Google Buys Fitbit for $2.1B | Hacker News Reader

Google Buys Fitbit for $2.1B

cnbc.com

946 pointschdaniel742 comments

Changes of control typically trigger a suite of investor and creditor protections. I'm beginning to favor a similar set of rights for consumers.

Right to deletion would be one. Heightened portability requirements another.

An interesting idea but the reason investors + creditors can get these is because they have leverage and can negotiate for them. They are not always able to secure them. Consumers currently have no such leverage. The best avenue to this kind of leverage is probably legal?

We’re in a new era— these things need to be legislated.

The leverage of the consumer is the government whose legislators they elected.

Incorrect. That is an avenue of leverage. Currently driven more by corporate interests than citizen interests.

"democracy" literally means "rule by people" or "government by people". You are in effect claiming that America isn't a democracy (which may or may not be true, sometimes you look suspiciously like an aristocracy in disguise).

Anyway, over here in continental Europe democracy mostly works. And when people complained about privacy issues for years and Facebook laughed in our faces we eventually got the GDPR. That's exactly the kind of "either get your shit together or we will legislate it" this thread is about.

America is not a democracy — it is a constitutional republic with democratic elements. America has democratic election of representatives, the the lawmaking is done by those representatives, not directly. California’s proposition system is an example of true direct democracy.

The constitutional part is important too — it limits what people, and their representatives, can do even if they have a majority.

The house of representatives is directly elected, same with the senate. While the laws are not directly voted on by the people, they are indirectly voted on by the people by their choice of representative. After all if direct democracy was the only valid form of democracy it wouldn't need the qualifier "direct". The constitution is an important part of limiting abuse and channeling everything, it can be changed with a two-thirds majority. So the citizens can change the constitution by choosing representatives who want to do so, and we still have democracy.

Similarly when electing the president people vote for a person who will vote for the president. While it is a weird system, in essence the leader is chosen by the people.

Calling only direct democracy a democracy would be weird, by that standard a country pretty much can't be democratic for purely practical reasons (though Switzerland comes close)

On the other hand, everything is a de facto democracy because revolution is always on the table. There's nothing wrong with being precise. In fact, it leads to fewer misunderstandings.

The problem is that preciseness seems to be something that all US people know (is it taught in high school?) and nobody else. Systems where the government is voted for by the people are democratic regardless of the details.

> America is not a democracy — it is a constitutional republic with democratic elements.

People like to say this all the time like it's clever, but being a republic does not preclude being democratic. The United States is a democracy.

> being a republic does not preclude being democratic.

No, but the particular form of the US republic does so in practice.

> The United States is a democracy.

The United States may have been built around an idea of representative democracy, but in function it is more of a plutocratic republic with quasi-democratic rituals.

Oof, “democratic rituals” is an uncomfortably accurate description of voting in the U.S.

> quasi-democratic rituals

"We're doing stand-ups and we use story points, we're agile"

Electoral college, bruh. Not a true democracy.

The last time I heard this stupid argument, that was from a literal neo-nazi who has a svatiska tattoo on his chest.

You elect you president ; you elect your representatives to congress and senate at federal level ; you elect your representatives and governor at state level ; you elect your mayor and your city council at local level.

That's the definition of democracy.

I'm sorry to break this to you, but you're in the wrong country if you don't like constitutional republics, because the United States of America is in fact a constitutional republic.

I very much dislike neo-nazis, but I have to applaud the gentleman for at least understanding the simplest nature of his government and attempting to educate his countrymen.

I am pretty sure a constitutional republic can be fall under the label representative democracy (which in the case of the US).

Imagine that. Downvoting correct answer. Did I somehow end up on Reddit?

is this not how it should work, at least in europe according to the new data laws.

recently nello.io was sold and this is the email i got.

we have good news, which we would like to share with you immediately! The journey of nello continues - we will join forces with the team of SCLAK. The new owner SCLAK will be the Italian supplier of smart home products. This fits perfectly to nello.

In order for you to be able to use your nello one in the future, there will be an update of the app shortly.

Since your data is particularly important to us, you will be asked to give your consent to the transfer of your customer data to SCLAK in the course of this update. The continued usability of your nello one can only be guaranteed with your consent. Without the data transfer, the functionality of your app will expire, which we would very much regret.

Perfect, except no refund offered!

The company would have had to carry a reserve to refund everyone who ever bought the app (which is equal to their total revenue). Or the buying company would have cover that. Either way it'd be an impossible liability.

Bricking hardware people paid for without offering a refund is potentially illegal, even US companies like Lowes realize this, hence why Lowes refunded all hardware purchases of Lowes by Iris Home Security Systems for customers they could track down.

It would be an impossible liability if everybody refunded. In realty I’d bet less than 5% would

It should be an impossible liability to intentionally brick devices that people paid you for.

You already have right to delete in this instance.

In Europe, sure. What about those of us in the United States and other places with laxer privacy laws?

Fitbit allows you to download or delete your data regardless of where you live.

Here’s a quote from the NYT:

“You will always be in control of your data, and we will remain transparent about the data we collect and why,” Fitbit’s chief executive, James Park, said in an email to his company’s customers on Friday morning. “We never sell your personal information, and Fitbit health and wellness data will not be used for Google ads.”

What does that even mean? The company was bought by Google, the data has been sold.

A pedantic note, but what's happened here is that the companies involved have made a commitment to permit you to delete your data from the service. (Which they may or may not properly make good on, I'm not clear on whether they can be legally held to this commitment, e.g. in the US, once it's been made.)

A right to delete would mean something more like that the companies have no choice, e.g. that existing laws force them to delete your data from the service, whether they were willing to commit to offering that option or not.

Most of those "protections" that are triggered are contractual.

As a B2B systems provider, we also have those for our customers.

If a B2C service provider does not provide these, then you can demand them or not sign up or both.

Oof. Goodbye Fitbit. Or, rather, welcome to the world where you're a pawn in internal politics.

You may think you have a product but you don't. If your product survives (as in, Google didn't buy you just for the team), your product schedule will have to survive the interests of every other PA/team in Google.

- You think you have software to run your products? Ha. The Android team will have a different opinion.

- Even if you survive Android, Fuchsia probably thinks you belong on their paltform.

- Oh and while we're at it, let's integrate with OAuth2.0 so your device now needs a Google account to even work (and stops working when refresh tokens can't be used as happened to many Google wireless routers).

- Your software development is now set in stone as various teams work out how to migrate it to Google infrastructure and rewrite it in [language/framework du jour].

I actually agree with other commenters: Google just doesn't know what it's about anymore. It has no overriding vision. Larry just isn't the leader Google needs to be, which would be fine, except that he clearly wants to be.

Disclaimer: Xoogler.

They don’t care about the product in so much as they care about the avenue to suck up more data, no?

Actually, no. I find this whole "they're selling your data" trope to be trite and just annoying at this point.

I actually expect this more a reaction to Apple's pivot into health with the Apple Watch (people seem to forget the ex-Burberry CEO positioned the Apple Watch 1 as a luxury product--anyone remember the Apple Watch Edition for $10k?--health came later).

Right, but they’re not going to make money off the hardware, it’s going to be the services and ad targeting based off of the data. You think chromecast is to make a profit?

This is a continuation of the trite bit. What's missing is recognizing that Alphabet (not Google) is very focused on diversifying its revenue stream beyond search advertising, ideally in a way that takes advantage of the things it's already good at.

GCP is a good example. No search. No ads. No using of customer data. Just a desire for a really big potential revenue stream that builds on Google's expertise in managing huge numbers of servers and services.

Very focused, but not very good at it thus far. Their revenue is still 80-90% advertising revenue.

No disagreement.

GCP is the exception in that it’s the only Google business that does not rely on data aggregation and profiling.

That's not true. I think @ceejayoz below pointed out the situation well: they've made many attempts (waymo, for another still-unprofitable example). Just not many of them have turned into significant revenue -- particularly compared to the sustained ~24% YoY growth that Google managed for so long. That's a hard business to beat.

Waymo is an Alphabet company, not a Google business. What Google business other than Google Cloud do you consider not to not rely on data aggregation and profiling?

Google accelerated science, fiber before it was spun out into alphabet, the medical diagnostics part of Google Brain, the quantum computing group, Chromebooks, ATAP (the group that partnered with Levi's to make a jacket), ...

There are a lot. And there have been more that were cancelled. As I said: Google-the-search-and-advertising-company is one of the most successful companies of our time. It's astonishingly hard to replicate that success, which is probably why we don't see Google other units with equivalent revenue. But it's really not for lack of trying.

> I find this whole "they're selling your data" trope to be trite and just annoying at this point.

Do you believe it to be mistaken? Or true, but not worth caring about?

From Google's privacy policy:

We don’t share information that personally identifies you with advertisers, such as your name or email, unless you ask us to

We all know it's possible to identify you even without name or email, given enough data.

If it was easy, advertisers would be doing it already. Google is highly motivated to keep your data fire-walled from advertisers.

The problem isn't just their sharing the data (although you'd be naive to assume that the data they collect isn't being turned over to at least the US government) it's the collecting and storing of that data itself that is problematic. The fact that they're using that data to manipulate us via advertising isn't much better.

The presence and centralization of the data makes it a very juicy target for all kinds of evil people.

Except that statement is just wrong and misleading. Your personal identifying information is all the metadata that can be aggregated and intersected to directly identify you, your name just is a number in the database but it's directly identifying and tracking _you_. Google doesn't care about selling your name or email, that's not valuable to them or advertisers.

And "unless you ask us to" is the default behavior of almost all google products. You have to ask them not to, sometimes under penalty of law (GDPR), before they actually change their behavior.

"unless you ask us to" - it's defined in the privacy policy and clearly says it's due to the user taking an explicit action.

But, like most companies, Google defines PII to exclude items (such as the Android advertising ID, for instance) that are PII.

It's hard to believe that the data in my exercise tracker has real, fundamental worth when I see so much targeted advertising that fails to leverage the data they already have. I suppose it doesn't matter to Google if someone buys a location-specific ad for a place I used to live in despite them knowing where my phone, purchases, and electoral record say I live but then why would them knowing my heart rate help them if they already know I bought a bicycle, search about bicycle parts, frequently use bicycle maps, and travel at about 15 mph?

> when I see so much targeted advertising that fails to leverage the data they already have.

Targeted advertising is far from the only thing Google wants data for.

Well advertising is over 80% of their Q32019 revenue, what else do they want it for?

Research.

> Do you believe it to be mistaken? Yes, Google doesn't sell personal data.

Its core business is selling products whose entire value would be negated if it sold the data behind them, so it really wouldn't sell the data.

On top of that, I think it's a mistake to say that they are buying Fitbit for data anyway. They are buying Fitbit for a toehold in the wearables market; while this probably has some data value, it's pretty clearly part of their effort to build up direct sales of consumer products as a revenue stream.

While I sort of agree, I think the problem is that "they're selling your data" misstates what actually happens.

Facebook and Google want to collect your data and keep it. What they're selling is indirect access to you: the more information they have on you, the more precisely they can theoretically target advertising and content to you. Keeping the data they have on you to themselves is literally their business model.

Two points, though. First, of course, that's still essentially what's been dubbed "surveillance capitalism"; it's still something someone may be uncomfortable with for a variety of reasons. Your data is being indirectly monetized, but it's still being monetized, and you still have very limited insight into the extent of that data and how it's being used. Second, adtech isn't the business model of everyone who collects data -- and one could argue that the more businesses a data-collecting company is in, the more moral hazards pop up. How much data will Google give over to law enforcement when there's a warrant, for example? What if we see a Facebook Health initiative that allows medical providers and insurers selective access to what Facebook "knows" about you within the limits of regulations and the law? (Do you know what those limits are? I don't.)

I actually expect this more a reaction to Apple's pivot into health with the Apple Watch...

Expect what, privacy concerns? While I understand that, I'm not sure much health information collected by Apple devices ever leaves your "local ecosystem" (i.e., your personal set of devices). Also, the Apple Watch Edition notwithstanding, I'm not sure I'd say its original incarnation was positioned as a luxury product -- yes, you could pay $10,000+ for it if you wanted to, but it still started at $349. But it was certainly positioned as a fashion product at its introduction, which they've dialed way back on since.

Google also wants to meddle with the elections (Numerous quotes here, but the most relevant is certainly Youtube’s CEO). Anyway, you are right for the collect-and-keep-my-data part, but I think in their idea they want to use this data to build some sort of utopia. That is the most benevolent appreciation on it, because it is one that explains all of “Do no evil”, election “influence”, use of AI and exhaustive data collection.

A utopia was originally the exploration of what life would be like if a philosophy was taken to the extreme. In that sense, one man's utopia is another man's personal hell.

For example in the utopic vision of anarchy, there are no authorities and everyone must find their own path in the world. The flip side of having no decisions made for you is that you must make all of your own decisions. Or in democracy, since anyone and everyone has the exact same power over decisions, all the really important decisions are made in the most mediocre way possible. In Capitalism, we have the specter of individuals being ground into raw resources and then spit out when they reach their useful lifespan.

So if their intent is to build a utopia of their own making, that's definitionally evil because it admits no dissenting opinion in the matter of how we live our lives.

Google’s core business is ad targeting, the cornerstone of which is personal data used to target better. While it is (hopefully) untrue that they literally sell your data, they do profit from it indirectly (and massively, it’s 85% of revenue). Google has many great products and some bad ones, but almost all have vacuum hoses up against your personal data... Now, Fitbit makes a really mediocre and pedestrian tech product that captures a wealth of deeply personal data. I’ll go ahead and connect the dots on this one.

The data isn't very valuable, and it's even less valuable without users. They care about the product but are just incompetent at making hardware that people will buy, even if they eventually make the the product have useful features like identity assertion.

I don’t know about that. People’s daily fitness activity, weight, entire diet and sleep patterns aren’t valuable?

> as in, Google didn't buy you just for the team

2.1B isn't an acquihire. They want the customers, the team, and the manufacturing chain at the very least.

You missed "Data"

I mean, it's implied in "customers" but yeah, they want the data obviously

Nah, what they want is me, ie. my data. I'm throwing away that fitbit (Google Personal information gathering device) and deleting my account. I'm informed enough to make that decision. Unfortunately thousands of users that just got sold out are not.

Fuck Google.

We live in fast times.

In a little less than a decade the perception of Google went from 'Best search on the internet' and 'Do no evil' to 'Fuck Google' and 'Delete your accounts with them'; and 'their search has gotten exponentially worse'

No skin in the game from me (I only use Gmail for non-essential shopping), just an observation. Personally, I think it's great. I'm proud to stand with the vocal minority against the rampant data collection and trade.

Same as Microsoft, really: first they were one of the plucky little companies* “sticking it” to the likes of Big Blue and AT&T, then they themselves fell victim to their own success and became embodied in Gates Of Borg on Slashdot, then they missed the boat on Mobile and failed to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish the Internet and ended up on the downward stroke, so now they’re cool again... while the Googles and Apples that opposed them and grew ascendant in their various ways are now the Great Evils that draw our ire.

My guess for the next great Satan? One of the notable, useful, quirky little “meta”/“web-glue” outfits such as IFTTT or somebody like that. Or a Fintech. Or some other company that somehow insinuates itself into our daily lives, holding our rickety digital lifestyles together, and eventually becomes as indispensable as mortar is to a brick building.

*Other notable examples being, in no specific order: Intel, DEC, Symbolics, Commodore, and yes, Apple.

> My guess for the next great Satan?

It's Cloudflare.

edit: Just to be clear, the reason I'm so suspicious of Cloudflare is that they're inserting themselves between users and their destination. The service they provide is a great value, and their contribution to the public (free dns and vpn) is extremely admirable. But they only exist because the infrastructure maintained by the old corporate guards is so poor. Once they take over all network traffic, they'll be the next great Satan. Their story will probably turn out similar to Google.

> No skin in the game from me (I only use Gmail for non-essential shopping), just an observation.

This is really commendable. Do you host your own E-mail/Calendar/Contacts server? if so, what's your setup like in terms of hardware and the software stack?

If you want it easy, you can buy something like a Synology NAS where you can install locally hosted Email, Contacts, Calendar, Dropbox and Photos servers with a few clicks. The software is of decent quality as well.

Obviously you pay for the convenience, but it's not a lot for self-hosted and maintained stack at home.

Contacts are, unfortunately, still under Google. Just under a separate email.

Important email is hosted through https://soverin.net with a custom domain.

Never used Calendar and have no plans to.

I moved to iOS to be Google free. Have been happy with my Fitbit until I read this news and went through this exact sentiment. Happy to be part of a vocal minority.

I advised my privacy-worried dad to get a Fitbit instead of an android watch (couldn’t afford Apple Watch). Now I feel like an *hole

Don't throw it away, send it to me. I'll pay for shipping.

I just deleted my Fitbit account and will for sure be confirming whether it's deleted in 7 days.

How will you confirm this?

Sundar has been leading Google for a few years now. Larry/Sergey have been out and about for a while now.

I am a Xoogler myself.

Yes and no. Sundar has no more vision than Larry does yet somehow is paid $200m+ a year and in my mind is the most unjustifiably overpaid CEO by a huge margin. At least Larry founded the company and contributed to turning into the behemoth it is. Sunday is a random associate product manager who somehow managed to ride the wave of Chrome to somehow becoming CEO.

> Sundar has no more vision than Larry does yet somehow is paid $200m+ a year and in my mind is the most unjustifiably overpaid CEO by a huge margin.

Do you have a source for this? My understanding is that this $200m figure is a multi-year figure to keep him at Google.

I wouldn’t characterize him as random though. Larry seemed to like him because he is able to handle conflict very well.

https://www.businessinsider.com/ap-alphabet-paid-google-ceo-...

> The stock that Pichai received will vest in quarterly increments through January 2020

Seems like multi-year (2016-2020), not annually.

It is hard to accurately judge how the CEO is doing as most us are not privy to what he has to deal with in his job. That said, to me he seems uninspiring, dodging questions and without much background in Computers. In some ways arguably similar to Steve Ballmer.

Just like Presidents, you cannot judge a CEO's job till the aftermath. That and after only deep introspection. Few cases bar exception, i.e. Steve Balmer.

Under your theory, Steve Jobs still runs Apple.

Now you are comparing Apples to Lemons.

Depending on how much product roadmap he set before he shuffled off the mortal coil, he may well be.

> Sunday is a random associate product manager who somehow managed to ride the wave of Chrome to somehow becoming CEO.

Chrome has monopolized not just the Internet[1], but is in the process of monopolising desktop dev thanks to the success of Electron. Of course those are good credentials to end up in charge of Google.

[1] As far as most people are concerned, their browser is the Internet.

I have no idea why you are downvoted.

Anything less than violent enthusiasm about Google leveraging their Chrome monopoly tends to go down badly here.

Nadella seems much more capable as a visionary than Pichai

> Sunday (sic) is a random associate product manager who somehow managed to ride the wave of Chrome to somehow becoming CEO

I'd be more careful about dismissing him as a random APM who "somehow managed to ride the wave of Chrome". Successes like these aren't wholly random and while there is certainly an amount of luck involved, you need to remember that Chrome is/was a crazy essential thing for Google's success before the smartphone/Android revolution.

It is more about not giving up the entry point to search (browser on PC -- mobiles weren't dominant in 2008) to a competitor (MS) who could stifle or charge a steep price to let it be the default search. If you need any more data on this, read up on how much Google pays Apple to be the default search engine ($5B a year IIRC).

So... Sundar's CEO status may or may not have been the best choice but don't discount years of work and navigating inside a behemoth like Google and getting st done :)

I'm on the outside but always had the impression Eric Schmidt was calling most of the "do evil" important things.

