Peter Pan in the smartwatch industry
Dec. 7th, 2016 01:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mme_hardy Pebble just announced that they'd been bought by Fitbit. Fitbit is taking the software people and the intellectual property, firing everybody else, and shutting down manufacturing and warranty immediately. This sort of thing happens in Silicon Valley.
What is unusual is the cheerful way Pebble chose to announce all this. Note in particular this image:
We'll never deliver the products you Kickstarted, the products you bought are dead on your wrist, but hey, at least the engineers are having fun joking about it!
P.S. Guy on the left: get a fedora that fits.
What is unusual is the cheerful way Pebble chose to announce all this. Note in particular this image:
We'll never deliver the products you Kickstarted, the products you bought are dead on your wrist, but hey, at least the engineers are having fun joking about it!
P.S. Guy on the left: get a fedora that fits.
no subject
Date: 2016-12-08 04:31 pm (UTC)Yup. I've backed a number of Kickstarters and only one has failed to deliver, but I believe only one, maybe two, of them have arrived on time. Mostly it seems that the people estimating the time it takes to manufacture forget to factor in time for getting a prototype that fails to live up to expectations and having to go back for one or more rounds of redesign.