Google just doesn't have the attention span required for this sort of thing. I was around at Google when Larry Page was pushing the "more wood, fewer arrows" ma

Google just doesn't have the attention span required for this sort of thing. I was around at Google when Larry Page was pushing the "more wood, fewer arrows" mantra but it never translated to organizational or cultural change. Some things work very well when they're bottom-up or engineering focused (eg search, GMail). Others require top-down leadership to create a coherent product and user experience (eg an operating system). So Google has built some amazing technology but hasn't been great at things that require polish. Apple OTOH has been very good at producing a consistent user experience. Apple can push through things in a way Google can't because Google engineers are incentivized to write something new or rewrite something for "impact" to get promoted and then you move on to the next hot thing. Apple Pay is a great example of what Apple is good at. They just keep plugging away. Every week there's another bank in some minor country that signs on and over the years they've built an ecosystem. Google doesn't have that kind of patience. Likewise with the Apple Watch. It was originally launched as a "luxury" product, mainly due to a bad executive hire (IMHO) ie Angela Ahrendts. It's found a niche (but still not mass market appeal) as a health and fitness device. APIs are forever. You have to be extremely careful about what you release into the wild. Once something hits production, you've made a commitment. There are only so many times you can burn your platform users. Another example I came across recently was with Nest. There's another Google product (because of course there is) called Google Matter for integration into, say, Amazon or Apple's smart device ecosystems. But guess what? The Nest Learning Themostat isn't compatible and won't be migrated. Because reasons. And this was a device that they were selling last year. That's just unacceptable. Remember the debacle with Linux support for Google Drive? Anyway, fitness devices are still a relatively small market and Apple have consumed a lot of the oxygen. This market just isn't big enough for Google to really care about. Google Fit was probably someone's E6->E7 project and they're long gone now.