I don't really have any special evidence to the contrary, but I suspect Schmidt gets a bad rap simply because of his appearance and demeanor of looking a bit stodgy like a bureaucrat from the federal Gov or something. He also has a very serious face. I think he was basically a competent CEO who steered the company away from risky businesses.

Every Andrew Carnegie needs his Henry Frick [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike#Plans_of_Carn...

>You may think you have a product but you don't.

I absolutely agree with everything.

Here is the thing, total side topic - but Fitbit's product is really excellent!

The packaging of the PCBs, the operating system, the tech, it's all really impressive.

I know that means nothing in the larger scope, Google bought them for their data and mining potential.

But the product is actually really cool. It appears to be simple, but when you deep drive, you can run your own javascript code on your own device, and serialize the data with packages like CBOR for export... This was done a micro that's running an RTOS made in C on an extremely constrained resources device.

I've always been impressed with Fitbit.

Can you run it with Bluetooth off logging locally and then sync periodically? I doubt it but haven't dove into it

I've done that occasionally, over a weekend when I left my phone at home or something. Doesn't happen often, obviously, but it does have some small number of days of local logging.

The logging works ok while off bluetooth...but be aware that _any_ changes are basically impossible in that state. Even basic watch functionality like changing the time or setting an alarm require a bluetooth link, the software, and an internet connection back to the fitbit servers.

Well, that's a conpletely pointless limitation. Nothing of good was lost...

1. Just so we are clear, after having gone through 5 "lifetimes" of fitbit and probably 15 across the family, one thing I can tell you is that the software is buggy with no end in sight. Fitbit could definitely use better software.

2. If Google didn't integrate their Auth, the same community will be complaining about the lack of compatibility.

There's a difference betewen integrating one auth and disintegrating all others. Should my fitbit be bricked if I make a wrongthink comment on YouTube?

I don't think fitbit will be improved considering how jank WearOS can be

> “I actually agree with other commenters: Google just doesn't know what it's about anymore. It has no overriding vision.”

it’s pretty apparent to me that after google finally got over wanting to be facebook, google now wants to be apple. and they’re desperately trying not to be microsoft, even though that’s what they mostly are.

in the beginning, google had a unique identity (quirky & clever) and vision (organize the world’s information). now they look to others to figure out who to be. it’s like the small town high school football star who never moved on.

> small town high school football star

That's odd thing to call the biggest software company* in the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_software_c...

* Alphabet

That wiki doesn't justify your statement. It's leveraging a list from 2017, but using Alphabet's market cap from 2019? And regardless, the actual market caps on that page would say Microsoft is the biggest software company in the world.

I have no idea what Forbes is using for its ranking but it is obviously not by valuation.

EDIT: And it should arguably be Apple, but for some reason neither Apple nor Amazon are software companies?

The Wikipedia article sorts by sales. Not sure why the years are like that, but the relative values are similar in 2019. [1] [2]

> for some reason neither Apple nor Amazon are software companies?

Because they aren't software companies? Or at least principally software companies.

Amazon is categorized as an retail company. [3]

Apple is categorized as a computer hardware company. [4]

Nitpicking aside, I think my point stands about a $800B+ company.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/companies/alphabet/?list=global2000#5...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/companies/microsoft/?list=global2000#...

[3] https://www.forbes.com/companies/amazon/?list=global2000#2c4...

[3] https://www.forbes.com/companies/apple/?list=global2000#3d04...

And market cap while it measures investor sentiment, doesn’t measure fundamentals. If it did, Uber wouldn’t be worth anything.

> and they’re desperately trying not to be microsoft, even though that’s what they mostly are.

Mostly because Microsoft became more like Google in recent years. :P

You mean old Google?

They're doing some seriously good things in the dev space.

and spamming users with ads left and right, Google style, too

Hmm. In Chromium Edge, my new default browser, AFAIK the UO plugin will still work perfectly unlike in Chrome, meaning I rarely if ever see any ads.

The closest thing to an ad in VSCode or for that matter Terminal would be .. I guess hints at ease of Azure cloud services? Never found it intrusive myself, and I do AWS.

It's hard to understand your message, but... ads in VSCode? Is that a thing now?

I was kind of trying to say I haven't seen any ads, just non-intrusive integration with other MS services, in response to the ads reply I got. Sorry that was actually rather vague and roundabout.

You can use VSCodium, it's a fork of VSCode without Microsoft's telemetry.

They are embracing a lot of technologies because that is how they gain market share and then extinguish them.

forgive my ignorance, but what's a xoogler

Ex googler

From the context, I’d guess it’s an “Ex Googler”, in other words a former google employee.

Fitbit already runs on Google cloud [1], IMO this has been in the making for some time already.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/new...

Wow what a bunch of FUD.

Maybe so, but please post substantively here. I know that takes time and effort, but it's always an option to just not post anything.

The site guidelines particularly ask: "Please don't post shallow dismissals [...] A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Google just doesn't know what it's about anymore."

Isn't it an organization optimized for enabling engineers to increase leverage?

That's why things get rewritten into [language/framework du jour].

I think they do. They're the same thing they've always been: an advertising company. They can only become something else when the majority of their income is derived from something else. Which it currently isn't.

> [language/framework du jour].

Is this an accurate description of Google? I thought they used the same 4-5 languages they've used since the beginning of time, maybe minus perl and plus kotlin.

Ummm. Fitbit was already on the downward spiral. So, they'll take this lifeline from Google. Thank you very much

> as in, Google didn't buy you just for the team

Or for the data ... even better profiles of people, including people who tried avoiding giving Google that data. Probably time for such users to send GDPR notices (If EU citizens)

Just like any massive global tech company.

Garmin and Apple have the fitness market covered. Fitbit never had the hardcore fitness market Garmin executed into and Apple has always had a product that works well across the wearable and fitness. Between these two companies I can't imagine there's much of a niche Fitbit does better. On the extreme hardcore triathlon user even Garmin has taken a lot of market from Suunto and the like. I've owned a handful of Garmin devices over the years and have never considered Fitbit. Now that Google owns them my initial reaction is that Fitbit is going to be in a very confusing state for the next year and their products will fall further behind. Unless Google actually scraps what WearOS is today and goes back to the drawing board they've lost this war even to Garmin.

Fibit should fit perfectly into the 99$ market for a zillion people that just want to track steps and sleep cycles.

You have 10$ chinese brand-able devices for that: https://rbaron.net/blog/2018/05/27/Hacking-a-cheap-fitness-t...

Or just get a $1 pedometer and a sleep app.

And why wouldn’t they just buy a $199 Apple Watch Series 3? How many people are both into fitness and do price conscience that they won’t spend an extra $100.

Well, they could cater to the Android market.

If you have an Android, or even want the option of an Android in the future.

I wish Apple would want some of their stuff cross-platform - I don't like the all or nothing nature of the Apple ecosystem (I consider 'exclusives' to be anti-consumer in general).

Well, there is iTunes for Windows, Apple Music for Android and the Apple TV app for various TVs and streaming sticks.

They’re starting to put some of their data behind a monthly subscription, especially around sleep.

A coworker recommended I look into buying one, but as soon as I saw that I needed to pay $x per month to see data they were already capturing, I immediately passed.

I came across this with my fitbit this week. I immediately had such a clear realization I was done with this company.

$99? A brand new Garmin Vivofit 4 which has an always on display and a year of battery life is $79.99 USD. It's the low margin segment of the space and that's where Fitbit put all their eggs. Fitbit didn't really invest in anything behind low-end fitness tracking well. They tried, but people buy other products now. They want heart rate, they want GPS, they want PulseOx and ECG features and will pay for them. Regardless of whether or not they need them.

Doesn’t support heart rate tracking or phone notifications. Nice try though.

I didn't say Vivofit 4 had those things. I said people want them.

Your phone can already track steps and sleep. You don't need an extra device.

Google needs a proper smartphone-like smartwatch and they needed a cheap buy to speed up the dev process. They don't need the Garmin market because they want a smartwatch on every person and not on every athletic person. I was always hoping smart glasses come after smart phones but I guess these are even smaller and need even more time than watches to become efficient enough to cover for the small battery.

If this is really the driver behind Google buying them, what do you think are the odds that most - if not all - of the non-watch FitBit products are eventually discontinued?

That's how they built up a following, with devices that were inexpensive, and did a few things well, but given the current environment, Google doesn't seem like they are interested in that market.

I think there's an enormous market for <=~$100 wearables that are primarily positioned as health trackers. Among other things, many wellness programs partner with Fitbit as a device provider. The first mover advantage for Fitbit also carries over into their existing, very expansive, partner ecosystem. This "health tracker" market is far larger market than the one for fully functional smart watches with 1-2 day batteries.

I'm currently using a Mi Band 3 with Gadgetbridge on Android just because I know it doesn't phone home, last several days and gather enough data for what I'm doing. Oh and seeing notifications without pulling my phone out of my pocket is a big reason why I wear one.

I have seen a lot more Fitbits then Garmins or Apple Watches. I would argue that the hardcore market, while the most loyal, isn't the largest revenue generator. It's everyone who wants something "smart" without breaking the bank (or tied to iOS).

Fitbits are a quarter of the price; same reason you see way more Androids than iPhones.

I wouldn’t have bought an Apple Watch even if I wanted to spend the extra money. Battery life, minimal build, and sleep tracking are the selling points for many people.

I'm confused by this comment.

To me, Garmin is the only company here that does a good job with the "hardcore fitness" market, but why does that matter in the first place? The better market to compete in is the "fitness amateur" market, which I see as being many times the former in size. Fitbit competes well here, and Google has no offering to speak of. Seems like a successful diversification move for Alphabet's portfolio. I especially like what Google's software can do to improve FitBit's offering by leveraging AI.

This and the casual smartwatch market where FitBit's versa already sells great (even though it's not great at all). Google's offerings here are sparse, littered with confusing options and half-assed design. A cohesive pixel/Fitbit product can help create a proper Anti-Apple Watch product.

I think the point you're missing is everyone levels up. Even amateur fitness users want a better fitness wearable. Which is why Garmin and Apple have the lion's share of the market. Fitbit is still seen as a step tracker level device, even if they do more. Garmin wearables are laser focused to the workout market and most buyers seem to lust over the idea of needing a more capable fitness device. Garmin and Apple both cover "fitness amateur" in spades but do an upsell far better.

With regard to AI, I'm not trying to be flippant but, those users don't care. No amateur fitness users would even understand how that would apply and likely be less to care than selling predictive analysis to those working out who legitimately track vitals and are trying to shave seconds.

Apple Watch battery lasts a day at most. My Fitbit can go without a charge for 6 days. Fitbit offers sleep tracking.. Apple Watch doesn’t natively, and even if it did, you still have to charge it at night. Fitbits are more minimalistic. They’re so nice. I don’t want a Garmin wearable. A lot of people who use Fitbits don’t use them for the fitness aspect. We use them to avoid the sedentary lifestyle by viewing our steps, and occasionally going on a run. I hope Google doesn’t ruin Fitbit. But judging by their past moves, my Charge 3 will be useless in a matter of 2-3 years

I much prefer my Apple Watch over my shitty fitbit to be honest. Charging isn’t an issue. I only charge it in the morning when I’m getting ready and that’s enough to last me the whole day and through the night.

>Apple Watch doesn’t natively, and even if it did, you still have to charge it at night

The way around that is to charge it earlier in the evening before bed - I do that and it lasts me easily until the following evening.

But it's a shame the device doesn't cover sleep natively.

You may like AutoSleep. It gets darn close to feeling native.

It does sleep analysis natively. You just need to enable a bed time and it’ll track it.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208655

This, I want the basics, not another phone on my wrist. The charge 3 lasts me 10 days and charges in about 15 minutes. I don't want another device to charge daily.

All that as well as the great GPS capability. I have the Fitbit Ionic and start the Walk exercise when bushwalking ( hiking). It produces very accurate track logs that I can use for mapping when I return. It does consume more battery but far less than high rate logging on the phone

> Which is why Garmin and Apple have the lion's share of the market

Source? A simple search for "fitbit garmin market share" [0] seem to suggest that Garmin is ways behind Fitbit in adoption.

[0] https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/09/08/fitbit-loses-more-...

> "fitness amateur" market ... Fitbit competes well here

I'm not so sure about that.

For simple activity monitoring by way of step counting, movement time, sleep time, and similar simple metrics, there is a lot of competition. This isn't just from the extremely cheap (but probably not very good) options, there are several devices out there at about half the price of FitBit's cheapest that seem to do the job just as well (caveat: I'm basing this mainly on anecdotal evidence from friends/family and online).

For very little more than their cheapest watch & step-counter you can get a TomTom sports watch which has built-in GPS for accurate run/cycle/other tracking, breadcrumb mapping, and so on. The price difference for adding a wrist-based heard-rate monitor is about the same in both ranges.

Moving away from the casual fitness market towards people like me[†], their only GPS capable device[‡] costs more than Garmin's 235 which is a more capable device, more than twice the price of the aforementioned TomTom units, in fact you can usually get a Fenix 3 for the same price as the Ioinc, and there are a couple of other well regarded competitors with similar feature sets at that sort of price level too.

Their key advantage is name recognition, at the casual end of the market at least, though that doesn't necessarily help. People often call cheap-n-dirty activity trackers "cheap fitbits" rather than an activity tracker, watch, or other name including the products official name, but they still buy them instead of the actual fitbit. They did in the past seem to have that part of the market cornered, but seem to have let it slip considerably in recent years.

(NOTE: I'm in the UK. Relative pricing of manufacturers/models may differ in different markets.)

[†] I'm a recreational runner, far from the top of any particular class though in recent years I've knocked of a couple road marathons and multi-day trail challenges so I consider myself to be good at putting one foot in front of the other without tripping over either!

[‡] I generally discount phone-based GPS tracking by wrist-mounted devices due to the battery drain on the phone, and I never found it terribly reliable though that may have improved since

I recently purchased the Samsung Galaxy Active 2 and am loving it so far. Fitness tracking seems to be accurate too.

Would be interesting to see the market share of Apple, Samsung and Garmin for smart watches.

Forbes says Apple 35%, Samsung 11%, Imoo 9%, Fitbit 5.5%, Amazfit 3.7%, Huawei 2.8%, Fossil 2.5%, Garmin 1.5%, "Others" 27%.

My Garmin 935 is waterproof, has an always on display, shows smartphone notifications, charges once a week, and has worked for over a year. If apple or Fitbit had this, I’d go back. Had multiple fit bits and they all broke in 6 months. Had an Apple Watch, but it needed to be charged every day, wasn’t waterproof, and display turned off. Apple has improved on 2 of those but it still needs every day charging.

I would put garmin last software, but the other hardware features more than make up for it.

Seriously, I know that these always-on displays don't look as nice as an LCD, but I value battery life more. If there were WearOS device that had this type of display to make them last longer than a day or two I'd consider it, mostly for Google Pay and the ability to use Spotify without my phone.

Plus it really sucks to wait for the lag on wrist-raise (or the false alarms) to be able to tell the time. With the Garmin, glance at it to get the time; no wrist movement foppery. Edit: BTW, some of the WearOS watches now have effectively 2 displays: a always-on lcd with great battery life for the basics and the fancy backlit lcd underneath for everything else: one example is Mobvoi, which has funding from Google and thus hopefully isn't fly-by-night. Edit2: https://wearos.google.com/#find-your-watch .

Ex Garmin employee: The amount of 1st party software in those watches is astounding. And it almost all gets processed on-watch.

The 3rd party app support is laughably poor, but the APIs are there. ConnectIQ apps are written in their own language (MonkeyC, which is kinda hard to use), which hinders adoption, and are generally slow and feature-poor.

But the good thing for Garmin is that the 1st party software more than makes up for the lack of 3rd party support. The music-enabled watches (eg FR645) have Spotify support, GPS, and Bluetooth music, last for an eon, and are hardy as all hell.

Which one gives you the most achievements? I'm a simple man who just wants achievements. Fitbit has some weak ass achievements.

I'd be willing to try a fitbit if they had a daylight-readable smart watch. I haven't gotten around to getting a Garmin, but last I checked they were the only watch since pebble with a daylight-readable screen--and they support heart-rate. Google has a chance to do better with App integration.

Withings has some neat watches (and lots of other health-related products).

https://www.withings.com/se/en/watches

I'm currently using Fitbit, but has considered switching. This will probably catalyze it.

I disagree. The wearables market is still wide open IMO and there is still plenty of room to make a truly compelling product.

I use Strava (which I’d like to ditch) on an iPhone (I do not a GPS watch or fitness tracker).

Are there open source, privacy conscious apps that can be used instead of Starva, RunKeeper et al to log my fitness activities?

Honestly, I think an Apple Watch (maybe the very affordable Series 3?) would be your best and most comfortable option. You can have your activites tracked by Apple's own first-party Activity app, which is likely the most privacy-conscious option.

I use an Apple Watch for cycling and several other activites. It isn't a necessity at all and one could debate the purchase for ages, but once you start using it you probably wouldn't want to miss all those small and frequent conveniences it provides in addition to the rock solid activity tracking.

I for one welcome this change. I want a standalone smartwatch good enough so that I can stop using my phone. The state of smartwatches right now is quite sad (I cannot afford an Apple smartwatch so I cannot speak for those). The simple list of things I want from a smartwatch right now are barely fulfilled by the best I could find which is Huawei Watch 2. I want Google Pay, calls and LTE, proper Maps navigation, sending voice messages through some Facebook owned chat app which everyone uses, some very very simple browser experience, bluetooth connection for headphones, Youtube and Spotify.

The Huawei Watch 2 I have constantly crashes, the battery life is horrible, charger doesn't connect well, Google Maps doesn't offer directions (only location), WhatsApp and Discord aren't supported, Google Pay works but I have to use PayEnabler because they don't care, Spotify isn't there and Youtube is very very laggy.

I guess the biggest issue is actually Qualcomm because the current chip is 3100 which is 28nm (is that like 5-6 year old tech?). I sincerely hope that with this acquisition and Qualcomm rumored Snapdragon wear 439 (they are rebranding it as 3500 or something) I will finally in the May of 2020 get an actually good (no need to be great) standalone Google Pixel Watch.

That's a completely different product than Fitbit is. Even its full blown smartwatches are very light, very dumb peripherals with very low power that last a week on a charge. They're really not the same type of product as a Wear OS or Apple Watch type device, and trying to turn them into one will take away all of why Fitbit owners choose them.

Well there's also market segmentation you know. Xiaomi is entering the Wear OS smartphone market, no reason why FitBit couldn't also. This move from Google is obviously a way for them to speed up their own watch tech so that they don't have to start from scratch. This doesn't mean there wont be these simpler dumber versions of smartwatches for the people who want exactly those

The Apple Watch Series 3 with cellular is $329. How much cheaper can you get a smart watch with cellular, gps, health sensors, etc?

The Series 3 without cellular is $199 and you can find a cellular model on sale under $250 all the time too.

Yeah well I'm from Eastern Europe where it's more expensive, never on sale and I have less money

Out of curiosity, what is the cost of an iPhone 8 (the cheapest current iPhone) + Apple cellular watch where you live?

In a shop or used? 1788kn watch + 2452kn iphone 6s = 635$ usd. Average net salary is about 750$ usd.

I think this is the cheapest new: https://edigital.hr/apple-i-dodaci/iphone-c18325?filter%5Bse...

And watch

https://edigital.hr/apple-i-dodaci/watch-c29547?filter%5Bsea...

And it's looking like this year's Black Friday deal is that model for $199 (cellular for the price of the regular).

Yeah but you really need to buy the IPhone to go with it.

Point taken.

