The curse of Google strikes again
It’s a familiar story: a successful company is bought by a huge conglomerate and run into the ground, while the conglomerate takes the smaller company's best ideas and products and incorporates them into its brand. Sadly, it looks like the acquisition of Fitbit by Google's parent company Alphabet is unlikely to play out any differently.
Fitbit's first wrist-based tracker, the unobtrusive Fitbit Flex, launched in 2013 to critical acclaim. The Fitbit Force, Charge, and Alta series followed, and the Ionic and Inspire after that. People loved the Alta, but I personally enjoyed the, which was its spiritual successor.
The market became saturated, and Fitbit began to turn to other sources of revenue. This is where Fitbit Premium came in: it was a way for the manufacturer to make extra money by offering you a more comprehensive look at your data, along with guided workouts and meditations. However, I digress. In the latter half of 2019, along came Alphabet to snap up Fitbit and save it from its place in the middle of the crowded wearables market. Coincidentally, Google had been working on its first smartwatch, the long-gestating Pixel Watch, and Fitbit’s USP of collecting health data and presenting it in a user-friendly, accessible format would make it the perfect addition to Google, which has also been collecting data on its users for years.
Alphabet has even shut down the facility for developers to create third-party apps for Fitbit OS, preventing new content from being created for the platform. Instead, the emphasis will be on Google’s own Wear OS, with future Fitbits likely relegated to slender trackers, with no need for a full operating system.
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