and Nike teaming up for the iWatch launch is probably a safe bet now too.
Worth mentioning too that Nike has several job openings in PDX for Android engineers to work on Nike+, so clearly they're looking to shed their Apple exclusivity thus far.
Or perhaps their website hasn't kept up with the restructuring? On another note, why are these reports saying the engineers were "fired"? It's one thing to be let go when a project was discontinued but nobody wants the stigma of being fired on their record.
Re: Nike fires majority of FuelBand team, will stop making wearable hardware
#75It's surprising to see it so early, but they probably see the writing on the wall. Once Android Wear and Apple wearables start rolling out, it's going to be a slaughter out there. Apple and Nike teaming up for the iWatch launch is probably a safe bet now too.
How certain is everyone that Apple will launch a wearable? I just don't see it personally.
Right now wearables are in a pre iPhone era. I guess people are waiting for an iWatch, let's see which company delivers.
Re: Nike fires majority of FuelBand team, will stop making wearable hardware
#76My wife finds the FuelBand so ugly she almost finds it offensive. She's a pretty normal woman, and I'm not suggesting all women feel that way, but it bears reminding that anything worn on a wrist is actually a fashion accessory for a lot of people.
Re: Nike fires majority of FuelBand team, will stop making wearable hardware
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Once Android Wear and Apple wearables start rolling out, it's going to be a slaughter out there. For Nike, its already a slaughter -- FitBit has the lion's share of the market for activity trackers, Nike was in third well behind Jawbone UP. [1] [1] http://mobihealthnews.com/28825/fitbit-jawbone-nike-had-97-p...
Those are some interesting stats, since amongst runner circles (at least here in DC), Garmins are the most popular by far. Could they be classifying these devices differently?
My fiancee is a runner and I recently purchased her a Garmin GPS watch as a gift. I had originally planned to buy a FitBit, but they're just not meant for the same thing as the Garmin watch. The Garmin is useful when you are actually running to figure out your pace, distance, etc. The FitBit is more of a logging device and you don't really look at it while running. The FitBit doesn't have a screen, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't have a GPS.
Re: Nike fires majority of FuelBand team, will stop making wearable hardware
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's at the expense of credibility, but it's CNet. These terms have actual meanings, "laid off" when the position is being eliminated, "fired" when it's not.
Having a US head-office I'm frequently bemused / confused as to why companies in that country so readily lay-off the staff of canceled projects, instead of redeploying them internally to fill other vacancies. Particularly in large corps there's nearly always some other division crying-out for staff with hands-on knowledge of their industry and product, instead of spending $50,000 to hire someone out of college and th…
My guess is because the decision is made at a high level that a whole project is to be killed, and in order to keep that decision compartmentalized the decision is made to lay off the entire staff rather than bringing in mid-level managers to make decisions on who should stay and who should go, which would probably cause the news to leak early.
It also makes it a bit better for the laid-off employees. If you keep 50% and fire 50%, the ones that got let go have a much harder sell to their next employer. If you can shrug it off and say 'the whole project got canceled', no negativity is cast on that particular employee.
There is also some HR/legal things related to the difference between eliminating positions and firing people. It is easier to claim that the positions are eliminated if you axe the whole project.
Then what typically happens swiftly after the lay off is the company offers to re-hire the best performers from that team immediately. I have seen that in 20 person startups and 100,000 person companies.
The whole thing is always ugly. In my mind the worst part is when a company heavily recruits a top performer from elsewhere in the company or externally to come work on this project when it is 80% of the way to the cliff, generally by mis-representing the situation, and then axes the whole thing 3 months later. I have seen many people burned by that scenario.
Re: Nike fires majority of FuelBand team, will stop making wearable hardware
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it interesting that voice-reco is a primary input mechanism for both the Amazon Fire TV and Amazon's scanner gadget for their Fresh grocery delivery service. The Fire TV is not on battery power, so it's not surprising there. But the scanner wand gadget presumably doesn't have much of a CPU in it, nor does it rely on a nearby smartphone.
Yes, they claim their voice reco "really works" - I don't find it a credible claim... except that, when you have a confined univese of possible matches (e.g. grocery items), it doesn't so much have to recognise the word, as distinguish between the known candidates. For example, just counting the number of syllables can narrows it down (even identif it: yif expecting a digit, only "7" has two). And no verbs etc. Isn't…
They can back the voice recognition with mechanical Turk. If the recognizer has a lower confidence than desired they just ship the sample to a human.
Re: Nike fires majority of FuelBand team, will stop making wearable hardware
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's at the expense of credibility, but it's CNet. These terms have actual meanings, "laid off" when the position is being eliminated, "fired" when it's not.
Having a US head-office I'm frequently bemused / confused as to why companies in that country so readily lay-off the staff of canceled projects, instead of redeploying them internally to fill other vacancies. Particularly in large corps there's nearly always some other division crying-out for staff with hands-on knowledge of their industry and product, instead of spending $50,000 to hire someone out of college and th…
What other projects do Nike have that they need a staff of computer software and hardware engineers to work on?