You can see the same thing happening with the Apple Watch needing an iPhone as what happened with the iPhone needing a computer early on.

It wasn’t until iOS 5 that you didn’t need a computer running iTunes to activate and update an iOS device.

Apple has slowly been detaching the Apple Watch from the iPhone. First with a cellular connection and then with an independent Watch store and adding better APIs for third party apps.

Right now, you can get away with only having the Watch with you in day to day use and the phone company already assigns a dedicated number to the watch (even though you can’t use it), I can see in the next couple of years not needing a phone at all to use the watch.

A cheap beat up iPhone SE fulfills this requirement for $75.

If you're leaving it at home anyways it doesn't need to be pretty or fast. Just needs to allow you to set up the Apple Watch.

Friend of mine decided to go phoneless -- borrowed an iPhone 6S from his QC department and used it to activate an Apple Watch, which is now his sole mobile device.

The Apple Watch cellular requires an active phone subscription to pair with it.

The Ford Mustang and Chevy Camaro are each better because the other exists. I think Apple users should be especially happy when Google enters the game.

Does it have a 6 day battery? My Fitbit does.

Does your Fitbit have a cellular connection? He explicitly said he wants something that allows him to leave his phone at home.

Is there a way to send voice messages without using the phone? Does any of the bigger chat apps offer the "record voice" button?

I haven’t tried any of the other chat apps. But you can send a voice message with the built in messages apps from the watch. It should work with both iMessage and SMS.

Are you thinking of the dictation option, which makes text from voice?

I don't see a way to send a voice message in my watch interface.

I do think an Apple Watch meets all of your requirements pretty easily. You’d have to spend more on an LTE model, though.

I don’t think Fitbit has ever tried to compete in this space.

I can see them linking this data to medical data and getting sued again. Like last June https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/technology/google-univers...

I've been interested in tracking sleep/exercise/heart rate more closely, but have yet to find a manufacturer that takes privacy seriously. Whatever device I have should transfer data only to computers that are under my control. No matter how pure the intentions of the current maintainers of centralized databases, acquisitions can lead to those databases being in unscrupulous hands.

> have yet to find a manufacturer that takes privacy seriously

What's wrong with Apple then?

You need an iPhone. The square design might not appeal to everyone

That wasn't the point of the original comment at all, this is your personal projection.

Whatever device I have should transfer data only to computers that are under my control.

It might be possible to keep the data local, but it is likely to be neither easy, nor easy to NOT end up accidentally linking it to iCloud. Where I personally don't have a problem with those data living on Apple's servers, parent obviously does.

I'm under the impression that health data is not uploaded to iCloud or backed up by iCloud backup. What makes you think otherwise?

From https://www.apple.com/ios/health/

> Your health data stays up to date across all your devices automatically using iCloud, where it is encrypted while in transit and at rest. Apps that access HealthKit are required to have a privacy policy, so be sure to review these policies before providing apps with access to your health and fitness data.

That it is uploaded and capable of being shared with apps implies that Apple both has access to it and is capable of decrypting it. I also have a wider definition of "health data", and would include sleep patterns, heart rate, and exercise rate under it.

I think all the decryption happens on the phone, so Apple can't actually see your iCloud data.

I would be very surprised if that were true. Apple needs to be able to help users reset passwords and recover data. And it would be a complicated key management situation when adding or removing devices.

It is indeed true (and complicated). There have been well-publicized cases of users who have been permanently locked out of their account, because they lost all their trusted devices and also their recovery key.

Well, I am very surprised, thanks for the info :)

That is for iOS and not the watchOS. All health data is stored on the device and Apple does not have access to it.

It doesn't even have the means to decrypt it.

They can't decrypt the health data. They can decrypt most icloud categories, but a few are only exempt.

You can also shut off icloud backup for health.

https://support.apple.com/en-il/HT209519

-------- [forgive me, for the life of me I don't easily know how to format lists on HN or even put things on newlines without double spacing]

"These features and their data are transmitted and stored in iCloud using end-to-end encryption:

Home data Health data (requires iOS 12 or later) iCloud Keychain (includes all of your saved accounts and passwords) Payment information Quicktype Keyboard learned vocabulary (requires iOS 11 or later) Screen Time Siri information Wi-Fi passwords"

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303

------

Imessages are also end to end encrypted. However, if you use icloud backup, they can be decrypted as the keys are backed up.

I'm the same. I use a Contec CMS50I purchased new on ebay as a sleep data logger. I use SleepyHead software, however I think even the windows software that comes with it doesn't require a network connection. It is a pulse oximeter that tracks SpO2, pulse rate, and perfusion index. I think they are primarily sold as a low cost option for hospitals. The data format was reverse engineered not provided by the company and while I haven't compared directly I think there might be some debouncing that should be applied in some cases involving movement of the sensor (possibly their software doesn't do anything about that either). I've used it overnight maybe 30ish times and I'm not sure it will last all that long, although the blue line the display acquired at one point went away after a while. I did find that it is a good idea to wipe with rubbing alcohol each time you use it as the manual suggests. I wish there were more options.

sued just means they overplayed their hand and got a slap on the write. in a sinister way it validates their business model

"Similar to our other products, with wearables, we will be transparent about the data we collect and why. We will never sell personal information to anyone. Fitbit health and wellness data will not be used for Google ads. And we will give Fitbit users the choice to review, move, or delete their data."

Yeah, sure.

Just scroll down and click accept in the meantime.

It's absurd they actually make you scroll like that some how indicates full acceptance of their programme.

Isn't selling your company with the data the same as selling your data?

This is the same situation as when Facebook bought that cool app Moves, and suddenly Facebook had retroactive access to all of my location history and IP+timestamps.

It's true Google doesn't sell your data: they just rent it out a bit.

Saying they rent it is almost as misleading as all the people that say they sell it. It implies that the renter gets the data and they don't and that distinction is key.

But I too am not sure what the right way to describe it is. I guess you could say they use your data in the product that they sell.

It's there in all its glory for the state. Massive surveillance to create a permanent record of everything about everyone.

The problem with this kind of statement is that the data will be there forever and all it takes is a "welp he changed our minds" to undo everything.

> Fitbit health and wellness data will not be used for Google ads

"For now. We'll wait a few years until everyone's forgotten, then launch an amazing new service that just happens to combine health and ads data. What? Hey, it worked for Facebook and WhatsApp."

Well that's pure baloney. They're clear that they may collect data such as <non-exhaustive examples> and that it may be used in a variety of ways which could include <list of vague, anodyne fluff>.

John Gruber^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H

Dan Lyons^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H

Steve Ballmer had another colourful analogy, he used it in response to companies claiming that a merger would create a powerhouse to challenge the market leader:

"It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster."

(Thanks to "raldi" for finding the quote on Daring Fireball, and identifying that Gruber was quoting Lyons, who said he heard it from Ballmer, although the words here are Lyons')

I can't find this quote, or anything like it. Was it recent?

Not an exact quote, I'm going from memory. I believe it was many years ago.

It was actually Dan Lyons, as quoted by Gruber:

https://daringfireball.net/2008/02/devils_advocate

Thanks, attribution fixed. Now that we've got that sorted, what do you think of the analogy with respect to this deal? Does it—cough—fit?

Oops, turns out Lyons was just quoting Steve Ballmer:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080206081701/https://fakesteve....

It's aphorisms all the way down!

The usual algorithm is to follow the attributions until you reach Samuel Clemons, Benjamin Franklin, Confucius, or Laozi. They are said to have said everything.

> They are said to have said everything.

Which one of them said that?

Raymond Smullyan. He established how they could say things about things they said.

Man, that whole article is worth a read ten years on, in light of the topic at hand. He quotes Ballmer, then shows how Ballmer considering turning around and doing just that for lack of better ideas, all the while (Lyons posits) knowing it won't work.

“Two cripples do not an athlete make”

— folklore

However, if the merging companies compete in the same market, it would be fairer to claim that "It's like taking the number two and number three sprinters in the world, and having them run IN SERIES against the number one sprinter." (emphasis mine).

Because number two and three companies merging to a new number one does in fact happen.

(Note that this is the case here, though. No idea where Google is going with this.)

I don't know that that analogy follows, because agglomerations of thousands of people doing a complex task really aren't that comparable to two people doing one simple task.

Taking one example I know of second-hand:

My brother worked for the #2 company in his industry at the time they acquired #3 in an effort to overtake the market leader. It worked out disastrously. It turns out that #3, despite being the less profitable (and therefore less valuable) company, was also physically larger. Internally it had a lot of inefficient ways of doing things that resulted in them needing a lot more people to accomplish the same volume of work.

You might think that #2 was then able to lean up #3 and make them more profitable, as part of the acquisition process. But it just isn't that simple - this was a large multinational with ossified internal procedures that were baked into the very infrastructure (both physical and IT) of the company. Things were never going to change overnight.

So, instead, what happened was that, over the next 1-2 years, #3's culture got imposed on the employees from #2, by simple virtue of the #3 camp being twice as many people. So, in the years since then, the #1 company's market lead has consolidated into outright market dominance, as a result of their #2 competitor suddenly becoming no more competitive than their #3 competitor.

> But it just isn't that simple - this was a large multinational with ossified internal procedures that were baked into the very infrastructure (both physical and IT) of the company. Things were never going to change overnight.

I mean, it could have been that simple: #2 could have just entirely liquidated #3 and taken over their brands, marques, and physical assets like buildings, without retaining a single employee or officer of #3; or if they did keep the employees, it would just be by putting them into an "internal talent pool" where they're being paid to do nothing for a month or two, while they get filtered through #2's HR department as if they were new hires, either being placed in #2's structure or dropped.

This would mean that #3 would be essentially erased from the marketplace at the moment of acquisition: no further revenues, but no costs either, all creditors paid off by #2, etc. #2, however, would also immediately be free of the effects of #3's competition on their bottom line, which might balance out that lack of #3-revenue for them quite well. Many customers previously using #3 would find that they had simply stopped communicating or delivering on their promises for a period—and if they were going to switch allegiances based on that, who better to switch to than their still-business-as-usual acquirer, #2?

And, of course, presuming #2 already had logistics pipelines feeding the same markets as #3, and produced essentially-indistinguishable products from #3, it wouldn't take long to just start producing #2 products with #3 brands slapped on them and start sending them to their new base of #3 customers, to return things to normal. (But in the mean time, they'd have already received many of those customers as switchers to #2, without having to "fool" them with the #3 brand.)

I believe this is the strategy employed by one of the big successful examples of M&A: Anheuser-Busch InBev. When the beer giant acquires another brewer, they don't keep them making beer; they just tear them apart, throw the acquired company away, and suddenly customers of MomNPop Beer Co. are drinking AB InBev beer in a MomNPop can. (They don't even keep the MomNPop brewery itself; there are economies of scale that make operating a bunch of small breweries silly compared to operating one huge megabrewery. They just strip it, sell the equipment for scrap—because otherwise they'd be encouraging someone to start another competitor!—and then sell or rent out the land, if owned.)

> I mean, it could have been that simple: #2 could have just entirely liquidated #3 and taken over their brands, marques, and physical assets like buildings, without retaining a single employee or officer of #3

Oh my goodness.

So, they would have bought this existing large multinational, with a huge existing client list, base of installed product, all sorts of SLAs and support contracts, all sorts of infrastructure for supporting all of that, etc, and immediately fired everyone who knows how to manage it all!?!?!? And what, then just immediately hire several thousand people to replace them 24 hours later, and have every single one of them up and running and productive in a jiffy?

> This would mean that #3 would be essentially erased from the marketplace at the moment of acquisition

Yep. . . followed by #2 being erased from the marketplace by lawsuits within a year or two.

> all sorts of SLAs and support contracts, all sorts of infrastructure for supporting all of that, etc

We're talking about different verticals, here. Product businesses can get away with this. Service businesses probably can't.

Even in service industries, though, there's a simple hack: when #2 acquires #3, they keep #3 running for a few months, but they make #3 push a change to the SLA, where service provided by #2 in lieu of service provided by #3 will be considered an acceptable service-level. They only begin liquidation of #3 once all #3 customers have signed onto the new SLA. Then, when the lights are turned off on #3's infra, all #3 customers are temporarily just provided with #2 services.

Again, this is mostly a thing with product businesses, or, say, logistics providers, where the product/service is "pushed" to the customer by the provider, and the customer doesn't need to change how they do things, they just need to take receipt of the alternate product/service from the new provider for a while. "MomNPop beer is unavailable for a month, but here's a truckload of existing AB InBev 'indie-branded' stock to put in its place until we get our new marque spun up."

This is less of a thing if we're talking about a "demand"-driven business, like, say, a SaaS API provider, where the customer has to communicate to #2 or #3 through an API, and they have different APIs. This can still be made to work, but it's all about how long the transition period takes. Google's purchase of Nest looked like this, with a transition period of two years. But it wasn't temporary; with a transition period like that, you may as well just shutter the #3 "API" entirely.

(Example I can think of where this does happen in a service industry: cell-service MVNOs getting acquired by their own infrastructure provider. If ISP #3, an MVNO who uses ISP #2 as their network, gets bought by #2, there's nothing in #3 that #2 wants or needs, other than their customers, and maybe #3's brand value. So they just tell #3 customers that they're going to be #2 customers for a while (i.e. their phone will be "roaming" onto #2's network all the time, but they'll be charged regular #3 prices for it.) Either every customer from #3 is then pivoted into being a "real" #2 customer; or, if #2 keeps the #3 brand around, their #3 service starts working "normally" again a while later, as just a marque of #2 (if they stuck around with #3 instead of checking the box on their monthly bill that offers to switch them to #2.)

> and immediately fired everyone who knows how to manage it all!?!?!? And what, then just immediately hire several thousand people to replace them 24 hours later, and have every single one of them up and running and productive in a jiffy?

You don't hire the "new"-from-#3 employees to service the #3 accounts. #2 employees service the from-#3 accounts. #3 employees come in at the bottom, as if they were outreach hires.

> followed by #2 being erased from the marketplace by lawsuits within a year or two.

I mean, not if #2 doesn't own #3 when it liquidates, they don't. A company doesn't have to literally acquire another company; they can just pay it to commit suicide, and then pick up the pieces. Who do you sue, if your provider-of-choice #3 just decides to fold?

Or, even more sneaky, #2 can just figure out a way to enter into some kind of financial arrangement with #3, where it then slowly squeezes #3 to death... and then picks up the pieces. (Do you know what happened to Target in Canada? Do you know why? Hint: all the land the Targets operated on was leased to them... by Walmart! And now, after Target set them up nice and neat, and then got squeezed out of the market, they are Walmarts.)

"Simple hack"s may work in "tech". I am becoming increasingly convinced that the people that brought us WeWork and Juicero do not believe themselves to be operating under the same rules as the rest of the world.

When we're talking heavy industry, for example, those support contracts are typically negotiated on an individual basis, and you don't just "push an SLA"; you wait for contract renegotiation to come up in, say, 5-10 years, and then you get a chance to alter the terms of the agreement. Which is a process that will typically involve weeks or months of negotiations, with heavy involvement from the legal and financial folks from both parties.

Happened to a company I started working at. Long story short, I joined as an engineer when one 15 year old based company that was clearly still running like it was 1995 bought a lean tech startup with smart/focus people and proceeded to impose its really inefficient, old culture onto the newly acquired folk. Lots of clash, tons of shit talking, and people leaving left and right. The giant company ended up selling for basically nothing to another company because leadership had no direction and it was all a huge failure. A giant waste of a year of my life. Culture clash is very real, and it'd be interesting to study to figure out how potentially bad acquisitions/mergers can be predicted from other angles besides economic growth or "owning a larger portion of the market"

Just one year? That's a brief stint to learn a lot of valuable lessons about organizational behavior. And you probably have some great stories.

It's easy to spend 3-5 years at a startup that implodes. One year is failing fast, and at least you got paid the whole time!

i rounded down, it was actually 1.5 years, but the stories i have are downright comical and belong in the silicon valley HBO show

if it isn't too much effort, can you briefly jot down a few of your favorite ones? Just like, I bet, quite a few other people here, I am actually very curious to hear some of those.

sure here's a comical one:

we were a healthcare company so HIPAA was very prevalent, and so that entailed a locked office which further included either taking your laptop home, or locking it up in a drawer. there were plenty of people who would just leave the laptop on their desks when leaving to go home due to the fact that the office was locked; one day I come into the office and am met with a bunch of coworkers telling me that the CTO came in early today and found that the door was open and all of the laptops people had left lying around were outside in the hallway, stacked. nothing was stolen, but clearly someone had broken in. it made zero sense, and a different coworker said that she felt unsafe and that we should call the police. the CTO immediately said that that was unnecessary and that we should just be more cautious. a few hours later we found out that this was all a ploy/lesson to teach us to lock our laptops away, and that the CTO was the one that stacked them up outside. he was later asking whether he should resign because of this embarrassment. real michael scott shit.

a non comical one:

we needed to build a viable infrastructure and one of our smart engineers found that we could use a hipaa compliant service (aptible) as a fast way, and spend a bit more. however the ancient dudes wanted us to hire some third party consultancy to build out some crazy complicated AWS stack, and unfortunately that was what we ended up doing because hierarchy. the project was being led by a person who wasnt an engineer, and surprise surprise, we were also locked into some crazy contract where regardless of the work they did, we still had to pay them an insane amount of money per month. the project dragged and dragged, and ultimately didnt work out. we had some half assed/half done AWS stack that no one knew how to deal with so NOW we had to hire an infrastructure dude to finish/manage it inhouse. so we hire this "hotshot" who turned out to be literally a money dump as well, and would show up to work about 45% of the time. no one knew what he did. it took him like 7 months to get that other project to SOMEWHAT work. he was getting paid i think like 200k to sit around and really do absolutely nothing. i was also convinced he was addicted to drugs on the side based on his manners when he actually managed to show up to work. by the time i had left, that AWS project was still incomplete and im positive that anyone with half a brain/aws experience could have built that stack in a month and a half.

and then of course there was the day to day of trying to get information from the acquiring company's employees and trying to cut the red tape of actually getting shit done, but they were very clearly used to bureaucracy type of work environment where every decision took ages, and some people were offended by the most minor things when we attempted to speed things along.

Is this Thomson merging with Reuters to take on Bloomberg? Everything you describe here sounds like it.

I didn't have a specific example in mind, but I believe your example works.

I was mainly thinking, in general, of industries that have experienced significant consolidation.

“Argument by analogy is very powerful and utterly fallacious” — my high-school Theory Of Knowledge teacher (Mr Dawson you’re the best)

That said, I’m really not enthused by this under either the business (relevant case history: Nest) or privacy perspective.

A common antipattern here in HN comments is someone using an analogy (which is almost always bad), and then the responses devolving into arguing over how the analogy isn't correct.

I honestly think a "no analogies" rule for commenting would do more to facilitate good discussion than the existing "no jokes" rule. Analogies are almost never useful. Even the ancient Greeks realized this.

> Analogies are almost never useful

That statement is too broad to possibly be true.

And demonstrably false: what are numbers and arithmetic if not metaphors for acts performed on actual objects? “Get three apples, give away two, share what’s left with your sister” is encoded in the arithmetic analogy (3-2)/2.

Analogies... are more pernicious than you think.

Indeed, if one wishes to be extremely extreme, one might go as far as to argue that all language is ‘analogy’, insofar as it assigns symbolic monikers to real-world objects. Furthermore, phonetic encodings (alphabets) are a further level of analogy, as they posit that (for example) the “in” in “indeed” is “similar enough” to the “in” in “insofar” to be denoted with identical symbols. Those symbols are, themselves... you guessed it... analogies, metaphors, and other various kinds of abstractions.

