Yes, absolutely. I don't even know what Travelocity is :)
What surprises me is that people still use Expedia.
Agreed, this is probably satire.
Go buy a Fitbit today. Incredibly, against all odds according to this article, you still can. They make new ones every 6 months. They may not have the high-performance 60hz display tech of the AW, but look past that and its a better experience than AW (and I use an iPhone; I still prefer Fitbit).
Week long battery life on all models. Truly continuous heart rate monitoring (versus AW's "I'll take a reading maybe once every five minutes unless you're working out"). Great range of devices, from $50 trackers to $300 super-watches (ALL of which are still cheaper than the $400 giga-watches that Apple physically cant not make). Sleep tracking, without worrying about battery life?
Apple Watches are a jewelry phone companion. That's what they do, and that has value, for some people. I've never seen that value. My value is specifically in fitness; Fitbit is Just Better at that.
A heartbeat tracker doesn’t provide the same amount of value.
Didn't people train before the advent of "smart" watches?
Didn't people travel before the advent of the "wheel"?
People just really can't get their heads around a high risk / high reward investment strategy.
https://digiday.com/media/today-in-history-google-buys-appli...
They also have struck out a lot on new technology ventures as the article mentions.
I like what Google is doing with their "X, moonshot factory" but I think, again, there are examples of picking strange things to sink a lot of money into (project Loon for instance).
But Google is hardly alone... MS, Yahoo, Facebook, etc. all have their venture failures to counter-balance successes.
Overall I think Google is a well run company and generally knows what they are doing on the balance.
Meanwhile,the article authors works at Zdnet... just saying.
I was wondering why a post from 2019 is appearing now. So I checked out the submitters history. This dude seems to have a hard on for Google's failures.
Said person has submitted "How Google will Collapse" no less than 5 times.
The general feeling I get, is if a product I have bought had the parent company change hands, I can expect greatly diminished support.
With Google, it is super frustrating. They seem to gas light products/markets, and then just walk away when the initial flare up doesn't immediately take off. I liken it to trying to make a camp fire by just throwing kindling at the fire pit and then not doing anything else.
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/samsung-galaxy-watch-4-switch...
Google's culture is fundamentally broken. I don't think it's possible for them to fix this. I'll probably take a short position on Google in the medium future.
Also, it can be really expensive to hold on to a short position for a long time so it might not be a good idea even if there were more substantial reasons to take one.
To me the real question is: what will come of these antitrust investigations into their targeted ad business?
That's the cash cow upon which their stock price is ultimately based. They've been able to get away with a lot of failures because ultimately advertising is such a huge business for them.
But if there's any move to break apart that business or regulate it in a way to create more competition in the market, to me that could be the thing that could start to undermine their share price.
My suspicion as to why Google hasn't grabbed the accelerator on FitBit just yet is they're waiting for other companies like Oura to prematurely release their next "big thing" before they choose to blow that competition out of the water. There's a lot more that these companies could be doing with their fitness trackers, and it's a matter of who does it first at a large enough volume.
If that's the case, it's only likely to be so for a very few years before we start seeing at least the more progressive jurisdictions like California putting severe restrictions on how that data can be used—not just "with consent", but "at all", given how easy it is for them to tack any kind of "and we get to sell all your data" clause into a user agreement.
Why does Tizen spell DOOM? It is a huge C system that traffics exclusively in pointers to void. Yes: it is full of typedefs to void*. Do you need to know anything else?
So, in whichever way Google flubs Fitbit, at least Samsung is out of their way.
My question is, what has gone so very, very wrong at Samsung as to have led them to pick up Tizen?
I've heard some good things about Matrix[0], but I'm even a bit wary of any "open" protocol that's backed by a single for-profit company. However, I don't know of anything out there that's better right now.
The trouble, as always, is getting the people you want to communicate with to agree to use it, too...
Unfortunately the killer P2P protocol, BitTorrent, has been a victim of its own success, I imagine it'd ge tricky to get a BitTorrent protocol based video app into the Apple App Store, for instance.
