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Comment by kerng | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Vic Gundotra, the Google+ guy?

What makes him a useful authority?

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.

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...

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

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

eunalogy methinks

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.

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.

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