This is speculation based on how stupid-looking decisions typically happen at big companies: Internal politics. Probably there was an internal team outside the

This is speculation based on how stupid-looking decisions typically happen at big companies: Internal politics. Probably there was an internal team outside the Fitbit group that wanted to build a watch. Their leader(s) had enough political clout to get the okay for a parallel effort, and apparently enough to eventually kill the Fitbit group entirely. Again this is pure speculation, but once a company exceeds a certain size it's amazing how much waste can occur because of infighting.