openpolitics.com

Will Fitbit Go the Way of the Palm Pilot?

The problem for single-product tech companies is that, no matter how much they spend to develop devices with cool features, bigger companies like Apple—and, more recently, Samsung and China’s Xiaomi—can always spend more.

.. 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.

..  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.