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Comment by j0ba | Hacker News Reader

> Fitbit was getting killed and would likely have gone out of business

If this is a reason for acquisition, then why wouldn't G*gle wait until they were "killed" so they could come in and buy their business for pennies on the dollar?

We're fast approaching a dystopian Snow Crash world of all-powerful corporations, and you people are cheering it along.

How can these both be true?

- it's bad all US legacy media is owned by 5 corporations. - it's good for FB, Apple, Amazon and to buy up all adjacent business.

I don't see how sharing data is a good argument for unchecked consolidation of power. I'm pretty sure Fitbit could export an open standard data format, and Google could consume one. But I guess rich people wouldn't be able to get even richer if they did that.

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>If this is a reason for acquisition, then why wouldn't G*gle wait until they were "killed" so they could come in and buy their business for pennies on the dollar?

Because what Google wants to buy is their marketshare and existing userbase. I very much doubt fitbit has any tech or products google couldn't make themselves in a few months. The longer fitbit sucks compared to their competition the lower that becomes.

This, and they want to hire the talent that built the product. If Fitbit were already a sinking ship for too long most senior folks would have left.

Great point.

Hard to continue developing a product when the most talented people in the company have gone elsewhere already. They need the human capital in order to make sure it stays afloat and they get the requisite knowledge transfer.

Then its anybody's guess what will happen. Google's track record of buying technology and then doing something better with it is not encouraging at all.

> Google's track record of buying technology and then doing something better with it is not encouraging at all.

Err...what? Earth, Maps, Docs, Waymo, Android, YouTube, WebRTC, Flights, Deepmind all come from acquisitions.[1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

They haven't done much better with many of these. And I suspect these would also have succeeded independently of Google.

> very much doubt fitbit has any tech or products google couldn't make themselves in a few months.

Considering how absolutely dreadful Google's hardware (pixel line, pixel watch) is nowadays, and how unfinished all of their software is, no, Google would not be able to make any of that in a few months.

Hahaha I literally laughed out loud at this. Google making products. Have you seen how they make products? They have killed more physical products than they have delivered. They discontinue them more frequently than an average person throws out a napkin. Their first gen products are usually overpriced trash (Google Glass? Nexus Q?). If Google could pump out electronics with the speed and quality of someone like Anker or Amazon they’d be buying half of Europe for cash right now. I don’t pretend to know why they can’t but empirical evidence shows that it takes them several years and at least a product generation to put out something useful. For them to put out a fitness tracker or a smart watch in a few months that would be remotely competitive with the Apple Watch is just not in the cards.

They nailed the Nexus 7, but that was a while ago (2012 and 2013)

EDIT - never mind, Asus made both of those

All the Nexus devices were made by third parties, it's when they switched to Pixel branding that they started designing them in-house.

Were you thinking of the 2012 Nexus 7 with the poor-quality NAND that went bad within a couple years, rendering the tablet useless? Or the 2013 that had phantom/unregistering input due to (IIRC) general build-quality and flex issues?

Asus did make both, but I'm not sure either was as good as you recall, sadly.

The Nexus 7 was way ahead of the competition at the time. It was fast, had a great display and cheap. I used mine for 6 years before it stopped working. Unfortunately google didn’t build on its success.

2012 Nexus 7 was the best tablet there was at that time. Yes it started working really slow after few years, but I still have it in my drawer, unfortunately something went wrong after 7 years and it either doesn't charge or the screen died.

They have an entire hardware division that regularly churns out quite high quality consumer hardware: nest. They also have a pretty big hardware group that makes high performance servers and specialty hardware (TPU servers among other things). They have a few other hardware divisions as well.

Google would have absolutely no issue creating quality fitbit devices. Whether or not the market would be there for them to stay in long term, I don't know.

Nest was an acquisition so not the best example.

Nest was acquired and was already a mature and popular product. They by no means built it from scratch. And enterprise server products are probably outside the scope of what we are talking about, which is consumer electronics. I can build you a pretty decent server pretty quickly. I wouldn't know where to start to create a smart watch that had good battery life, great screen, great app ecosystem, great sensors, and didn't cost over $400. As far as I know, no consumer electronics Google product had launched and was an instant success. All the first product reviews I've ever read sounded like this: "it's a great first start and as a nerd who knows about these things I enjoyed some innovative parts of it, but it's not ready for prime time. Maybe next year they'll have a more polished product."

