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?
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
> 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>.
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'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.
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.
> 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 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.
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[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"
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.
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?
"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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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”.
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?
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.
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.
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 -> ???
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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 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.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 479 ms ] threadCould 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.
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.
"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."
What's wrong with Apple then?
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.
> 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.
It doesn't even have the means to decrypt it.
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.
Right to deletion would be one. Heightened portability requirements another.
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.
The constitutional part is important too — it limits what people, and their representatives, can do even if they have a majority.
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)
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.
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.
"We're doing stand-ups and we use story points, we're agile"
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 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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Companies don't like to destroy assets.
I don't think anybody is assuming malice, just incompetence. There are precedents after all.
https://policies.google.com/technologies/retention?hl=en
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)
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.
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.)
"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?
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.
Glad to see them purchased by a company with deep pockets and a real interest in making Fitbit a success.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Well the world is not so simple. Apple + Next = ?
edit: not saying it didn't used to be, up to the 20th century it certainly was.
Just running a profitable business that's not losing market share is enough for most people's definition of success.
there's a very famous counterexample, namely cancer. are there others?
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?
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.
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
There's also zero chance it will be affected.
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.
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.
Maybe I will have to find a new option for fitness tracking! Nike+ -> Google Fit -> Fitbit -> ???
1) Put Google Assistant in everything
2) Discontinue customer service in favor of a useless forum where you can shout in to the void
I think this is a save for fitbit employees and users.
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...
Or they could just end up with Wear OS on worse hardware and a disaster.
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
I hadn’t seen that, so then yeah I agree it is improved.
For stupid acquisitions, look no further than everything Andy Rubin bought, from Motorola to robotics companies.
Nokia Maps pre-existed Waze and wouldn't have benefited from purchasing it.
I’m citing Wikipedia for conciseness. You can look up the article’s references for citations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Maps
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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"
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...
https://deepmind.com/blog/announcements/deepmind-health-join...
Those have all been industry defining.
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/#6
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.
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...
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.
https://fortune.com/2019/10/11/waze-google-maps-how-it-works...
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?
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.
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.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio... for a good chronologic list.
Notice that they don’t offer Google Fi for sell internationally and they also don’t offer free roaming like t-mobile.
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.
https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/01/29/did-google-really-lo...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Apple sued Samsung not for the Android parts but for the design of the phones.
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.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-oracle-google-lawsuit/ora...
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.
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).
Waiting years between updates with no news pushes away OEMs and ensures consumers forget you even exist.
Truthfully, with AI chips in fitbits who knows what they’ll be able to use it for
I'm not sure people really need biometrics data to advertise to you more effectively.
So google will know what stores you’re near, what people you’re near, and for how long.
Or, when it's noticed a lull, and kmows you're influencable: Hire this personal trainer to get you back exercising!
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are so many bad implications of this, it will never outweigh any good Google claims this will do.
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.
It's fun to play this game!
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/26/apple-buys-autonomous-vehicl...
What makes him a useful authority?
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.
Some of what they struggle with shouldn't be as hard as they seem to make it...