Analogies can sometimes be a useful supplement to make an argument easier to digest, they just shouldn't be used as a substitute for a coherent argument. The latter tends to lead to what you're describing here:

>A common antipattern here in HN comments is someone using an analogy (which is almost always bad), and then the responses devolving into arguing over how the analogy isn't correct.

"You're painting analogies with an awfully broad brush."

----

"Painting with a broad brush" probably began as an analogy, but once enough people use it, it becomes an idiom. If understanding is shared between speaker/writer and listener/reader, idioms are a useful shorthand for sharing some commonly understood argument.

So useful, in fact, that people often forget what the original analogy was. For example, the verb "rewind." How many people using it think of reel-to-reels, cassettes, or videotapes?

"Painting with a broad brush" is not an idiom, since it's meaning is deducible from its content, not only its contex. It's a metaphor (literally false as written, but calls to mind an analogy with truth -- both the comment and broad brushes apply the same thing to many targets without any careful differentiation)

http://learnersdictionary.com/qa/Idioms-metaphors-similes-an....

Great link, thank you, I will use these words with more rigor in future. I think that “metaphor” is a much better word for the thing that is used to illustrate or add emotional oomph to an idea rather than to argue its merits.

Analogies are like the electricity of communication.

Well played.

I agree with Mr. Dawson.

Argument by analogy is weak.

Communication containing analogies is powerful.

I do not find it useful to say "If A is like B, then all the things about B must apply to A." This forces us to find perfect analogies, and encourages too much bickering over how well the analogy applies.

But I do find it useful to use an imperfect analogy to illustrate something that you have already established directly. So establish that mergers between #2 and #3 rarely end up beating #1 directly, and then say "It's like..."

Our minds are not cold calculating machines. Colourful, humorous, and/or emotionally laden analogies do help us learn things and remember things.

I have found a similar thing going on with illustrations in blog posts. If you have a section about cascading failures in a digital service, and you include an illustration of dominos falling down, it does help people grasp and remember your point.

Even though obviously, cascading service failures are entirely unlike dominos, and it would be quixotic to attempt to reason about services from the things we know about dominos.

This is what I always try to tell people but I like the way you worded it: analogies are for communicative understanding, not argumentation.

All analogies are approximations. Even though they may not be argumentative, picking out flaws in analogies often presents as attacking a strawman.

If I can dynamically alter the spacing between the services ... or take a service out of the fall path before the crush comes. :)

Welcome back! I very much enjoy your meta cognitive viewpoint.

Since I have drawn such unexpected interest in the subject and power of analogies (and the broader class of mappings they belong to, metaphors), might I suggest Surfaces & Essences by Douglas Hofstadter (of Godel, Escher, Bach fame) and Emmanuel Sander. It is a very insightful, powerful, and amusingly self-referential cinderblock-sized tome on how the ability to draw inferences, create and manipulate metaphors, and have a sense for where they do and don’t apply is a central issue for “general artificial intelligence” (you know, the MIT-cantered, Marvin Minsky-fuelled, LISP-encoded “symbolic AI” that eventually plunged into ‘winter’ only to emerge, phoenix-like but neutered, in our ‘modern’ statistics-based Machine/Deep Learning guises).

Analogies are certainly useful. I recall reading that Hawking first had the idea of his eponymous radiation ‘emanating’ from black holes by way of a calculation performed by a Russian physicist (whose name escapes me at the moment) that argued that a sphere of ferromagnetic material should ‘emit’ tiny but theoretically detectable amounts of electromagnetic radiation. I forget the details. But apparently Hawking’s brain drew the analogue between the inverse square laws at play, the virtual particles, and the non-permeability of the objects and set out on his quest for what eventually made him world-famous.

I myself am a prolific, if somewhat irreverent, manufacturer of analogies, metaphors, and euphemisms. I remember the general horror of my family members when I asked great-grandma why she had been moved to “the launch-pad ward”. In my defence, I was six.

Analogies aren’t universally bad but they’re not really arguments.

You need to have an argument for the two things being in the same category for them to make sense.

I don't see how this analogy is apropos. Here's another analogy that works the other way: Adding an extra tube to a single-tube tunnel improves the efficiency of the tunnel greatly. Why is the runner analogy better than this one?

Because your tunnel is not competing against a superior, dominant tunnel.

EDIT: Also, the runner and eagle analogy seam to criticize the line of thinking that would lead people to assume you can just smash together two companies and end up with a company that is better than the current market leaders. The tube analogy doesn't touch on that at all..

> assume you can just smash together two companies and end up with a company that is better than the current market leaders

But you can. Think of regional phone companies (the baby bells), which merged and became dominant just by dent of natural monopoly.

Anyway, my analogy is exactly the opposite of that critique. It's the optimist's view (which is also the view of the decision-makers at the companies, so it's not to be dismissed easily).

> you can just smash

I think you may have glossed over the "just". Of course they "can" but it's not "ergo" in the sense that 1 + 1 = 2 ergo you are now better than the 1.5 company.

I don't view the tunnel as being the optimistic antithesis of the turkey or runner analogy. The other two are not meant to be postulations pending mathematical proofs but critiques on simplistic thinking.

Tunnels are passive, people are creative. Adding a second tunnel doesn’t require interplay from the first. Adding a company of people is subject to whatever the sociological equivalent is of Amdahl’s law, whereby there is extra overhead to coordinating their work with your current employees, and don’t forget cultural integration.

I wouldn't exactly say running a 100 yard dash is creative.

Let me ask you this: why do we run 100 yard dashes? (If you'll allow, I'm going to ask you up to four more whys, maybe we'll find out something interesting!)

I had to google for what "^H" meant.

Found an interesting answer and backstory: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/386870.html

TIL Google had a Yahoo Answers clone...

Not exactly a clone, you had to pay to get answers on Google Answers.

> "Asker-accepted answers cost $2 to $200. Google retained 25% of the researcher's reward and a 50 cent fee per question. In addition to the researcher's fees, a client who was satisfied with the answer could also leave a tip of up to $100." [0]

I'm quickly understanding why I've never heard of Google Answers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Answers

It turns out advertising is still more profitable than charging users.

Correct!

^G^G^G We have a winner, folks.

I’d prefer ^D^D^G.

I used to joke that I was going to have "stty erase ^H" etched on my gravestone. It's probably been 25+ years since I've last needed to type that, but I can still hammer it out crazy fast. Sadly, that muscle memory is taking up neurons that'll never be used for anything else.

> taking up neurons

As long as they're not being used to hold "celebrity" biographies ...

(Sometimes I'm sad I even remember some names ... There's only so much crap one should be asked to take in to live in society ...)

omg how is http://answers.google.com/ still up and running with a 2-generations obsolete UI framework.

But look how fast it is!!

Thanks, saw it in my lecture notes a while ago and figured it was a formatting error...

>> "It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster."

Funny, that's exactly what it has looked like till now since the announcement about Microsoft and Facebook ML teams joining forces to go up against Tensorflow. :-)

So, the concerning thing is, if Company A has been collecting data on users but not doing much with it, then gets absorbed by Company B who is notorious for infringing on everyone's privacy, do users even get a choice to prevent their data (that was collected by Company A) from being seen/used by Company B?

Refer to what has happened (albeit slowly) with Nest... basically as an end user you get no say or choice in what happens to your data, and you can either give up on it or accept the new terms.

This is why I prefer to stick with Apple; even if their commitment to privacy is just PR, at least their stuff won't get bought out by the likes of Google or Microsoft.

Yes, assuming the customer is aware of the acquisition/aware of their data being under new ownership, and assuming the company isn't malicious about secretly storing this data after the fact, they can ask either fitbit or Google to delete the data. For both PR and Legal reasons they allow this.

Vic Gundotra (VP Google) said back when Microsoft bought Nokia that "two turkeys don't make an eagle".

Google officially has become the Microosft of the mid 2000s. Lack of direction and innovation, buying up companies just for the sake of it.

Here is a link to Google's anology: https://www.techspot.com/news/42338-google-attacks-nokia-and...

Google has a long and successful history of acquisitions, as also a long history of lack of direction and headless actions even in their youth days. It's probably just natural for a company with too much money to invest that way.

But when a company becomes big, they do have to branch out and try a bit of different things right? otherwise they are just relying on a few income source, and potentially miss the opportunity of the next big hit?

A long and success history of acquisitions doesn't mean Google has any advantage of taking a poorly performing acquisition (Fitbit) and stacking it into a failing division of theirs (Wear OS). Google would be better off starting over. But Google wants data and Fitbit comes with data for cheap, IMO.

Alternatively, you could view this as a recognition that Wear OS has failed along with a plan to move to Fitbit as a software platform. If they can combine Fitbit's software and community with better hardware, they might actually have a good product here.

Or they could just end up with Wear OS on worse hardware and a disaster.

Fitbit also comes with users, brand recognition and goodwill.

How valuable is the brand these days? It's certainly already declining, and many people consider their products inferior quality. I am currently wearing a fitbit and have already had to deal with it not working twice today, and it's not even noon.

Fitbit maintains #2 market share in fitness watches and has always been a non-premium quality, mid-to-low end entry wearable.

Maybe it's because I'm not a marketing guy, but when has buying the less-than-best company at anything ever resulted in turning it around to earn more marketshare? Especially when that brand is already known for lower quality.

If you buy the first loser, you're just paying more to lose. Also according to this Fitbit is #5 in terms of devices sold (which make them look much worse when you consider how cheap some of their products are), and they have been steadily declining for years. They went from 45% just 5 years ago to 6% this year. That is horrible. Unless Google has an ulterior motive, like primarily using FitBit as a source of data for targeted ads, this is a bad acquisition.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/435944/quarterly-wearabl...

Please point at some of those successful Google acquisitions - the more I think about it the less I can point at anything apart from Android.

YouTube?

Double click, Youtube, waze...

Youtube

Might be because the big names are from their first decade, and in the last decade they focussed more on integrating companies, or are still working on making aquisations a success.

Google Maps and Earth started from an aquisation. Youtube was right out bought by them. Google Groups, Picassa, Blogger, Google Docs are more, though a bit less successfull.

What long and successful history? The only one that I can think of that was a definite success is Android.

Their only notable hardware acquisitions that I can think of were Motorola which was a disaster, Nest which is barely muddling along, and the semi-acquisition of HTC’s hardware team that made the Pixel. While the Pixel may be a great phone, it isn’t taking the world by storm

Doubeclick, Youtube, Waze...

One could argue they’ve almost ruined Waze since acquiring it.

I tend to agree, but it has also improved Google Maps, so maybe it is still a plus for the business overall?

I agree Google Maps has improved, but I’m not convinced it was directly because of acquiring Waze. Waze UX has dropped so much since acquisition that its almost to the painful point. I also find it’s “user submitted” data (cops, construction, pot holes) has dropped a lot so I feel a lot of folks who were submitting quality data have either left or just stopped submitting as the UX has gotten so bad.

Keyhole is another acquisition in the mapping space that I feel has degraded since being acquired by Google. I was a paying customer of Keyhole and loved it, since becoming free under Google, it’s basically stagnated and some of the features I used are now gone.

> I agree Google Maps has improved, but I’m not convinced it was directly because of acquiring Waze.

They often include Waze reported events in Google Maps now. That was the part that I was referring to. I'm not sure if Google Maps reported issues feed back into Waze as well, but I would expect them to.

> They often include Waze reported events in Google Maps now.

I hadn’t seen that, so then yeah I agree it is improved.

I hate to be a cold hard capitalist. But how has improving Google Maps helped its profitability? Would a competitor have taken market share away from Google Maps if they hadn’t acquired Waze? But more importantly, would it have decreased as revenue?

By keeping its competitors utterly uncompetitive. There remains no good alternative to Google's maps for consumers. Waze would have jumpstarted a competitor's mapping efforts.

For stupid acquisitions, look no further than everything Andy Rubin bought, from Motorola to robotics companies.

Nokia Here maps and Apple Maps is larger than Google Maps on iOS.

Apple Maps is so bad that people go out of their way to install another map app even though the OS does not let them properly use the other app as a default.

Nokia Maps pre-existed Waze and wouldn't have benefited from purchasing it.

Fortunately, we have data. Not anecdotes.

I’m citing Wikipedia for conciseness. You can look up the article’s references for citations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Maps

> we have data.

Where is the data that large numbers of people aren't installing Google Maps on iOS despite iOS crippling third party maps apps? Not in your link.

The data is that a majority of iOS users are in fact using Apple Maps.

Btw, you can trigger Google Maps with Siri by creating a simple shortcut and when you search for a place on google. It launches Google Maps.

> a majority of iOS users are in fact using Apple Maps.

That does not contradict the fact that many people install Google Maps. Reread my comments.

> Btw, you can trigger Google Maps with Siri by creating a simple shortcut and when you search for a place on google.

That does not make it work in all apps.

The app is crippled in iOS, yet people still go out of their way to use it to avoid the dumpster fire that is Apple Maps, many years after Apple Maps launched. If Apple Maps existed on Android, it would have barely any users at all, even though Apple Maps would have access to exactly the same APIs as Google Maps on Android. I'm sure Apple would like to have the traffic data that Android users could provide, but they understand that they can't get that data if nobody uses their app.

People “go out of their way” to install the Yahoo Mail app. Is that indicative of anything?

If enough people do it, it is indicative of the native mail app being unsuitable for using Yahoo Mail.

> Apple Maps is so bad that people go out of their way to install another map app

That used to be the case, but they’ve rapidly improved while Google Maps on iOS has mostly stagnated. There’s feature in Apple Maps on iOS 13 that I find useful that nobody else has even.

I mean, YouTube is another.

YouTube is hemorraging red ink, if it wasn't suppprted by the rest of Alphabet it would quickly become unsustainable. Kinda hard to call that a "successful" acquisition.

"it would quickly become unsustainable" why?

If its not profitable. Revenue without profit is meaningless without it being part of some larger platform play. Besides that, how much is YouTube benefiting from getting to take advantage of below market access to Google’s infrastructure?

I don't see any indication that youtube is losing money. That seems like a pretty bold claim, tbh.

> YouTube is hemorraging red ink

Citation please. Everything I've seen is a mix of "breaking even", "still unprofitable", and "adding billions to their bottom line". I.e. nobody really knows because Google doesn't break out YouTube financials.

In any case, I still think calling the largest, most successful video serving site on the web "not successful" is laughable.

Do you consider Uber “successful” even if their not profitable?

I guess it depends on how you define success. If I made a company was used by the entire world at some point, I'd probably be pretty proud and consider it a success even if it failed.

My second point would be to say, is a business only successful if it always makes profits? How many years does it need to be in business to be a success? If I made a company that has a good run for 20 years then tanked, was it a success. Does it need to be run by my grandkids before it's a success?

Uber has never made a profit. If I had a business that everyone used selling dollar bills for 95 cents would you consider it successful? That’s basically what Uber is doing.

Except that Uber is not doing that at all. They do make a gross profit on each ride. Its more like asking if you were successful if you were generating a lot of revenue by selling people dollar bills for $1.15/each, but losing money because of very high operations costs. The answer would be "it depends".

Yes and WeWork was profitable when you use their made up metric "Community Adjusted Ebitda".

Isn't that true for every money losing company? They make money as long as you ignore expenses?

The usual retort is "our addressable market that we have only started to penetrate will allow us to have a large enough marginal profit to cover our fixed cost".

But isn't that also in the pitch deck of every startup looking for funding? "There are x number of dog owners in the world. The total addressable market is ten gajillion if we capture 10% of that we will be worth $some_outrageous_number"

There is a lot of truth to that, and that is a big part of what makes it so difficult to filter out the companies that are criticized legitimately from the ones that are criticized wrongly.

I've been around long enough to recognize that the criticisms often look virtually identical for both cases, so you really have to do a lot of the legwork yourself.

The one thing that I'm confident of with Uber is that they take in more from me as a customer than they pay the driver. Is it enough more to build a sustainable business? Considering the volumes and margin, one would hope so, and frankly I find it hard to understand how their spending is so high. But I've never tried to do the math...

YouTube, Doubleclick, Waze, and DeepMind were good acquisitions.

What exactly does DeepMind even do that provides investor ROI? I can't call it a good acquisition.

Deepmind Health was a pure-data play, like most Google acquisitions; including Fitbit ─ which might initially suggest it is a way to sell gadgets or a platform but reverse is true ie. it is a strategy albeit not a cohesive one, to acquihire and/or gain foothold in a sector, especially where it does not have a dominant presence, in order to integrate a disparate portfolio of existing services.

https://deepmind.com/blog/announcements/deepmind-health-join...

Urrmm, Youtube, Doubleclick, Waze?

Those have all been industry defining.

As someone stated below, YouTube is still not profitable. Waze is really not adding to their bottom line, and DoubleClick was to increase their advertising reach. It’s really not analogous to their hardware acquisitions.

"YouTube is still not profitable." Are you sure?

https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/#6

That’s revenue - not profit.

Revenue is not profit. If you search around, analysts mostly suspect YouTube is either not profitable or only slightly profitable.

Google isn't in it for just the money. They want to control our thinking as well, and given the kind of censorship that is happening on YouTube, if it is operating at a loss, they may not mind because it has other less tangible benefits.

For profit public corporations do everything for the money. There is no ulterior motive.

Gas stations make hardly any profit on gasoline. The margins on snacks, on the other hand...

Youtube or other platforms may not make strong profits themselves, but contribute strategically or operationally to the overall Alphabet bottom line.

So the discussion here is not 'Is Youtube making a profit' but 'Does Youtube contribute, directly or indirectly, to the overall Google/Alphabet enterprise strategy?'. In that case, it is entirely possible for major acquisitions to not appear to be 'for the money' but are still essential in driving shareholder value.

"as someone stated"...

Google has never released Youtube numbers, so I can't say that. I will tell you that youtube is the dominant video platform on the internet. You do realize Youtube shows ads? and those ads are part of google's ad revenue? But the numbers have been inferred "YouTube probably generates $16 billion to $25 billion in annual revenue"[1]

Waze drives all of their google maps traffic data. Again, industry's best.

Doubleclick is the basis for ALL non text advertising at google.

I'm starting to get the picture you really just want to argue your point, without any actual facts. Google has a verifiable history of successful acquisitions. Just apparently non that you "like"

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/technology/youtube-financ...

Your link estimate “revenue” not profit. And none of those are hardware acquisitions - again look at Motorola, HTC’s partial acquisition and Nest.

there are no ads on YT

What? A giant front page ad, one to two pre-roll ads (with accompanying banner ad in the sidebar), semitransparent text ads on the bottom of the video, and another video ad every 4-10 minutes in the video.

Personally I think they are great at finding interesting and relevant ads, which is why I don't block the ads. Howerver I hear the experience varies.

YT does not show ads if you have adblock. Adblock cannot actually block them, but google detects it and chooses to not show them (the idea is that if you have adblock, ads are unlikely to be worth showing to you)

Just an FYI - Google Maps doesn't get traffic or user data from Waze. Maps gets it's data from Android and people who have Google Maps open on their phones.

https://fortune.com/2019/10/11/waze-google-maps-how-it-works...

>Google has never released Youtube numbers //

Can't you just log on to the appropriate USA government website and download the submitted and audited accounts?

Isn't USA supposed to be a bastion of capitalism, and isn't a central feature of capitalism that it optimises the distribution of resources, that optimisation being predicated on readily available information -- the system doesn't optimise at all without information flow.

Please don't tell me Google don't have public accounts???

There shouldn't be any mystery here, you should just be able to read it off the P&L sheets?

