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See if anyone was truly concerned they could have put a coalition together and made their own offer for FitBit. FitBit is an incredible company that deserves t
by breck 6y ago
See if anyone was truly concerned they could have put a coalition together and made their own offer for FitBit.
FitBit is an incredible company that deserves the Nobel prize for Medicine because they began what will eventually turn into a doctor on everyone's wrist.
But doing that is incredibly hard. they had to invent all kinds of hardware, software, data processing pipelines, models, et cetera.
And then Apple came in and cleaned their clock. they adapted and somehow pulled off the Versa 2, which was a huge breakthrough, but it was totally David vs. Goliath.
If you hate Google, fine, go after Google (here's a hint: abolish #ImaginaryPropertyLaws, the unjust set of laws from which Google derives all its unfair monopoly advantages), but don't sit back and watch while FitBit gets pummeled by monopolists and shorters and then when they reach out for help you attack the one company that came in to save them.
- nr2x 6y agoI’m curious if any future antitrust settlements will require API interoperability. That’s the Apple Watch main advantage, deeper hooks into the ecosystem.
- mattmcknight 6y agoI wonder what it would take to get this idea to actually happen- that the proper response to some antitrust claims is not the incoherent "break them up" argument, but the "open them up" argument that prevents the actual abuses of monopoly that matter in information technology.
- breck 6y agothe answer is to abolish copyrights and patents. that is the only thing we should be talking about. everything else is a log(n) improvement whereas #abolishImaginaryProperty would be n^2 improvement.
- technofiend 6y agoPebble unfortunately also offered a functional, reasonably priced low power device and failed. Fitbit (arguably) has a much larger market but still is part of the problem there's just not that much of a market for small, low power minimal feature devices? It'll be interesting to see how Wyze's Band and Watch sell.
- rusk 6y agoFitbit ate pebble
- breck 6y agothe market for health wearables is 8B. that's people, not dollars. this could be the biggest future market there is. just look at the grin on tcook's face everytime he talks about apple health. we haven't seen this big an opportunity since personal computers. it will make phones look small by comparison. don't just look at what's out there today, look at what all the big dogs are spending money on trying to crack: passive blood sugar monitoring, stress levels, hormone levels, et cetera.
- technofiend 6y agoTim Cook might sell a charger for less than what the Fitbit or Pebble cost, but he won't have any wearables at that price point. I emphasized low cost for a reason: that doesn't include Apple. Yet the Apple watch sells well. So either Pebble & Fitbit missed the mark by selling cheap or they need more features even at that price point.
- nradov 6y agoThere was nothing special about any of the Fitbit products including the Versa 2. They always had multiple competitors with equivalent or better features, not just Apple.