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Comment by skort | Hacker News Reader

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Google didn't "vacuum up" Pebble. Fitbit bought them (after they were in financial trouble), Google bought Fitbit later so ended up owning the Pebble source code after that.

As the top voted comment on the article says, Google didn't have to do this. It's probably driven by only a few people internally there, and if everyone's cynical and nasty about it, they're less likely to try doing the nice thing again next time. That isn't a good outcome.

Pebble went bankrupt because no one bought their products. Their assets were acquired by Fitbit. Fitbit did not continue to produce the Pebble products for which there was very limited demand. Google then later acquired Fitbit.

Big Tech companies acquired and acqu-hired many unsustainable small and medium sized businesses in the past 16 years. Most people don't know that because seller doesn't want to admit they were a bad unsustainable business and buyer doesn't want to admit they are buying a bad unsustainable business.

They sold 2 million units, which is nothing to sneeze at for a Kickstarter-funded project. What they miscalculated was the demand for the Pebble Time, for which they spent too much money on R&D and marketing to justify the results. They should have iterated on the original design, making it cheaper, smaller, and longer-lasting. Instead they tried to go upmarket and compete with the Apple Watch, with predictable results.

Eric has described in-depth what went wrong: https://ericmigi.com/blog/success-and-failure-at-pebble

Yes, I was paraphrasing that.

They didn't have to do this. They didn't even acquire Pebble outright, they acquired it through Fitbit, and Pebble was just a part of Fitbit's portfolio from a previous acquisition.

>We should be more upset that projects get acquired, shut down, and never see the light of day again because these massive companies must continue to expand at all costs.

>Stop treating mega corporations like they've done you a favor when they've done the bare minimum.

Most of the projects that got acquired and acqu-hired by mega-corporations were bad unsustainable businesses.

Many, MANY acquihires are just someone at a large company being nice.

Google should get credit for this, especially if you think it's the bare minimum - to encourage others to do similar things.

I prefer to shit on companies that don't even do "the bare minimum" and never publish source code of their dead products. Today, this is not Google.

I’m the first to criticize Google and say they have the attention span of a crack addled flea.

But I have to commend them for this.

It feels like they deliberately sat on it until it's almost completely dead.

Fortunately you don't need to go on your feelings, because people involved have told us exactly what happened. RePebble guy (Eric) reached out, asked them to open source, they spent a ton of effort to get it releasable, and did just that.

Unless you think everybody involved is lying.

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