Looking on Pixel sometimes I think that Google is not interested to have phone that is taking the world. I think it is more interested in taking word of OS of phones and have phone that is part but not taking world. If Googles tries to take world of phones, then other companies like Samsung will start developing their phone OS which Google do not wants. So I think that the current state of the market of phones and phone OS-es is the one that Google see is optimal for them.

I don't think Samsung, or anyone else trying to develop their own phone OS is any kind of threat to Google. If Microsoft can't make that work with their last phone OS, which was a genuinely interesting, innovative and high quality product, nobody can.

On the other hand their are millions of “Android” phones being sold each year in China with no Google Services. Not to mention the low end Amazon Fire tablets based on Android.

I think by working with a cell phone carrier in the US and bundling enough must have apps a manufacturer could get away with having a non Google certified Android phone. Especially if they could use Nokia’s Here for maps.

It's still Android though, and still picking up crumbs falling from Google's table.

Phone sold in China and Fire devices don’t have any Google Services.

Samsung has good hardware and very good brand for phones which Microsoft has not. I personally thing that if Samsung decides it can become much bigger threat to Android than Microsoft.

OK, but the OS isn't hardware. Being good at one really doesn't say anything about ability with the other. The only reason Apple is an exception is they've literally been bet-the-company all in on both for every single one of 43 years.

Also, at the time who had a better reputation on phone hardware than Nokia? The MS/Nokia phones were also very well reviewed for the hardware too. It didn't matter, the software platform was too late to the party. There simply wasn't, and still isn't a significant market for a third OS platform.

Google Maps, Google Earth, Youtube, Google Ads, all started from aquisitions, to name the big services. They have many more small services and features coming from aquisitions.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio... for a good chronologic list.

Google ads - where they did advertising on their own site was homegrown. DoubleClick helped them expand to other sites. None of their hardware acquisitions have been successful. Android hadn’t developed a piece of hardware when it was acquired AFAIK.

Absolutely, and I would add Google Analytics to that list of "big services" as well.

Ah yes, urchin! God that's a blast from the past.

To be fair I don't think they are trying to make Pixel world-wide popular. If they did, they would sell it to more places (can't buy it here in Slovenia).

It's not about them trying, they don't have the competence that it takes to sell phones worldwide. It takes years to build relationships with the carriers -- where most phones are sold.

You mean the carriers they have relationships with for Fi? https://fi.google.com/about/international-rates/

Those are roaming agreements. It’s a lot easier to get roaming agreements than your phone in retail stores.

Notice that they don’t offer Google Fi for sell internationally and they also don’t offer free roaming like t-mobile.

It took years after the first iPhone launched in the US for it to be available in peripheral markets.

The hardware supply chain capability at Google is beginning to ramp up, but is nowhere near the maturity it needs to be to support a global rollout.

Apple sold 10 million phones the first year it was introduced in a much smaller market with only three or four carriers worldwide.....

If we consider parent's home country a "peripheral market", then it took iPhone months to reach it. Don't forget that Nexus One launched almost 10 year ago. There was plenty of time to build the supply chain.

the Motorola acquisition wasn't a disaster. It's just that many didn't understand Google' intent with Motorola. Google tried to take a stake in Nortel's patent bid, as the wireless patent war started heating up in 2011, but it eventually bailed out. Google instead went after Moto's patent portfolio. It bought the entire company, which came with $3B free cash and tax credit, and stripped off unnecessary assets it didn't need to Arris and Lenovo. All in all, Google ended up paying less than $4B for what they had previously valued at $5B.

https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/01/29/did-google-really-lo...

> All in all, Google ended up paying less than $4B for what they had previously valued at $5B.

A month ago WeWork was valued several times higher than it is today. It doesn't matter if you got a good deal on paper - what matters is if you got a good deal.

So thst begs the question, did Google make enough from licensing the patents or save enough on licensing from a potential competitor or getting sued?

Sure, they got a good deal. Moto's wireless patents were second only (or maybe third) to Qualcomm's in term of quality and they generated a steady stream of licensing revenues before and after the acquisition. Unlike WeWork's unproven business model, the wireless industry's successful revenue generating licensing practices were in place for a decade and Moto's patents were worth quite a bit.

Now let's not forget why Google bought Moto's patents. Just before Google's acquisition, a consortium led by Apple bought Nortel's old, lesser patents for $4.5B. Ever heard of Apple's patent troll outfit Rockstar (or Mobilestar)? They tried to run a patent extortion ring against Android OEMs in the famed Eastern District of Texas with Apple behind the curtain. That is, until Google and Samsung's countersuit convinced the courts that the patent troll's litigation strategy "was consistent with Apple's particular business interest." They quickly dropped their sham lawsuits when the courts agreed to transfer venue to Apple's backyard.

Needlessly to say, Moto's patents in the wrong hands would have been a devastating blow far more than $4B to Google's business.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110831/01030115745/are-a...

Still, the folks at M-CAM decided to put the Motorola Mobility patent portfolio to the test by using a variety of scoring techniques, and believes that the portfolio isn't all that valuable, both in the aggregate and at the specific level. It basically found that about 48% of the patents are probably worthless. At the specific level, the company looked at the 18 patents that Motorola Mobility had asserted against Apple, suggesting that these particular patents may be the "stars" of the bunch -- but, again, found that nine of those patents were "impaired," and were unlikely to be very strong or valuable.

I'm guessing that they evaluated the patents before Motorola got preliminary injunction against Apple.

IIRC, fewer than 2-3% of all patents actually survive and are upheld in patent trials, so they are not probably wrong when they say 48% of Moto's patents are worthless, but that isn't saying much. Take for instance, Apple's design and utility patents asserted against Samsung in Germany. All, 100%, of their patent and claims were invalidated, and declared worthless. I guess Moto's 48% is far better than 100% worthless. The key questions re: Moto's patents were their applicability, not their validity. Moto had filed lawsuits against Apple and Microsoft before Google bought it -- the court had to address Moto's appropriate FRAND licensing fee for SEPs (802 wireless standards and H.264 video encoding standards) and proper court jurisdiction.

IMHO, there is no reason to believe that Moto acquisition was a waste of money and, considering Android's popularity and success of Android today, despite threats from Apple's patent trolling (and even Microsoft), Google's strategy patent strategy worked well.

It’s estimated that Microsoft made more from each Android phone sold via patent licenses than Google.

Apple sued Samsung not for the Android parts but for the design of the phones.

Wrong. Apple also sued Samsung for Android core features, but no infringement was found.

Microsoft was a tiny iceberg and exemplified what could have happened to Android. Samsung was reportedly paying close to $1B for a couple of years, until MS bought Nokia.

Google effectively neutered Apple's patent trolling operation by threatening to expose the troll's true motive, and prevented potential threat from Moto patent portfolio by preemptively purchasing it -- on the cheap.

I haven't had a chance to really think this all the way through, but I have a few thoughts. Google seems to have more trouble absorbing companies that have many more parallels with what they're already doing. Makes sense. At the time Google acquired Android, they weren't really invested in mobile operating systems as far as I know. So Android was a pretty easy integration. The same was true for Motorola and I suppose to a lesser extent HTC. Those two companies were building hardware which Google wasn't as involved in at the time. Those companies were also doing the lowest level stuff i.e., hardware and operating systems. But Fitbit, Dropcam, and Nest are different. They have parallel efforts all the way down. They have their own hardware, operating system, authentication, and they have a non-trivial customer base. Bringing these all under one roof seems a lot more difficult. Even logging into Nest with your Google account took quite a few years. Google also has Android, ChromeOS, and Fuschia. I can't imagine that they now want Fitbit OS to deal with. Or maybe this is just a trivial detail to them i.e., they could just rewrite Fitbit OS over the weekend.

Motorola was sold at a loss and estimates are that Google barely sells 1-2 million Pixels a year - about the same number that Apple sells in a day or two.

Android comes to mind...

According to information that came out during the Oracle lawsuit, Android had only made Google $23B in profit over its entire lifetime. While nothing to sneeze at, considering the number of Android phones sold during the time period, it's not that much.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-oracle-google-lawsuit/ora...

As the owner of a Nest (pre-Google acquisition), I can only say that it's not been a positive experience for me.

Condescending emails about how many 'leafs' I've earned every few months and forcing me to login to the device over Google instead of my Nest account is what I'm faced with now.

I purchased a first generation Nest, and I remember getting emails about leafs for as long as I've had it. I don't think that one is on Google

If a company has too much money to invest, give it back to investors and let them direct the money more efficiently.

This makes perfect sense given the success of Apple in the wearables market. If Google's software and Fitbit's hardware can work closely, then they may have some wearables that could be good competition for Apple Watch.

I mean two turkey's don't make an eagle, but a gun and a bullet are not very lethal on their own. Fitbit's sales are good and it's platform is not, Google's platform is good and it's sales are not. Easy fix.

What do you mean by "platform", in this context? Google's wearOS hasn't proved popular with users.

That was exactly my point, capability of the software, from a technical standpoint WearOS is miles ahead of anything Fitbit will have for 5+ years, but lacks the user count and apps needed. (though by using existing Android notification reply functionality they are still really far ahead in some ways.) From a user quantity factor Fitbit is miles ahead. Mix the two and you get a great (and difficult to make popular without breakout products) WearOS platform with the great user base Fitbit brings.

Completely cherry picked a statement to fit your narrative. Google has done quite well with critical acquisitions. Wear OS is struggling .. this is a good buy they can afford.

I don't think this analogy really works here, the reason the Nokia acquisition didn't work is because it was too late. Microsoft was simply too late to make the necessary changes to compete on the OS level and they kept changing development kits entirely driving away developers and consumers.

The issues seem even deeper there.

In the US, the Nokia brand had basically disappeared outside of Symbian pre-paid feature phones which isn't a great association to have. In Europe, a lot of people seemed unhappy with the switch to Windows Phone and killing Meego/SwipeUI (the n9 sold gangbusters considering it wasn't available in any of the Nokia markets that could actually afford an expensive smartphone). Finally, lots of people were upset that Europe's flagship phonemaker was sold off to Microsoft and then gutted costing a ton of good-paying jobs.

Next, there's the general issue that the MS brand is a bit poisonous to a lot of people. Windows has (somewhat undeservedly) a pretty bad reputation with performance, bloat/slowdowns, and reliability. When Android and iOS basically "just work" and Windows not being necessary, not a lot of people want to deal with perceived potential issues (real or imaginary).

Finally, on the development side, most of the people making apps didn't seem keen on the Windows Phone platform and their passive neglect was a huge complication (supposedly, even multi-million dollar incentives couldn't get the devs on board).

I don't see how it could have been too late. Nokia switched to MS way before the acquisition. It wasn't successful for a lot of reasons and I don't think an earlier acquisition would have really changed that.

I didn't say the acquisition was too late, I said Microsoft pivoted too slowly in mobile.

MS had a solid OS with Windows Phone 7 years before Android had anything resembling a good user experience.

Waiting years between updates with no news pushes away OEMs and ensures consumers forget you even exist.

Oh, that is a fair point. If they'd have bought Nokia before they both became turkeys it might have ended differently. But at that point, Nokia probably wasn't for sale and the "two turkeys" analogy wouldn't have applied either, tbh.

How do you know what they are going to do with Fitbit? Companies attacking others with rhetoric is no different than standard “vote for my comprehensive plan, not theirs” politics.

Truthfully, with AI chips in fitbits who knows what they’ll be able to use it for

Fitbit with Google's Soli sounds... futuristic the very least.

80% to 90% of Google’s revenue derives from collecting your personal information, and you think that buying a wristband that tracks the biometrics of 25 million people is “just for the sake of it”?

Right. Google seems to never have created or bought a product that did not collect data in a new way. It's the only question I ask when I see a new product from them - "What new data is this giving them?"

80-90% of Google's revenue derives from organizing your personal information and selling ad products derived from it. It's not a direct transfer of data into cash.

I'm not sure people really need biometrics data to advertise to you more effectively.

It’s not just biometrics — now they’ll now where you are. Lots of people who don’t already have android phones will buy these (or carry them when not carrying their androids).

So google will know what stores you’re near, what people you’re near, and for how long.

Google knew where you were long before fitbit. It's called Directions API.

I use Apple maps, and I only use navigation when traveling long distances.

Well... what else does Fitbit's cloud store? How often you exercise? Where you do it? What sorts of exercise? Check out these running shorts, keep cool in the summer! Carbon fibre kayak paddles are on sale!

Or, when it's noticed a lull, and kmows you're influencable: Hire this personal trainer to get you back exercising!

Yes hiring personal trainer ads is the market Google was so desperately after all these years

Global health club market is 87 billion based on, err, googling. How much would that market benefit from highly targeted advertising? Only Google knows that: but you can take a guess from the money they paid for Fitbit. Someone needs to stop them because they can sell any business that benefits from target advertising better than its current owners. The purchase itself is Monopoly abuse.

Highly targetted ads are not my concern here, they may even be welcome.

Using heartrate, activity levels, mobilty can probably infer a broad picture of someones health, which of course, would be very valuable to health insurance/life assurance companies.

With this level of privatised surveilance, I'll stick with my mechanical automatic watch thanks.

With sufficient data you could find out much more than that. Your heart rate dropped around 8:20 and spiked shortly after at 8:25? The same happened to 3 million other customers, looks like you are also enjoying the Game of Thrones premiere on HBO.

Located in Hong Kong, elevated heart rate in the evening, spikes match tweets about police activity against protesters? Be prepared to be visited by the authorities.

does google sell data or attention? the whole point of google/facebook ad networks is that THEY keep the data hidden and let you use it as a filter, without being able to see it. they would lose their value if their data was for sale.

google would sell "attention time to people whos heart rate spiked during the world series" but not tell the customers who those people were. you would be outing yourself if you click the ad.

Actually there is a ton of money in the health sector going digital. The more niche are virtual trials and compliance, but it represents 200 billions to pharma and government in the US alone. The more advertisement-related opportunities would be the one you can sell to drug stores and insurance companies. While Google maybe the king of ads, and would benefit from knowing what happens to you when you shop at target online vs in-store, Alphabet is involved in so many health, personalized, and direct-to-consummer related projects, that you don't even have to be creative to think about how they can use it.

Fitness trackers provides tons of information, but probably the most valuable part of that information is that it's real time. It can tell google information about your routine even when you don't have your phone on you (wake up and leave your phone on the nightstand while you get around? Now Google knows you're not asleep.)

I haven't had a Fitbit in years, so I'm sure some have GPS, which would increase the footprint of GPS tracking for runners that don't run with their phone (even if that not many), then you're getting ads about healthy food options near the start/stop point of your trail.

It could tell Google if you've been having trouble sleeping, then you're getting sleep aid or sleep study or high end mattress ads. I'm sure the fitbit can detect certain workout routines based on physical movement, and can cater ads to users based on whether they're weight trainers or endurance trainers as well as skill level.

I think there is a ton of high value information that can be gathered from a Fitbit for Google.

This is where I start to get paranoid about data collection. Once you start combining biometric data along with all the rest of the data they have on you, how valuable does that data profile become to a health care provider?

There are so many bad implications of this, it will never outweigh any good Google claims this will do.

Google already already has a ton of activity information via Android, probably lots of Fitbit data already anyway

Is it possible they see an end to this era of personal-data-valuation and are diversifying?

I seriously doubt it. I don't think they've come anywhere near to exhausting that well.

I think it's the opposite: Apple is growing its accessories line quite dramatically - this and 'services' are where all the new bottom line growth is.

Extending their brand into consumer products + their 'home portfolio' is actually a strong 'vision' not lack thereof.

I suggest however, that their phone, home etc. might well be done under a separate brand, while still under the Google umbrella.

eunalogy methinks

Apple buys self-driving car startup Drive.ai to compete with the leader Google and others in the autonomous space, as it's own efforts flounder. [1]

It's fun to play this game!

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/26/apple-buys-autonomous-vehicl...

Vic Gundotra, the Google+ guy?

What makes him a useful authority?

They're obviously buying them for the data. It's the new gold.

I don't think this is undirected.

Google doesn't talk about it much, but the founders are still interested in the kind of non-dystopia cyberpunk future where a personal assistant is virtually perched on your shoulder, helping you get through your day like a non-invasive cyber-butler. It's the notion that drove Glass and drives Home and Assistant.

Having an in on medical observation technology fits into that mold. I doubt they'd publicize that as their goal until and unless they have something to show for it though.

What has Vic ever done to be mentioned as thought leader?

Vic headed up the Google+ effort, killed Reader, and probably isn't the best example of Google leadership to quote.

I still have PTSD from that murder. It really launched a new google era as the company that tries to hurt internet users as much as possible.

The company that can't even put the right sized batteries in their latest mobile product probably can't spin this purchase into gold.

Some of what they struggle with shouldn't be as hard as they seem to make it...

https://news.yahoo.com/google-acquiring-fitbit-130619853.htm...

"Google has struggled to make much of a dent in the wearables category..."

"Fitbit, meanwhile, has had issues maintaining growth in recent years."

Failure + failure = success?

A large established and (based on personal connections) loyal fan base is a failure? Growth is not everything. Growth isn’t even really sustainable over a long enough time span, and Fitbit’s been around awhile.

Fitbit really only took off after the Pebble acquisition IMHO.

Oh no they owned the fitness tracker market prior, the initial Smartwatch product, the Ionic, was a flop, seemingly their launch of the Versa helped because it was a stylish smartwatch with the fitbit brand and focus, the software was still quite bad compared to Google and Apple's efforts. I would go further to say that Pebble's product was actually much better.

Versa also has hardware design errors, it allows water to leak in (trough HR sensor's bad adhesive seal) with regular use causing massive return rates.

Many management boards do live on the utopia of eternal growth and and it stops, a couple of hundred thousand employees get shown the door, just because they need to collect their bonuses.

So true, often when I google news of a company laying off a bunch of workers, I then see the stock ticker and sure enough, the stock is up 10% on the news.

Not so loyal, also based on personal anecdotes: wife and me both had to have our fitbits replaced and with mine dead again, I'm looking at everything except Fitbit.

Scouring forums full of people with bizarre problems with their devices (usually connection related tho that might be only a symptom), I get the impression I'm not an outlier.

Fitbit built up a huge fan base but looks to me like it is now in the process of shedding it at alarming speed.

I've been getting the same impression. It's the sort of thing that can happen when a company is on hard times and cutting corners perhaps.

Glad to see them purchased by a company with deep pockets and a real interest in making Fitbit a success.

Unfortunately Google is known for its terrible customer support and sunsetting services early. It could go either way.

Why is Google know for its terrible customer support? I have had great experiences with their support analysts in the past, specially concerning Nexus/Pixel devices and Google admin accounts. I never had to wait more than a few minutes to talk to someone and they are always polite and tried to help as much as they can, but this is all anecdotal.

Could you give me examples of their poor customer support? I know that they are not so great with developers who publish stuff on Play Store and the likes, but never heard of them being bad with paying customers.

I can.

I had the USB-C connector on my Pixel 3XL fail. This failure is covered under warranty. I was in Asia at the time. I asked for a replacement, but they cannot ship internationally (even if I paid for it). So I had them ship it to my dad's place, he was going to be meeting me in Thailand.

Well, they shipped it to the wrong address, and by the time it was returned to sender and they sent my dad another one, he'd already left for Thailand.

When he returned home, he mailed the replacement phone back to Google.

When I returned from Asia, I requested another replacement. Well, my account had gotten into some state where they couldn't issue a replacement. I was escalated to a higher level of tech and told to wait. I waited. And waited. 2 months past. My account was finally "fixed" but by then I'd left for a 3 month trip to Europe.

I had them ship the replacement to my mom in Chicago. Then she mailed the replacement to me in Switzerland.

