Will Fitbit Go the Way of the Palm Pilot? - The New Yorker

Final paragraph from a timely Fit-ness check

"Palm came of age before anyone had heard the terms “cloud” or “social network”—too early to learn from Facebook or Instagram. But companies like GoPro and Fitbit, whose appeal has as much to do with the material they help store and share as with the devices themselves, might have the best chance at staying in business if they think of themselves not as hardware companies but as providers of services that let people manage and share their content. Fitbit has already announced its own version of a smartwatch—the Fitbit Surge, which sells for two hundred and fifty dollars and includes call and text notifications and music controls. Competing directly with Apple on hardware isn’t a bad move; after all, the success of the Apple Watch is far from guaranteed. Fitbit might want to focus, too, on the health information it stores and lets users share with one another. It may not be able to become a Facebook for health stats, but as Palm’s experience showed, one thing the world doesn’t need—not for long, at least—is a company that does only one thing."

Will Fitbit Go the Way of the Palm Pilot? - The New Yorker