> Nest was acquired and was already a mature and popular product. They by no means built it from scratch.

Sure, but they did come in and add real innovation to the product; for example, adding a secret microphone that wasn't disclosed to the customer.

Wow is this real? Crazy Google!

Google's pixel phones were initially pretty well received, especially the camera

The same hardware division that came up with Brillo, sorry Android Things, never mind, it is gone now after 3 years anyway.

Or those wonderful Android Watches, sorry wearOS, never mind, they aren't getting proper updates for ages now.

Glass was never a finished product. It was sold as a dev kit that non-devs snapped up.

> Glass was never a finished product.

Seems to be a finished-ish enterprise product now.

https://www.google.com/glass/start/

Right. My point exactly. Google releases half baked consumer goods, then kills them later if they aren't a hugely important strategic line (like the Nexus/Pixel) or not a runaway success. The idea that Google could build a fitness tracker or smartwatch from scratch in a matter of months and it would be better than what FitBit currently has to offer just seems silly.

Counter-example : Chromecast.

The device that overheats when playing 1080p videos ? Or the one that freezes when just launching Youtube ?

The Chromecast works well most of the time. The ways it fails is ridiculous.

Hmm, I did have minor issues, but IMHO it's much better than your average gadget (the first Chromecast at least). And it's dirt cheap, I think I got it for 4€ ? (though that's because Google subsidizes it).

I did have some issues recently with being unable to pair it with specific Samsung phones, but it's a combination of it getting old and I assume issues with Google killing software (I don't want your Google Home !).

In a way I have worse issues with my Pebble Time… which Google now owns, to my displeasure. (But it is probably more open, so I have better chances fixing the issues myself in the long term…)

>Because what Google wants to buy is their marketshare and existing userbase.

Personally, I'm curious how that worked out for them. The announcement of this purchase, and how they handled Nest, is what made me stop using my Fitbit.

Google also wanted the Fitbit patents for IP litigation protection.

My favorite part of snow crash was the corporate mergers with public entities like the library of congress. That one's probably safe for now, but I wonder if we'll see corporate mergers with small local governments when they start to default on their debts.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/citizen-coup...

"Imagine there was no such thing as a library, and that members of the current neoliberal policy consensus were to sit down today and invent it. They might create complicated tax expenditures to subsidize the poor purchasing and reselling books, like the wage support of the earned income tax credit. They might require people to rent books from approved private libraries, with penalties for those who don’t and vouchers for those who can’t afford it, like the individual mandate in the latest expansion of health care. They might come up with a program where they take on liability for books that go missing from private libraries and thereby boost profits for lenders themselves, like federally backed private student loans. Or maybe they’d create means-tested libraries only accessible to the poor, with a requirement that patrons document how impoverished they are month after month to keep their library card. Maybe they’d exempt the cost of private library cards from payroll taxes, or let anything calling itself a library pay nothing in taxes."

If someone invented the concept of a library today wouldn't it sound, you know, kinda socialist?

Oh, very.

Only if the state owned all the pens and paper. I guess those are the means of production for authors?

More like Liberal Capitalism.

They want their brand recognition, brand loyalty, market share, and specifically they want a watch to compliment their Pixel phones to counter growth of Apple Watch (which locks people into buying iPhones). All those reasons are better now than later

If we do enter the Snow Crash mega corp/gated burb future I want to become a Deliverator for the pizza mafia.

I'm also not for this. I wasn't for nest either. I now trust the device on my wrist less.

> why wouldn't G*gle wait until they were "killed" so they could come in and buy their business for pennies on the dollar?

The company waiting for this to happen missed out on the deal.

You've hit the nail on the head here. The only arguments in favour of these are money-oriented and therefore celebrating the fundamental move towards a dystopic future (insofar as it isn't already here, which is debatable to a painful degree).

Nobody wins here, except for a very small group of already outrageously powerful and rich people. Any regular human being will at best gain nothing from this and at worst have all of their information inserted into the Google silo.

> We're fast approaching a dystopian Snow Crash world of all-powerful corporations, and you people are cheering it along.

Walmart is uniquely set up to become the first FOQNE.

Fitbit is able to export the semi-open FIT file data format.

https://www.thisisant.com/

It's good when companies I want to work with who or give me free candy are winning. They're my team!

It's bad when Nazis and Nazi-adjacent folks don't get a platform because they're my... uh...

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