An incredible hassle all around, made far worse by their very low end customer support folks. Every interaction began with a 20 minute conversation about what had happened followed by them typically saying "you're escalated to a higher tier, there's nothing we can do."

Some of the pain above could be fixed by changing their international shipping policy. But my account being in some state where they couldn't issue a new phone to me for 2 months even when I was in the US was supremely frustrating and intolerable.

---

I've had another issue recently. I bought a Pixel 4XL. Google allows trade-ins of old phones, but at the time trading in a Pixel 3XL was not an option (they fully acknowledge this). So I called the next day and asked to add a trade in. Not possible. They suggested I return to sender the phone I bought to avoid the restocking fee (it was too late to cancel the order), and then place another order with a trade in. Well, that wasn't going to work because the phone was sold out.

LAME.

I ended up replacing several fitbits in my family with Apple watches. The $199 price point is very compelling.

So strange, I've had to replace the band but the product itself is solid.

In financialized capitalism growth is everything. If capital isn't generating growth for its holders it is losing it (relative to other investments).

I've gone through two Fitbits and I'll never buy one again. Horrible customer service, horrible build quality, band just kept breaking under REALLY light usage, and they refused to replace it the 2nd time because I was out of warranty (even though it was a replacement band that lasted <9 months). The guy kept trying to get me to use a 20% off coupon for buying a new Fitbit instead, as if he was doing me a favor.

So yeah, I'm with others below, I'm looking at everything else. Just bought a Withings on a whim, and I'm really happy with it so far. May spring for the ECG model once it passes FDA approval.

I was searching for Withings in the comments, and this is the only occurence. I also played with various fitness and smartwatches, but the only one I really like and stick with is Withings Steel HR.

Battery lasts a month, it's water resistant, shows me notifications, tracks steps and sleep and looks good at the same time! Also costs less than a "real" smartwatch. What a bargain to me. If only it had NFC payments it would be perfect.

Also just because something isn't #1, that doesn't mean it's a bad acquisition. I don't know enough about the details of this to comment, but just because FitBit isn't the biggest thing in wearables doesn't mean it's a stupid acquisition target.

If Apple wanted to sell the Apple Watch for $2 Trillion dollars, that would obviously be a terrible acquisition. If Google bought FitBit for $2000, that would obviously be an awesome acquisition.

This reminds me when Microsoft acquired Nokia for some reason.

I think the Google acquisition of Motorola is relevant as well. On the surface, it looks like it makes sense, but Google has a horrible track record with these things.

I thought Google acquired Moto for the patent portfolio. On that basis the transaction seems to have paid off given the relative lack of noise on the troll front recently.

That is possible, but it seems like they could have accomplished that for a lot less money.

How?

That was a fantastic deal - for Nokia. They offloaded a large underperforming business whilst retaining all the valuable IP.

> Failure + failure = success?

Well the world is not so simple. Apple + Next = ?

A bit off topic, but since you mention it: Apple + Next = OS X / Cocoa, which was, for a limited time, a positive development. Now, of course, it's on the decline because of iOS-ification and “Services”. They went from “Apple Computers” to “Apple”. In another 5 years it will be “Apple Services”.

growth != success

edit: not saying it didn't used to be, up to the 20th century it certainly was.

"Growth" = ?

Growth implies success, but you can be successful without growth.

Just running a profitable business that's not losing market share is enough for most people's definition of success.

> Growth implies success

there's a very famous counterexample, namely cancer. are there others?

> Growth implies

But what is growth? Making more money? More users? Happier users?

After attaining profitability I wish companies would focus on making existing users happy, instead of making more money by any means necessary. If they did that then more users + more money would follow naturally.

The sibling comment about cancer is so apt. When does "growth" become cancerous?

My wife swears by her Fitbit... my guess is google needs their expertise to compete with Apple Watch.

- * - = + ... I don't know dude. The math checks out.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Indeed.

A blind and deff guy make a good team.

It's just capitalism consolidating its losses.

Both sides can lighten up some overworked desks. Fitbit can cut some management overhead by being under google, and google can cut some operations overhead by allocating to fitbit.

Overall it is less of a failure to merge than them failing independently.

It seems Google may be very interested in health data collected by Fitbit as other comments speculate. Fitbit has already done the data collection - now Google is buying it. For Google, this is definitely a "win" as I suspect they are mostly interested in this data and not as much in the hardware.

https://www.seinfeldscripts.com/TheSummerofGeorge.htm

George: [Laughs] Relationship intern...hey, what if two of us teamed up?

...

George: I've tried. We don't have it. But maybe the two of us, working together at full capacity, could do the job of one normal man.

Jerry: Then each of us would only have be like a half man. That sounds about right!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HggAV7V6Wg

My first thought is that google will idle and eventually kill Fitbit in four years (see Nest innovation before and after google). But then, I don’t know if Fitbit would still exist in four years if it stayed independent.

I am not sure what to think about this as a Fitbit user! I have been trying to find an easy way to get sleep and exercise data and Fitbit seemed to do the job well enough (I use my phone app during runs to get GPS data). Google's history of killing off successful but stagnant projects (RIP Reader) does worry me a lot! My prediction is that Fitbit merges with Google Fit which I used to work but I had trouble getting any useful data besides daily steps off of it.

Maybe I will have to find a new option for fitness tracking! Nike+ -> Google Fit -> Fitbit -> ???

Going by Google's track record, the top priorities will be

1) Put Google Assistant in everything

2) Discontinue customer service in favor of a useless forum where you can shout in to the void

If you actually are looking for another option, my bias is toward Garmin.

Or Amazfit

Everyone in here yelling about google stealing their data but it's ok if china does it: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/huami#section-overvi...?

As a Fitbit user I'm relieved. Fitbit was starting the death spiral and now they are purchased by a company with tons of money and a real interest in making Fitbit more successful.

I think this is a save for fitbit employees and users.

to everybody worrying about "the data", what do you actually believe google could possibly learn about you through your fitness data?

as far as i can tell, the most valuable piece of data they could harvest through a fitbit acquisition is whether or not you're the type of person who uses a fitness tracker (and they already know whether or not you installed the fitbit app through the play store). It seems insane to me that they would pay 2.1B to feed your heart rate or step count into their ad-targeting algorithms - it's just not that valuable.

If I were to guess: got $100bn cash, not many obvious opportunities to spend on, why not add a device to portfolio? OS + device seems to be Google corporate strategy.

Fitbit has disastrous financials. It's been losing money for four straight quarters and they are losing grip on the market. If this was viewed as non-tech company they would have gone to Chapter 11 already. Tech bubble is real.

The data is deep but not wide. I don't think Fitbit data has much value alone, or even joined to some broader user profile.

I see more value in using the FitBit customer base as a market for other wearables. FitBit has developed some trust regarding collecting health data, which is hard.

Maybe they won't do this...But, consider how big A/B testing is nowadays. Imagine if you could A/B test, but not just see which maximizes engagement, but also see which causes more fear, excitement, etc.

Who knows if that can be monetized, but it seems that there are actually some ways heart beat can be used for other products.

I would LOVE to hear what you think they collect. I’m sure it’s absolutely nothing, right?

Fuck off asshole.

We've banned this account, obviously.

Could you please stop creating accounts to break HN's guidelines with? It's in your interests to do so, because we're trying to have a community that stays interesting for everybody. Going down in flames gets boring pretty quickly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's incredibly valuable. If I were google, I'd harvest the crap out of the data to make ad-serving pinpointing even more granular than it is now. Not only can they use the data to immediately make their ad selection algo more accurate, but I'd imagine lumping all this new data alongside existing user-profile datasets will reveal new purchasing trends (and therefore advertisement campaign trends) at an exponential rate. They are essentially an ad sales company after all so that behavior shouldn't be unexpected. I also wouldn't really be surprised if they added hardware code that logs exactly when and where a given fitbit device is within bluetooth range of another fitbit device (or any google device for that matter). Then create a (or improve upon their already existing) network map via triangulation to see where each user goes, how long they interact with specific people, which supermarket isle they walked down when they happened to walk past another fitbit wearer that is known to be part of xyz demographic, etc.

That data potentially tells them about the health habits of people. How much of the users work out everyday, go for jogs, or bicycle rides, all these numbers can tell help them target specific health products to these people.

This health data is a gold mine for medical and pharma industry as well.

Eventually, all startups will be acquired into the FAANG companies, no matter whatever their "mission statement" is, just like Matryoshka dolls.

Pebble -> Fitbit -> Google.

I am sure there are more examples.

I'm probably just drawing a mental blank here, but what's the 'N' in FAANG? :-S

Netflix

Nicrosoft

Necrosoft.

Netflix [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook,_Apple,_Amazon,_Netfl...

Netflix! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook,_Apple,_Amazon,_Netfl...

Netflix, added mostly so we don't call it FAAG

Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google. Although, it might be more appropriate to call Google 'Alphabet' now. But FNAAA doesn't have as much of a ring to it.

frankly, Microsoft deserves to be in there at this point, so that would end up being FANAMA for Facebook,Apple,Netflix,Amazon,Microsoft,Alphabet and it's easier to pronounce to boot

A man, a fan, a channel?

FN3A

What are the examples of companies acquired by Netflix? They are big, but surely not bigger than Intel or Version or someone like that.

Once you take VC money, your “mission statement” is meaningless. You no longer have the luxury of being a lifestyle business. You either have to get acquired or statistically unlikely go public.

Wait, what companies did Netflix acquire? I can't name one, but the comment is true for the other four I guess

>Eventually, all startups will be acquired into the FAANG companies,

That fatalistic sentiment is often repeated but it's not inevitable that all startups will be acquired by bigger companies. The missing gap in that thinking is that people forget that the startup's founders have free will and must willingly agree to being acquired. I made previous comments about this with examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15732278

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18723777

But do they have free will if their startup is majority owned by VC funds?

>But do they have free will if their startup is majority owned by VC funds?

Yes. Even if the VCs control the majority of board seats and voting rights of the startup, companies like Google/Facebook/Amazon/Microsoft are not in the business of doing hostile takeovers with uncooperative founders. Yes, hedge funds will do that but not FAANG companies.

Typically, it's always a friendly deal and they want to lock in cooperative founders with "golden handcuffs" -- e.g. 4-year stock vesting, etc. So yes, even if the startup founders have less voting power, they're still in the driver's seat in multiple ways.

Can anyone think of an example where a FAANG acquired a startup with uncooperative startup founders? I guess it's possible that there's a startup out there and the only thing valuable about the company is its patent portfolio and FAANG doesn't care about the founders skill sets at all. In such a scenario, I guess they could collude with the VCs and override the founders to buy the startup. I just can't think of such an example.

The point still remains: if you're a startup founder, you can listen to the offers from Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, when they come calling -- but that doesn't mean you have to accept it and sell. Even though billions of dollars being waved in your face is persuasive, many founders have egos and like them, maybe you don't want to report to LP/MZ/JB as your new boss. Part of the joy of running your own company is that you're not someone's subordinate and you don't have to follow the agenda of a manager above you.

Does anyone remember a video about 10(?) years back predictioning something like Google merging with Amazon merging with some other tech companies?

I remember it was somewhat of a parody of how Skynet would come into existence.

> The company never sells personal information, and Fitbit health and wellness data will not be used for Google ads.

Is there any legal enforcement to prevent this in the future?

Besides marketing by health status, I can imagine that advertisers would be very interested in your heart rate before / during / after viewing an ad.

I mean, it's not even true now. They just sold all the data. To Google.

> Is there any legal enforcement to prevent this in the future?

I expect these will come from TOCs.

Which will reserve the right to change themselves at any time, and say that continued use of the platform indicates acceptance of the new ones.

Google has already been sued for linking health data, so this should certainly raise eyebrows for those interested, and I wouldn't expect Google to have any free pass here either.

Well, Google can't sell data to itself and nothing says it won't be used for Alphabet ads. So there isn't much to enforce in the first place.

>Google has made progress with partners in this space with Wear OS and Google Fit, but we see an opportunity to invest even more in Wear OS as well as introduce Made by Google wearable devices into the market.

I think it's pretty clear Google hasn't made much progress with Wear OS. Otherwise they wouldn't have needed to buy both Fossil and Fitbit.

Maybe they should just use Fitbit OS and scale it up this time.

It'd be pretty shocking if they don't start with Fitbit OS, tbh. Its a much larger community.

Maybe they will put Fuchsia on it?

I think for now they should just add Flutter support to Fitbit OS.

That way they keep the OS that works while also making it scale up to support more advanced apps. Also, when Fuchsia is ready they'll have a clearer migration path.

I've had an irrational grudge against Fitbit ever since they bought and buried Pebble. There's a cold, spiteful sliver of myself that takes pleasure from this.

Now for Google to be swallowed by the firmament...

Yesterday I was reading the Google Graveyard https://killedbygoogle.com/ so my first reaction on seeing this headline was to think it meant Google is killing Fitbit.

Wait, AngularJS is going to die?

Yes, AngularJS (1.x), not Angular (2 onwards).

I'll make an opening bet... The last non-security software update for any fitbit product will be 18 months from now.

RIP FitBit. Google bought you, which means that a good lineup of products will be killed or infected with buggy, slow, limited and unimaginative software from Google. Prepare to reboot your Fitbits daily. Maybe those always on displays can display Coke or Pepsi ad or two while you are jogging and figure out that you are dehydrated and out of the water, as ad-tech is the only thing that works in the whole Google empire.

At least there is Xiaomi.

You have it backwards. Fitbit was already dead before Google bought them. They couldn't keep up with the competition, they laid off hundreds of employees, and their stock crashed 90%. Google is mopping up the pieces. Spending $2B for Fitbit is chump change for Google.

I know about the state of Fitbit, but I would have preferred any other company over Google to buy them, including Samsung or Amazon.

I don't see any other company doing things as imaginative as Loon, Soli, Waymo or Duplex. What other company do you know with such a breadth of innovation?

But yknow, they killed Reader 10 years ago so you're right, RIP FitBit I guess.

I'm not talking about Google Reader, that's long gone. The companies you mentioned are technically Alphabet, not Google. If you look at Google all their consumer software efforts are an abomination. WearOS/Android Wear is at best at a level of a basement hobby project. Google Fit app became usable only after many years of updates. Their phones, i.e. hardware are the worst android phones except for the camera and even that leads only in still imaging. Technical details of how they implemented Android support for chrome OS just horror story for users who want to use it on underpowered laptops running Chrome OS. Hardware horrors continue with Google Home Mini, where G. had to disable the top button just days after releasing the device. Their 2 microphones better than 7 in Echo show its weakness as soon as you try to use Google Home to make calls - their AI can understand somehow what you said but humans can't. Their hardware products all feel like MVP from a startup not something designed for regular humans to use. Software horror stories continue, I was quite an early adopter of Google Apps for the business, it definitely was way better than early Office 365, where it would take 5 or more minutes for email travel between co-workers, however, if you signed up directly via Google (a major mistake at that time) there was no way even to backup your company accounts. Once Vault was introduced companies that were set up prior to the introduction of Vault couldn't migration to use Vault, a new company should be set up with 0 user migration tools available. Admin could not even edit the global address book to enter phone extensions of the employees. This was Google's business product. Look at Google's current Nest offering, barely changed in years, took years to deliver even simple multi-room sensors and speakers (Max for example) is the ugliest device you can bring into your home, reminding plasticky Altec Lansing beige speakers from 1990s.

Reminder for anyone who used a Pebble: Your data will have been sold to FitBit and so Google now gets it. Yay!

Assuming Google legitimately doesn't try to retain deleted data as they claim, you just need to delete your Fitbit account before the acquisition closes to ensure Google never lays hands on it.

Assuming you have a fitbit account. I don’t. But I did own and use a Pebble for many years.

That doesn't really follow. Not retaining data is something that has to be built into a product, and so would need to have been done by Fitbit.

I'm in the middle of deleting my Fitbit account. It takes 90 days, so hopefully this deal doesn't close quickly...

How does it take 90 days? If that's true then Google is absolutely aware of this and will make sure to take ownership of it prior to then.

Google fully deletes their user data when requested, I'm not sure why malice over data retention is being assumed here.

Do they? Or do they just anonymize it?

Companies don't like to destroy assets.

I don't think anybody is assuming malice, just incompetence. There are precedents after all.

I wouldn't blame anyone for not trusting them, but here's their page on it:

https://policies.google.com/technologies/retention?hl=en

I don't think merely anonymizing data when the user requested deletion is GDPR compliant.

Does GDPR cover generated insights about that data?

Disclaimer: I work at Google.

And even on the smaller service I work on, we go through privacy review. Generally user-data is coupled to user account identifiers and deleted when accounts are deleted.

This is the easiest, as your retention plan is automatically approved this way :)

All data stores are mapped to retention plans. So you don't accidentally forget something.

For anonymization there is some logic which ensures the smallest slice is small enough that users can't be identified.

Now, all of this is generally and of course there are exceptions -- but these are a lot of work to get. You need to have good reasons to get exceptions, it takes a long time. So if you want to ship on time, you delete data when it's no longer needed, etc.

Exceptions are usually when it would hurt another user to delete something shared, for example..

Sure, incompetence can happen. But Google doesn't have a lengthy record of security holes, data leaks or privacy issues. (I'm sure you can find a few, but my point is that this isn't Yahoo)

> you delete data when it's no longer needed

The data is deleted, but probably not the products developed from the data. For example, Google may pick up from my email that I have a Subaru and if I delete that email, they may lose track of what exact car I have, but I bet they still know I have a car.

I still have the original Kickstarter pebble. Other than my email address and the apps I installed, I can't think of any data at risk.

That would be a drop in ocean compared to the data they have on you if you are using Android and Google other products

Good. I'd prefer Google has it over Pebble or Fitbit.

There's not much data in there and it's probably not worth even worth importing given that Fitbit data is 1000x larger at least.

How? By default the official Pebble app notoriously only stored the data on the phone (and reinstalling it lost all history).

Did you ever read the privacy policy that went with that app? It stated in weaselly but still quite clear words that they were entitled to record and sell your everything for whatever reason.

Maybe they didn't actually do that but they demanded the right to do so and I never managed to make them (or their lawyers) deny it (which, let's face it, was all I wanted - I just wanted to use my watch without them using it or the companion phone app as a trojan to perv on my life.)

I have not used Fitbit in two years, but just logged in and deleted my account. They state that data is also deleted.

This is terrible news. As if Google didn't know enough about you already - they will now be supplied with a 24/7 live feed of your most sensitive health statistics.

I'll be switching to a competitor and closing down my account there as soon as possible to hopefully prevent years of my historic data from being merged into the (ghost) profile Google has on me.

But at this rate it won't be long before there are simply no more competitors to FAANG left anymore. Actually enforcing antitrust laws, anyone, pretty please?

To be fair, Apple does this too to some extent. However, given their most recent commercial re privacy and all of their public statements on the topic, I don't expect them to exploit it for profit quite so shamelessly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Py0acqg1oKc

> they will now be supplied with a 24/7 live feed of your most sensitive health statistics.

In Apple land all health data stays on device, not in the cloud like Google/FitBit

True, and to the extent they would exploit it, this basically amounts to providing a good customer experience (b/c Health information is useful) so that you continue to buy into the ecosystem.

Sounds like a solid sales pitch to me.

In Apple-land, health data is synced to the cloud, but encrypted such that Apple doesn’t hold the keys in escrow; they’re peer-to-peer synced between your devices.

Similar impact from a privacy perspective (assuming crypto is unbreakable), but the data certainly is synced.

Privacy as current corporate strategy is better than nothing, but it's not really good enough when you're talking about health data or other personal data that will still be highly sensitive for many 30-40 years on from now, when the entire board and leadership of the company and market will have changed in unpredictable ways. There's no true solution to long term uncertainty other than confirmed zero knowledge software and/or regulation.

