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Comment by zaptheimpaler | Hacker News Reader

"Google said it wanted to align the Fitbit hardware portfolio to more closely match the Pixel line’s regional availability. "

Wow... this must be the most brain damaged thing I've read today.

Imagine the google algorithm applied to orchestration. I am running a service that needs a Redis instance per webserver. I have 5 web servers and 3 Redis instances. I run `k8s deploy` or whatever. Google deletes 2 web servers.. see we're all aligned now! There must already be a classic fable or story about this scenario.

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My dorm building in college had eight entrances, of which two were handicap accessible.

University administration declared that from now on, 100% of doors on campus must be handicap accessible.

A week later, six doors were removed from my building...

Saving this one to my collection of bureaucracy anecdotes

Try this one on for size: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/06/u-california-...

In defense of the school, this forces everyone to confront how bad handicap accessibility is. Before, only a minority of people had to deal with only having two entrances available, so nothing was going to force the issue.

On one side yes, on the other side those two entrances are now more crowded, making it even worse for handicapped people, possibly for the time to come.

Did anything actually force the issue though? The comment said that they closed the other six doors, but I don't see any implication that people pushed back in any way that improved the new two-door situation.

>> University administration declared that from now on, 100% of doors on campus must be handicap accessible.

>> A week later, six doors were removed from my building...

> In defense of the school, this forces everyone to confront how bad handicap accessibility is.

No, that can't be a defense of the school. The decision-makers could have decided to make improvements so at least some of those six doors became handicap accessible, but they didn't. Instead they decided to take a cheap action that imposed costs on others in order to make an empty statement.

> My dorm building in college had eight entrances, of which two were handicap accessible.

Around 13% of Americans have disabilities according to Google. 25% of the doors at this school were handicap accessible. I don't get "how bad handicap accessibility is" from this example.

Closing 6 doors to comply with a policy of course is completely stupid.

Handicap accessibility in the U.S. is the best in the world.

My employer recently implemented "all gender bathrooms." All that meant was a couple new signs and disabling and taping off all the urinals. So now 75% of the toilets are permanently out of service and there's more pee on the seats.

Yep and then eventually you get WOMEN ONLY sections of the room any ways

wait, what?

There's rules vs conventions

They women use get to use both, W, Male Female and Male Men have to make do with the ones delegated Male and Male Female.

I have seen this in airports, nightclubs, office buildings.

One has to read between the lines. What they really said is "We sell not enough Fitbit products in these countries and need to cut costs. So we'll sell only in countries, where we sell other products and selling Fitbit products costs us nothing".

You need a sales force, translations, customer billing, regulatory compliance etc - I’m sure the cost of the cloud resources is negligible.

I think this is a perfectly rational approach, esp if the long term thought is to bring Fitbit into the android/pixel fold.

The action makes sense, but the justification just sounds bogus.

Like when a company says they're making some change to "improve service" or whatever but it's actually making service worse for some people

It's a penny wise and pound foolish approach that only a monopolist could get away with.

Monopolist? Fitbit is far from the market leader, where Apple Watch completely dominates the category.

I love HN sometimes. No, Google would be the monopolist. The company that purchased a competitor ostensibly just to shut it down and reduce competition. We do actually have laws against this behavior.

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