So buying Pebble was nothing but their previous try at surviving in a challenging wearable market? It's really difficult to wrap my head around these two recent moves in a way that makes sense.
There's also the matter of how the acquisition was paid for: if you're a company at risk of going under, offering stock compensation is very, very cheap for you.
Fitbit and the entire wearable industry is in a similar position to Pandora and Twitter. There's a massive need to re-adjust expectations.
You can build a very successful music streaming business, social communication company, and wearable manufacturing company... if you gauge the size of your market correctly. Guess wrong and Expenses > Revenues = panic (unless you've got Uber's pocketbook).
Long before it was 'trendy' the monitoring your hearbeat etc market was there for serious athletes. That is, and continues to be a niche market. So there are too many players chasing too few customers who aren't going to upgrade their equipment every year and aren't willing to pay a monthly service charge for reading that equipment so the market seems quite a bit smaller than it once appeared.
Unless they actually launch a revised Time 2 under a different name, I'm flummoxed as to how they'll capture my interest.