As this has been rumored for a little while now and I've been a fitbit user since day 1 it got me to think a lot about what goolge might be able to do with the data and machine learning and it got me to think of two things that I don't think I heard anyone reference yet.

1) Presence. Right now Google often doesn't know WHO is watching YouTube, whether it be the logged in user or someone else in the house. If they know you're watching on a desktop or TV but your activity shows you're walking around its likely you're not actively watching or someone else is. They could hold off on showing an ad or not target it directly to you until they think you're there to watch it.

2) Involvement. Wasn't exactly sure what to call this but what I mean by this is they can measure your heart rate to see how you react to various things you're looking at now. There might already be studies on how best to control peoples heart rates when buying something or keep them watching longer but if not they'll be able to do a ton of machine learning to test this out. This can help determine when to run ads on YouTube videos to keep you from clicking off or when the optimal time would be to show you an ad to cause you to buy something.

Google makes 80% of revenue from ads. It covers the entire web with adsense/adwords, records anything you search, has users login to chrome, scans gmail for purchase history, tracks your gps location and where you live and work with your commute + waze.. plus much more through android. It has microphones in homes and knows about all your iot devices with nest, it knows about any other online accounts you have because google sso....

Now it has something it couldnt really capture, detailed health data that users willingly provide.

This is all in support of the monster data vacuum that google has become - not about web indexing, its about people indexing, health indexing, interests, habbits all to support ads.

It knows exactly what its doing.

> detailed health data that users willingly provide.

I'm skeptical that an accerometer on your wrist and maybe an optical heartrate monitor can really provide detailed health data.

Honestly, most of the "personal health monitoring" consumer device companies are selling bullshit. They don't have purpose-built devices that are capable of monitoring specific health parameters as you sleep or as you work, they have a pile of "these particular electromechanical / electro-optical sensors happen to be cheap enough and low power enough to put in a wristwatch" and are hoping that they can gain insight by throwing machine learning at the problem. In that sense, perhaps this is a perfect match, since that's what the hype-chasers at Google/X seem to love, but sometimes the best signal you can find just isn't all that useful or interesting.

Maybe not detailed for many medical or health improving things. But Google does not care about that... It just need to be detailed enough for increasing their ability to map the world (see Waze, Niantic), deliver ads, and maybe things like pricing of insurance policy etc.

They do know how much you move and when you move. If I was selling health-related goods, I would really like to know who's thinking about getting healthy. Who's sticking to their goals, who are faltering. Are you up and moving around in the middle of the night. Are you having trouble sleeping. Are you stressed? All of these things could be extrapolated from the data they have.

Seems valuable to me. $2B valuable, I don't know.

Alphabet inc. needs to be broken up.

As someone who works at Google and who used to think these things were true, I can say that most of this is simply not true. We store hardly any data about users. Far from everything we get. Of the things we store, hardly anything gets stored longer than 30 days.

So, no, we do not store a constant audio stream from everything in your house for all of eternity. We don't store every website you visit in chrome for all of eternity. We don't analyze your face as you browse Hacker News from Chrome in your cellphone using your front facing camera, and store how the different parts of every page influence your emotions.

I'm sure SOME company is doing all of these things. But Google is not.

You need to jump through a million hoops to get permission to store anything at all! And unless there's a very clear reason why our service won't function without the data we're collecting (note this is completely different than the data potentially being valuable for something in the future, or possibly being able to add revenue) there's basically a ~0% it gets stored for longer than 30 days.

Maybe some of the older products like Doubleclick and Google Web Search are grandfathered in and storing lots of questionable data. I don't know. But I doubt it. Anything built in the last few years -- again I don't really know -- but I'm pretty sure shouldn't be considered a monster data vacuum.

Throw away account...

As someone who works with Google partners and partnering with Google's data, we see a lot of personal data in it.

You simply might be someone that doesn't work with such data. I do and we use a lot of it and it gets very personal.

> and it gets very personal

What does this mean? Are you reading people's depressed love poems and looking at pictures of their exes?

Could you share more? Perhaps some example or products?

I literally work in logging / analytics, so I do know a good bit about what we store and how we store it.

I didn't say that we don't store any personal data. That's ridiculous. Of course we store SOME personal data.

I said that we hardly store any data that we receive. Of what we store, we hardly store anything longer than 30 days. It's important to note that we receive an UNIMAGINABLE amount of data. Even a small fraction of a small fraction of that is still unimaginable amounts of data.

I don't know anything about our partnerships. I didn't say anything about that.

Data in what state? Does data need to be stored long-term to be used in analytics? The outcomes of those analytics is the data that is needed and would need to exist for a time, but the day-to-day, I don't know why you would expect all that to hang around.

Google isn't making money from selling actual raw user data, its selling data about that data.

From the perspective of a user this sounds positive, but do you have any idea why they don't store more data? Worry about public backlash? Lawsuits over data breaches? There would seem to be a financial incentive to store more given how cheap storage is and the fact that seemingly unimportant data could be useful in future models.

I mean, I'm new and just a lowly engineer, so I can't speak too much for the company.

I do work in analytics / logging, so I do have pretty decent insights into our different storage systems and logging policies.

The people that I interact with view data as a liability, not an asset. I think this is because of lawsuits mostly. We've been bitten by a few big ones. But also, storage is expensive, and even storing a Boolean on one type of log, we could get billions of those logs per day. It starts to add up and cost money.

I think we're pretty confident in our security and take it very, very, very seriously. So I don't think we're worried about necessarily a specific piece of data being stolen. If anything is stolen at all, that would be viewed as an existential catastrophe. So I don't think there's too many pieces of data that we'd care about specifically.

But again, I'm not anyone important here. And I'm new. And I don't know that much.

If you're actually a new engineer you might want to check your company policy on communicating details of internal systems in public; your external communications people probably don't allow you to speak about such things ... on the other hand, if you are allowed to talk about such things then you're probably just a persona adopted by someone in external comms.

Take care!

It's not a trade secret that we store data. I'm not giving away anything that isn't already public information. This is literally me giving a summary of our Terms of Use.

As far as I know, I'm allowed to say that: people I work with tend to be liberal. As far I know, I'm also allowed to say that: people I work with tend to view data as a liability not an asset. It's also public information that Google receives billions of requests per day. For me to extrapolate on that and say that even storing a single bit of data on those logs starts to add up and cost a lot of money isn't a trade secret either. It's common sense.

Upthread you appeared to be making definite statements about exactly what information Google shares, you also mention working for the company which suggests you're speaking authoritatively and in a way that is endorsed by the company (and that's why external comms people don't like it).

A couple of actionable statements

- you don't store anything for more than 30 days (that doesn't mesh with analytics data which might be de-anonymisable IMO).

- you don't do any facial tracking. Which doesn't surprise me too much but I can imagine a future trial where a barrister is saying "your engineers claimed in public you didn't do this sort of tracking" and that providing extras jeopardy for damages.

It's not my area, however, I appreciate the openness. Thanks for sharing.

I think it is not about storing data but it is about learning from it.

After you learn that I'm into fitness (or vice versa) and manage to serve me an article in a news feed and direct me to a health blog (served by Google ad sense), then job of the data is done.

Amazon sees a lot more and all they really care about is what you view and what you buy. Everything else is noise with current tech.

Every model I know about is retained from scratch on the raw data as often as possible. There are several reasons for this:

Anything derived from PII is also PII unless it is anonymized by aggregation. Everything that is PII is aggressively TTL'd from the time of its collection from the user. The privacy review team knows what they're doing and won't let you get away with clever lifetime extension tricks. If there is a model specifically for you, it isn't going to be causally connected to anything that's aged out.

You can delete individual items and categories from your history. It would be an unimaginable pain in the ass, both mathematically and engineering-wise, to propagate the updates for individual deletions through an incremental pipeline. Even worse, I can't imagine how you'd possibly argue that such an operation would satisfy a legal deletion request (HIPPA, GDPR).

If you need to change your learner - say you found a bug in your training code - but all you have is a trained network and no data, you're screwed. You lose all your history and your user's search, spam-filtering, or voice recognition quality tanks, and people really care about those things. Pure incremental pipelines are incredibly brittle.

All of these problems are trivially solved by retraining from the raw data. Disk is cheap. Compute is cheap. Engineer time is expensive. Fancy infrastructure is expensive. Mathematicians are super expensive. Legal compliance is fantastically expensive and grows in cost incredibly quickly with increased engineering complexity.

I work at Google. My views are not the views of my employer and so on and so forth. I build data quality infra for the knowledge graph. I haven't worked on a ton of projects that dealt with PII for public users, but even so the privacy reviews for the tools and pipelines I build get reviewed and occasionally changes are demanded to protect tool-use information about employees that use the infrastructure that I build.

Google (and similar businesses) get into trouble because they have to do enough surveillance and algorithmic profiling to make their advertising effective. You have to admit that it's a stretch to ask us to trust them.

> We don't analyze your face as you browse Hacker News

You disappoint me ;)

> You need to jump through a million hoops to get permission to store anything at all!

I guess you don't work with Android.

Today I wanted to set up my smartwatch. My phone told me to enable Bluetooth _and_ gps. I turned on GPS, it asked if it was okay to send positioning data to Google for some vauge reason. I said no. So it turned off GPS altogether. So now I won't be able to use my watch. (This is a clear GDPR violation btw)

Why am I telling you this story? Because someone at Google is trying really really hard to get his hand on all possible data. Maybe you two should have a chat.

Maybe someone can explain this to me.

Why does Google want to compete in wearables? Why do companies feel the need to spend time/money investing in a product for no apparent reason besides the fact they aren't? Google (and tech) has always found its success in developing new markets, not chasing existing ones. That's some Balmer era Microsoft group-think.

Is it just investor pressure?

Other than iMessage, the principal reason I'm not on Android is because I absolutely adore my Apple Watch. I suspect there are many like me. Google Assistant on a watch that that worked as well as Apple's would be amazing. Despite years of runway, no OEM has been able to make a competitor to Apple Watch with Assistant. I think Google has decided they'll just have to do it themselves.

I guess the reasoning is that the more industries you have your products in, higher the chances of your survival will be. If the economy fails, hypothetically there will be some industries that'll survive.

Your wearable knows where you are. It knows when you sleep, when you fuck, when you run. You tell the software associated with your wearable what you eat, how much, and when.

They want the data.

The good news is Fitbit’s health data sucks so Googles not gaining that much.

Don't understand what you mean by "Fitbit's health data sucks". I find it accurate. My only grouse with them is that they don't give enough data out to be synced with Google fit or Apple health. Which might change now.

Congratulations to all Fitbit users on becoming Google data products!

I think all this talk about Facebook and paid political ads missing the key problem I have with ads-based businesses and that is there are certain things you just shouldn’t be able to target ads to people with, including health information.

If congress wanted to regulate big tech they should enforce certain basic standards around 1) what information can be used to target consumers with 2) the granularity of the data.

For political ads, for example, I think the right decision for Twitter and Facebook would be to allow them but limit targeting e.g. you can specify the district they would appear in (low granularity) but be shown to a completely random sample of users who live there.

There have been quite a few lawsuits around related subjects. Facebook got sued because their targeting of ads allowed people to do things like target jobs to only men [0], or only to certain ethnicities [1], etc. Certainly, in some cases, targeting gender makes sense, but allowing it across the board gets a little scary.

0: https://www.vox.com/2019/3/21/18275746/facebook-settles-ad-d... 1: https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-advertising-discriminat...

Yeah but Facebook got sued for that because those violated existing laws. There’s no regulation around using any data for targeting purposes for most regular or political online ads, and I’m saying that should be the focus when it comes to regulation but have not heard anything other than “Facebook is destroying democracy!”

When looking for open and hackable alternatives, I stumbled over OpenHAK: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1222384528/openhak-the-...

Too bad the Kickstarter didn't succeed. If you wish it did, leave a note in the forums: https://groups.google.com/d/forum/openhak-beta-testers

Everyone here is talking about the fitness market or the lack of direction at Google. This move is about the Healthcare market.

At least where I work, researchers have been eager to partner with Fitbit and other companies to capture more reliable data in their longitudinal studies.

Fitbit devices are cheap but provide a wealth of information that's far more reliable than participant surveys. Companies are more than willing to purchase and distribute these devices for free to participants in their studies.

If people are interested in alternatives, Garmin and Polar are companies unlikely to ever be acquired by a big tech company that would rely on selling data as a business model.

Makes sense. Google needs access to our wrists and Fitbit is widely used and a cheap company, relatively speaking. That means they've got the Home, Nest, Fitbit, Phone, Computer, Car...all wrapped up. Now I wonder when are they going to buy a drone company. Oh wait, they did that already with Titan Aerospace and Boston Dynamics (even though the latter is gone). Anyhow, with this all lined up, it sounds like the Google 2020 announcements for 2025 will have watches.

And here I was considering getting fitbit...

Could anyone suggest an alternative?

I really have no trust that google will keep promise not to use the data.

edit: thanks all, I have too look into it all back home.

Apple Watch

Mi 3 or 4

IMHO giving your health data to China is worse than giving to Google.

Why?

It has a clear interest in suppressing any adversarial views and is not bound by any laws.

Currently that interest is mostly confined to China itself, but I wouldn't be surprised about that changing.

I don't know how they could use that data currently, but they are inventive and usually use everything they can get.

Consider the recent stories where LinkedIn was used by China to recruit spies.

Now consider a person with health issues, whatever they may be. Many people can be turned by using their or their loved ones' health issues. Whether it's the money for health payments, promise of new treatments, organs transplants ... I leave to imagination.

Garmin vívosmart® 4.

This! I had Fitbit before, but it stopped syncing (common story). I love the Garmin - nicer hardware, software, flawless syncing, lots of integrations with other apps which is nice.

https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/p/605739

I'm split between the Garmin and Mi Band 4. The stress tracking features on the vivosmart really tempt me, but I'm concerned about the irreplaceable band and the whole change in ecosystem as I currently use an old model Mi Band.

The Apple Watch is the best smart watch on the market and I'd trust Apple a lot more with my data than any alternative.

my one issue with Apple Watch is requiring an Apple iPhone to use it, if it could be instead used with an iPad or even one of their laptops/desktop I would have one and have bought them for a relative or too; mostly for the fall detection

I have 3 issues with it

1) Don't use an iPhone 2) Battery life too less (my versa lasts me 4+ days) 3) Too expensive. I bought my versa a month after launch for $150 and my wife's for $90 (albeit a holiday deal). They also just work without an issue and I don't imagine paying significantly more than that on another wearable.

Mi band 4 has best battery life and together with mi band tools app (search on play store) is great. To be honest, if there were custom opensource ROMs for mi band, they would destroy all alternatives.

And it's cheap.

The irreplaceable band on my wife's fitbit charge broke once, then the 3rd party replacement that shouldn't exist broke too. She then decided to get the cheapest option and seems pretty happy with it still. And if it breaks she'll just get a new one.

Since you can use the band with open source apps (Gadgetbridge), the security and freedom aspects of a closed firmware fitness tracker is okay.

Of course it feels nicer to have software you know on your wrist. There are a few people who are interested in writing an own OS for the Amazfit Bip watch by Huami, which may (I'm not sure) also be the manufacturer of the bands. The project isn't really active, but maybe the motivation of some possible synergies would help.

>I really have no trust that google will keep promise not to use the data

Worth clarifying that they didn't even promise this. What they said was...

>The company never sells personal information, and Fitbit health and wellness data will not be used for Google ads

That means they won't sell personal information but they will probably sell anonymized health and wellness data and they will absolutely use the data themselves, just not for Google ads.

Depends on what you want to do with it. If you just want a relatively dumb watch that tells the time, shows notifications and lasts for days, a Pebble may still be a good choice. The firmware has largely been reimplemented by the Rebble project, so you're guaranteed to be free.

If you want serious tracking and are prepared to spend a lot of money, Garmin makes good devices.

If you're okay with giving up data as long as it's not to Google, Jawbone and Mi fit devices are pretty close to Fitbit offerings.

PineTime, an open source $20 activity tracker, is going to be sold in the next few months. The dev kits are already in the wild.

Apple would be fools to not offer Android support on the Apple watch on the back of this news... But they are so concerned about ecosystem lock in they might not. There are now officially no stylish or social alternatives to Google or Apple wearables. I'm sorry, but Garmin is just not style focused and one of the benefits of fitbit is the social aspect of challenging your friends. This is a huge blow to wearables.

Why would they? There are so many ecosystem tie ins between the Apple Watch and the iPhone. Besides, what does the development tool chain look like? Develop an Android app for the phone and a Swift App for the watch? What is the debugging experience?

With Swift UI it should be even easier to use views on both the iPhone and the watch. Offering support for Android goes in the opposite direction.

Then on the other hand, with the Watch OS stand alone store, Apple might be moving into that direction of not requiring a phone at all.

Doesn't Amazfit GTR cover that? https://en.amazfit.com/gtr.html

Or Huawei Watch GT 2 https://consumer.huawei.com/en/wearables/watch-gt2/

Or Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2 https://www.samsung.com/global/galaxy/galaxy-watch-active2/

Garmin does sell style focused models such as the Vivomove and Vivoactive series. They also provide social challenges through Garmin Connect.

Negative spin: So your current fitbit will be useless in around 2 years, your data will be used for sales and the whole thing will collapse as a sunsetted product in 4-5 years.

Positive spin: new features, better integration with google ecosystem (whatever that means), ... um?

I think from history we can see that google will experiment with multiple products in the same space and kill off unsuccessful versions (video, social networks, chat, productivity etc) and that they will also make bets on more fringe areas and kill it if it doesn’t work. Fitbit seems different then, because google doesn’t have an alternative product nor is it a niche market (the fact that Tim Cook says that we will all remember apple most for their contributions to health probably means this space will blow up!). Fitbit clearly couldn’t innovate fast enough so for consumers it’s probably just a good thing.

The PineTime is a new Linux smart watch - I imagine a future version could do the basics pretty good. I really just need notifications and a step counter, personally

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/09/pinetime-linux-smartwatc...

If you want to try to keep your health data away from Google:

https://help.fitbit.com/articles/en_US/Help_article/1285

> Within 30-90 days: Most of your personal account info is deleted within 30 days of when you confirm your deletion request. This includes any subscriptions you have, like for Fitbit Coach. It may take up to 90 days to delete all of your personal info, like the data recorded by your Fitbit device and other data stored in our backup systems. This is due to the size and complexity of the systems we use to store data.

For heaven's sake, please let this mean that Google finally gives a shit about wearable devices!?!

I know wearOS devices have been struggling. I hate the thought that I have to buy a watch from China to get decent battery life (a Huawei band 2) which means that my data goes through some sketchy companies in China.

I already have given everything to Google. Why would I want to do that for Huawei, Samsung, and whoever else is making hardware?

I want to control when my devices talk back to a server and what they say, so I started using net guard and monitor the URLs my data is going to.

I want to see the data stream so I can get even more detailed in my blocking efforts.

Link: https://blog.google/products/hardware/agreement-with-fitbit

Wow, the legal disclaimer at the end is as long as the whole entry.

The buyout price is unacceptable, expect FIT shareholders to oppose the deal. Basically everyone who has been holding FIT more than two years will take a loss with this deal. IPO price was $20 in 2015.

Hasn't their entire future roadmap been a blank page for a while and the Versa 2 is a flop? If you view their roadmap as a lot of red you might see a buyout like this. (seeing as their opportunity to compete with Apple is quite poor.)

And they almost hit $52 once, but that is irrelevant now. They are in serious trouble and needed this buyout- that's why they put themselves up for sale.