I suppose it's the App Store in question that defines the limitations of a P2P video/chat app, I realise I don't have enough knowledge of those limitations to comment further.
Past that, I think it would be interesting to see how Google is going to operate Fitbit moving forward. I personally never found Fitbit attractive (as a product or company) and for the time it was public neither did Wall Street.
I think companies like Fitbit and GoPro will always struggle to create a defensible position in their market. On one side you have Apple squeezing pressing with their cult-like brand and high quality, taking all the upper-end of the market.
On the other side you have the Chinese brands leveraging thier efficiency to create products that serve the lower-end of the market. They compete on price but also have a lot of upper room to apply their efficiencies and squeeze market out of the middle.
And who is the middle? A company like Fitbit that has to compete on both ends while trying to avoid cannibalization.
I think Google's opportunity is to fold that wearable business into their smartphone business and attempt to gain terrain with very tight integrations that can't be used by their Chinese competitors. I don't see any other way for them to win with this acquisition.
Google maps, google docs and a few others were also bought, but have been integrated and are not considered trash by the majority of people - quite the opposite.
Realtime chat doesn't seem amenable to that type of optimization.
In any case, I don't think the problem here is primarily in the technologies being used; I wouldn't exactly call real-time video chat a solved problem (I'm sure there's room for plenty more optimizations in it over the next few decades), but at least as I understand it, it's definitely one for which there are plenty of available open-source stacks available.
The problem is in a) designing a robust protocol/API that can be implemented by many clients and servers (that fulfills my basic requirements above of "basically Discord, but not controlled by one company"), b) writing a solid reference implementation of both the client and the server, and c) (perhaps most importantly) getting other people to adopt it so it's more than just Failed Competing Standard #27.
[0] https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-bittorr...
Flights - wierd fare classes that dont have the normal options re changes and cancellation, no recourse through the airline if there are any issues
Customer service - hours on hold, and you have to call them to change anything, the hotel/ airline wants nothing to do with you
Hotels- treated like a 3rd class citizen, no points, cant use your status if you have it, worst room, I have been charged extra "urban fees" at the hotel on these fares. Hotels (business hotels anyway) dont want you to use Expedia and treat you like shit if you do.
I expect they have a niche for infrequent, budget sensitive, travelers as I have seen deals on there, but if you travel regularly, or expect plans to change, stay away.
What I like about google flights is how minimally commercial it is, it really looks just like its reporting fares, not flashing promoted bundles of things in your face.
Exactly! I use it because it is the craigslist of flights. I don't want to be sold a zillion things, I want to simply plug in the trips I'm considering and view the best available options. Flights is great for that!
We travel from where we are in China to Beijing, show up to the hotel, and they have no idea who we are. They're really apologetic but they show us the Expedia interface they have that definitely doesn't have us on it, we double-check our booking and make sure we're at the right place, etc.
So we call Expedia. They're like "Oh so sorry, we'll have to call the hotel. Please hold." They come back and say no one answered. We're standing there with the front desk staff in front of the phone and we all saw it very obviously not ring. We confirm the number with the staff, they say they'll try again. Still nothing. They hang up on us.
We call the hotel's number from our own phone, it rings.
We call Expedia back and try again. They try calling the hotel a few more times and finally tell us there's nothing they can do. So I tell them to just cancel the reservation then since it's obviously useless.
They tell us they'll have to escalate it to some other department who will contact the hotel and determine whether we're eligible to cancel without penalty due to the short timeframe for the cancellation. I told them if the charge hit my credit card I'd dispute it, but they're welcome to do whatever they feel is necessary.
So in summary: Booked hotel. They did not put booking through. They were unable to rectify the situation. They told us they may choose to charge us anyway. It cost me like $15 in international roaming charges.
Because a company can tie the timestamp of your BPM reading to your activity on your phone/desktop/what have you and judge your emotional response to whatever you're doing at the time. Psychotic as this may sound, it opens the door for a lot of particularly Orwellian mass surveillance under the guise of targeted ads. They wouldn't be knowing just what you do or buy, they'd know how you feel about it too.