fitbit is doing it wrong...

As a tech enthusiast, I like to follow stories and companies on their strategy and product development.  It is exciting to see a new company grow and at the same time its painful to see a company take the wrong turn and jump off a cliff.  You know you're doing it wrong when you have to change your name from RIM to BlackBerry.  With the growth of mobile phones, it has really taken place of the personal computer. Think about the one computing device that you can not go a day without using, you know it's your mobile device.  Now that smart mobile phones have reached a market saturation, we see the next growth market in mobile computing, the wearables.

Sony was one of the first to market with their Sony LiveView in 2010 which nobody bought. Yet it was important enough to them that now we're waiting on the 5th generation (counting the original LiveView) of this secondary display of a beautiful failure.

Fitbit is one of those tech companies that popped out of San Francisco and made a splash with their tiny affordable activity monitor clip-on-your-bra-and-forget-about-it devices.  They were under $100 and everyone got one and put it on their body. And then they evolved it into a cool OLED device with a watch band which is still cool and within reasonable price range.  Everything was well until this past week when they jumped the shark and actually released their most expensive and feature-packed Fitbit Surge.  Cramming all the hardware and feature possible into a rubber band, fitbit has really over reached into Garmin territory and went up face to face against Android Wear watches. At $249.95,  I have the the option to buy any of the Android Wear watches available from moto360 to LG G Watch R.  Since Fitbit will not be compatible with Apple HealthKit, I would expect most iPhone users to wait for their Apple Watch to go on sale first quarter of 2015.  

I understand the need for Fitbit to step up their game and go up against Google and Apple but I really hate to think that they're fighting a losing fight and they almost need to stick to their own game and make sure they can hold on and grow the fitness market that is not the smart watch market dominated by Pebble and Android watches.