To me, this isn’t about making a stronger push into the wearables market (sure, that’s what they will say), it’s more about collecting as much personal data as they can to better target ads with.

> making a stronger push into the wearables market

I can't see an advertising company ever being trusted enough for people to feel comfortable sharing their health data. They can push all they want, but maybe their slice of that market is about as big as it's going to be.

My friends and I have this theory that the top management at Google feels they are extremely close to general AI. With acquisitions like this we would hazard the guess that they want to see what data they are missing that could feed that borg and then buy a company that could supply the missing bits. They just have to promise that they won’t use it for ads. But if that AI gets better and better soon they have enormous new opportunities. Just a theory though.

Interesting. Would they be behaving differently if they were just racing to be first to general AI rather than already being "extremely close"? Seems like they're making great strides with specific applications but given the reported limitations even in that class of AI (see Duplex) I'd be surprised if they were on the brink of general intelligence. Of course, you might consider close to be in the next decade or two, in which case [shrugs].

Never attribute to evil genius that which can be explained by corporate flailing.

I loved Fitbit for many years, especially for its strong privacy stance. If my data becomes part of Google's surveillance economy, I will be greatly disappointed.

Alas, Fitbit data has just become part of Google's surveillance economy.

..and well on its way to "It's been a great journey".

This news says that it will. You should go in and delete your fitbit account if you don't want that.

Well done Google. So now you won't spy on me only when I am typing something on a computer or phone but also when I breath or when my heart beats. *uck FitBit. There it is in the dustbin and everyone else I see wearing it is an idiot or is an idiot. I hope insurance companies don't make it mandatory to provide my google account details while signing up. But who am I fooling.... So much for "Don't be Evil"....RIP

>So much for "Don't be Evil"....RIP

https://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/10/02/as-google-becomes-al...

Behind a paywall. Unfortunately I don't pay people/organisations to tell me what their opinion is. They can very well keep it to themselves.

This news made me discover where the line is. My Android device is always listening, it tracks my every journey knowing where I travel to and how I get there. Google scan my email and undoubted have traced the majority of my internet activity.

Now they want to know each time my heart beats, how many steps I take, how many calories I am burning etc. Nope. No thanks. Never been one to boycott devices but the Fitbit is now in the draw. I will be looking for a garmin this weekend.

This made me contemplate the context of a privacy policy.

Take a look at https://www.fitbit.com/legal/privacy-policy#how-we-use-info (the section on how they use information). Sections in here having a context to Fitbit is very different from those same sections as they relate to Google.

If Google wants to be successful in the devices segment, they should first try to release appealing products.

I am currently in the market for a better phone, and had high hopes in the Pixel 4. Sadly, the reviews about the battery life will make it a pass. For a giant company like Google, this seems like a major mistake you can not afford to make given the level of the competition.

They couldn't launch a similar product for (say) a tenth of $2.1B? Or is this an acquihire? How many devs will this give them?

I think they are mainly paying for the data from the last 10 years and the fitbit users.

Is there a pithy name for the “law” that any company that collects your data and promises its private will eventually sell it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_retention

Hmm I'm thinking something more like the "Streisand Effect" or "getting Rickrolled".

One step closer to my dream of Google Maps navigation being able to offer you the "least stressful" route.

Anyone remember when Fitbit exposed numerous clandestine imperial bases around the world?

https://fortune.com/2018/01/29/strava-heat-map-fitbit-fitnes...

Fitbit press release: https://investor.fitbit.com/press/press-releases/press-relea...

Fitbit always refused to open detailed APIs and integrate with HealthKit to keep people using their stuff which is why I switched to an Apple Watch despite really liking my Charge HR. Looks like that was the right decision and HealthFit will probably never ever come into consideration

How long are we figuring it will be until Google gets bored of _this_ project too, and shuts it down?

I had a feeling this was long coming - I loaded up on some Fitbit stock in early 2018 (when there were reports of their acquisitions in the glucose-monitoring space). I believe Fitbit was a target for acquisition by Apple/Google/etc due to their health patents.

Well, I won't be buying a fitbit ever again. The one I have now will go into goodwill pile.

All the folks talking about Wear not doing well, I'm always surprised the original Huawei watch wasn't more popular. I love mine, especially because I think it is one of the only smart watches that actually looks good as a watch.

If one doesn’t want their data to be consumed/owned by Google, what’s the best alternative fitness band (not smart watch) on the market? I specifically do not want all of the smart watch features... just fitness/health tracking.

Garmin

what about Polar?

Why isnt it Alphabet buying Fitbit, instead of Google? Does that make a difference?

Google is the software arm of Alphabet, already maintaining smartwatch platform. No reason to keep it separate.

Any chance this plays into a broader strategy with Verily? Not sure how that would work organizationally since it's Google and not Alphabet acquiring Fitbit, but seems like the data would be especially useful there.

This is $2.1B that would have been better spent on improving WearOS, get Spotify offline support, and maybe make their own Pixel watch.

Google hasn't really showed any interest for watches in years, this is a weird buy.

Discussed recently but before it happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21378471

Everyones getting so upset, but we knew they bought FitBit just to keep their pipeline of projects to sunset full. I mean theres enough here alone to be at least half of their 2021 sunsets.

This thread gets a whole lot scarier https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10932968

Is there any way to pull data from the fitbit device itself offline?

Anyone else not realize that "Google Fit" was already a thing?

https://www.google.com/fit/

More personal data to use and build a complete model of you.

The sooner they can integrate Fitbit with Google Fit, the better. I had to buy a Fossil smart watch (!) bc Fitbit doesn't talk to Google Fit and Noom.

Google: Says "Don't be evil"

I : yippee.

20 years later

Google: This is what being evil means....okay....

I : ok. But do I have a choice....

Google: well.....if you did, we'll buy it anyway. So please fall in line....

Sidenote: expecting some company will lead the Android tablet market with an interesting offering because Google discontinued their tablets.

...and all the Fitbit data on ~100,000,000 people.

I read Google buys Fitbit's data for $2.1B. Wondering what ML model they are going to feed with this data. Any product tips?

How could they combine the location data from Fitbit with the location data from Ingress/Pokemon/Potter?

Is that data alone worth $2bil?

Well, this sucks. I only got a fitbit at the start of this year, but I’m also trying fery hard to de-google my life. Damn :-(

My feeling is that Fitbit really wanted to sell, especially before the holiday seasons and risk showing unfavorable numbers.

I wonder if this will lead to a “semi-smart” watch. The fitness-minded audience can be a new way to push the assistant.

In international market - Xiaomi decimated Fitbit already. High end is owned by Apple. May be a mixed bag for Google

A simple, thin watch with an epaper/transreflexive display and an open ecosystem. Is that too much to ask for?

Simple question: why is the stock up so much considering the sentiment that it is bought up by Google?

Is there some alternative firmware for fitbit devices that makes them log into a self-hosted service?

Real honest question here, is there any viable open source competitor to fitbit devices and why not?

They might have an X project that could use the Fitbit platform. Hopefully not another Nest mess.

If there was any decent level of customer support at Fitbit, users can say goodbye to that.

I'll just burn my pebble now.

Please don't, there's a limited number of them in circulation. :)

There's also zero chance it will be affected.

I'm joking, I love my pebble. Just sad to see the company who should support them begin to die.

They "began to die" years ago and had shrunk to less than 10% of their post-IPO valuation. Not that I expect Google to be very price sensitive about this kind of deal.

Have they every supported it? My experience with them has been pretty bad.

Software is closed, no replacement parts, fewer features than marketed ("It has a microphone" -> you can never get that data, only the text from their TTS service) ...

Luckily the software part is changing with Rebble. But I don't see how anything will change for customers.

To be fair to Fitbit, they left the Pebble servers up for something like an extra year at the request of Rebble's developers, who said they needed more time.

They also recently helped get the Pebble app back in the iOS App Store after it was delisted a few months ago for some reason. That was pretty critical given the nature of iOS.

Pebble was reportedly more or less about to run out of cash on their own, so against that alternative I'd say Fitbit has been decently helpful.

Fitbit was absolute trash before the buyout. Garbage in, garbage out.

My previous company provided one of those Fitbit bracelets and it just stopped working one day after a month of usage. While it did work, step tracking was spotty, at best.

Haven’t looked back at wearables since then but I’m leaning towards the Apple Watch series. Maybe on the next refresh though.

Seems 'joining the forces' is no longer phrase of choice in these acquisitions.

UGHHHHHHHHH... will by FitBit data be shared and sold? Wonderful! What will happen :(?

worst pairing ever....from customers view. Or maybe not. Facebook would be the worst.

Google is terrible at anything hardware-related so this sounds like a big fat loss

RIP Fitbit

"We won't merge the databases - pinky promise!"

Well, guess Google knows all your heart-beat data now.

They will know when you're excited about an ad they've shown you!

Cool. Maybe ai can spot some health issues.

Google taking the lead into the trackers market

so now my watch spies on my like nest? great

What are some good FitBit alternatives?

Because Monolpoly Good.

The states doesnt even pay lip service to free market these days. Another 2 billion worth of market assimilated to a monopoly.

Seems like Google got a good deal.

Just deleted my fitbit account

Isn't it boomers that just use this? And by boomers I mean anyone 30yo and over.

It's become clear your data is not safe no matter which company you choose to do business with, considering virtually all companies are in jeopardy of being purchased by bigger companies which don't value your data privacy. Perhaps it's time the US enacts laws similar to GDPR.

Everyone who used Fitbit, now your data belongs to Google - Congratulations!!

We changed the URL from https://twitter.com/JonErlichman/status/1190252267406069760 to an article which adds at least a little more information.

The press releases are https://blog.google/products/hardware/agreement-with-fitbit

and https://investor.fitbit.com/press/press-releases/press-relea...

I see you replying to these threads sometimes, and you usually say "we" did thing. Are these decisions actually being made by a team and you the (possibly self selected) community lead? Or are you just saying "we" as in "I, someone whose actions represent the desires of the mod team, did thing"? Just curious, I've never had a problem with your changes.

I know I was told I can no longer talk negatively about Google on Hacker News nor point to a popular HN thread that puts Google in a bad light. I told my story for awhile on HN and lo and behold after doing so another student/inventor told a similar story with evidence of Google getting caught doing X.

I do wonder who is making up these rules and why do they care what I say about Google? If I talk frequently about the same Yahoo story one that is neutral and I am neutral are you going to tell me to stop/say that is spam too?

I think you may have replied to the wrong comment friend :)

Hmmm i was following your question about who makes the rules up.

I was shocked to hear and be told I can no longer talk negatively about Google on Hacker News and provide my reason why if asked.

> I was shocked to hear and be told I can no longer talk negatively about Google on Hacker News and provide my reason why if asked.

Because it's baiting people into allowing you to grind your axe? I just looked up what you are referring to, and while like the mods I agree there's likely something to your story, that doesn't mean it needs to be injected into every conversation, nor that you can be excused for saying "they are pigs" with regard to Google.

The job of the mods is to provide a civil place for discourse that people enjoy and find benefit in participating in. If they think you repeatedly bringing up something that you've already expressed on multiple occasions is impeding those goals, it's their job to take action.

The fact that you've started the same behavior over their actions to correct your prior behavior (note how the person you replied to thought you accidentally replied to the wrong person?) is evidence that you didn't understand what they tried to express initially, or possibly don't care.

The solution to this is simple, stay on topic, or at least make sure your tangents have a reason. A discussion about Google wrongdoing, or poor experiences, or even weird interview problems would be a good place to bring out your Google grievances. A discussion about who the moderators are and how they come to consensus for purely educational reasons is not an entirely appropriate forum to air your grievances about past moderator decisions, as it's a large shift in tone, and that's ignoring its tendency to derail any conversation it happens in.

If your message has merit, it will be better received when it's in the right context. In the wrong context, it's likely to be ignored, and possibly even negatively received, as you've seen.

It's hard to believe that. The large majority of commentary here is negative towards Google, and in fact most of the big guys. Are you saying you got a private message about this?

Yes, dang has told me I can not speak negatively about Google and point to my personal reasons why. Nor point to a popular HN thread that clearly/flat out shows Google getting caught doing a bad thing.

That's not what I told you (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21332308). The issue is repeating the same thing over and over at any mention of a triggering topic, or even (as in this thread) with no mention of it.

Repetition spoils curiosity. When users repeat the same thing so often that it starts to sound like an idée fixe, other users get upset and call it spamming, and eventually we have to ask the person to just avoid that topic. Google isn't the issue; there's plenty of criticism of Google on HN, as of every other big tech co.

An obsession ... no ... where its relevant I have spoken about it. Like if I say I loathe Google and then asked why I provided the reason. When ATAP released some new tech I pondered X. All done in the last two to three weeks. Further, everything else I commented on in the last two to three weeks had nothing to do with X.

Since our last exchange I haven't posted anything about it or had planned to. Here in this hidden thread I saw another member pondered something I did after our last exchange. I fully didnt understand why anyone would care that much about what I have to say about Google or why I loathe Google to the point of being told no more.

Overall I still dont fully understand it, but will refrain from talking negatively about Google (unless extremely relevant or not say why) as it leads me to point to a reason that is upsetting to various HN members(whoever they may be).

It's helpful to remember that HN is ultimately an entertainment site. We like to convince ourselves that our words matter and affect the world. And in some cases they do. But in most cases, people come here to distract themselves and to feel good. It's why they keep coming back.

If you want people to listen, you have to make it entertaining. If you want to tell a story, then tell a story! Spend a few hours putting all of your thoughts down on paper (not in a comment, but probably not on real paper, ha; put it on your own website). Go into juicy detail with your experiences. Make people feel like they were in your shoes. Put them in your mindset, your hopes and dreams, make them identify with your motivations. Make them feel how exciting it was when you were invited to Google, and how disappointing it felt to realize what it was really about. Don't tell them; show them. When you do this well, you get people on your side.

Everyone has a story to tell. But if you want people to listen, you have to really work for your audience and show them that you're doing it for them.

Turn it into something fun! I dug deeply into your comment history out of curiosity. The reason everyone is telling you to keep quiet is that when you write, you sound angry and hurt. But we have all experienced situations where someone has made us angry or hurt us. That's what power is: the ability to hurt you and not worry about consequences. It happens.

For various reasons, it's in my best interest to say nothing here. But I note you've been with HN since 2007, and have contributed 594 comments. That counts for something.

So, word of advice: when you come to an entertainment site, you have to be entertaining. But your HN profile, which is supposed to be about you, is about Google. You call them pigs, right there in your profile. Even if that were hypothetically true, what are people supposed to think when they read that? I search your comment history and see that 85 of your 594 comments are about Google: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

That's a ratio of 14.3%. Almost 15% of your sum total output on HN has been about Google, since 2007. In comparison, the #1 HN user by karma has mentioned Google 1,561 times out of 53,789 comments = 2.9% of the time. You're talking about google almost 5 times more frequently than other long-time members. That's why people are saying it's an obsession.

When people wrong you, and then you make your life about them, that's just them controlling you. Why let them win like that?

Now, the reason I said all of this, and why I'm sticking my neck out here to post this comment, is that I suspect -- just a hunch -- that you might have otherwise been inclined to bring up Google in the future. But I also suspect that if you keep doing this, and you don't change your methods, you're going to lose your HN privileges, and that no one will disagree with that decision. Poof. Gone.

It's Friday, man. It's the weekend. You in Chicago? If so, let me know! We can go out to a bar and I promise I'll really listen to everything you have to say about Google and about HN.

Just... have fun with life, you know? There's more to life than all of this. You're an inventor! Don't you still find joy in finding things to make? What happened to that creative spark?

I believe in you, and I believe you can still invent things and make positive contributions to the world. Don't let all this get you down. Just remember: HN is supposed to be fun. That's the real strength of the community.

Best of luck!

Sometimes it's something another moderator did and I'm just reporting it; sometimes it's something I did qua moderator, in which case I tend to say "we" because it's a team action either way.

Expect the Google fit app to have these branding changes over the coming years : Fit - > Fitbit -> Google Fitbit -> Android Fit -> Finally back to Google Fit in 2023

Will it make it that long?

You forgot Play Fit.

And Firebase Fit 360.

Motofit 360

And Alphabit...

Play Fit (beta)

AlphaFit

Alphafit?

Is this really the main takeaway from such a huge event? How about the fact that millions of users' data is just acquired by the company that already knows literally more about users than themselves?

That's obvious and way less interesting than googlified app names

I've made terms with fact that once my data is out there, I no longer have control over it. We need a major law change like GDPR that should allow users to control who has access to data and how it will be used. Until that happens. I'm surprised at the reactions from hn community on this. Do we really think Fitbit or any other company where we share data can never be acquired by some evil corp.

Figle

Should I be worried about the branding? Or the fact this behemoth of a company is buying it's way into every corner of my life. Close your eyes and imagine a few drones trying to see everything you do in your apartment. That's what it is. This ain't the internet I ordered :-(

You don't have to own or use any of Google's products.

Unless they manage to monopolize communication products. Snail mail has been doing well for me, I guess.

If your friends & family own or use Google's products, that's already a lot of overlap onto your life.

People were using Fitbit, not Google, and now their data is in Google's hands without their consent. Even if they stop using their devices immediately, Google still has the data Fitbit collected previously.

It's a good lesson about being willing to share data: even if you trust the company you're sharing with, a company you don't trust may end up buying that company and getting your data after all.

If you're privacy-minded, the only safe option is to treat all companies as untrustworthy.

You can download your data [1] and delete your account [2]. These are two things I always check for before trusting anyone with my data.

[1] https://help.fitbit.com/articles/en_US/Help_article/1133

[2] https://help.fitbit.com/articles/en_US/Help_article/1285

but now that could change

Google does a pretty good job allowing you to control and delete your data on their products.

Much better than the average tech company out there.

What you can’t do is delete the data that Google is collecting on you without an account. Data your family gives them. Data from your emails that land in gmail inboxes. Data from the umpteen thousand cookies that lead back to Google.

I’d like to see what Google has on me, but without an account I can’t.

If you text people with Android phones, Google can read your text messages even if you don't use their products.

While that sounds like a logical argument it’s becoming more and more difficult and will be impossible soon. It’s like saying you can live without electricity. Sure you can and there are people who do but that’s not the point. The point is a single company owning so much information about so many people without proper oversight. In such world it doesn’t matter if YOU are not a google user. You’ll suffer the consequences regardless. Start with how such a society is going to vote in elections and move from there.

And in 2024 they cancel the product line and cease all product support despite the large and passionate user base.

A better phrasing would be: Google buys Fitbit's customers' private data for $2.1B. Privacy suffered another big loss today.

One strategy “trick“ up Google is start a film studio like Amazon and Apple and they all will look alike cannabilizing each other.

In two years they'll finally release a smartwatch while Apple is releasing AR glasses.

More surveillance.

... and will be shutdown in about 18 months when our attention wanders elsewhere ...

I was hoping to have some time to transition off the platform before this went through. Any idea when the official "Google actually owns it" point will be?

I guess about half a year. For IBM's acquisition of Red Hat the timeline was about 9 months.

Countdown to when my fitbit just stops working...

And that's probably the end of Fitbit's customer service department. Not that they are particularly great, but, you know, they do exist.

Jeff dean needs more data from you minions! Surely great news for fitbit , lets hope to see more advanced tech coming to our wrists!

Fitbit was garbage to me before the buy, because the warranty replacement or the software on my phone had stopped doing any real syncing.

Could be a fluke, but as a consumer I don't really care about that.

Next thing I bought is a bluetooth supported chest strap, but I also resigned myself to eventual malfunction according to Amazon reviews for all the heart straps.

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