End of Pebble, End of user trusts in crowd funded projects

Pebble a kick started most successful crowd source project chickened out on 6 Dec 2016.

Buy outs keep happening in industries, that not a new thing, but buying out just to kill competition does not feel justified. It makes you wonder what will happen if someday Facebook kills Whatsapp in favor of it's messenger! If such take over happen more often the startup products will loose the charm they are enjoying now.

I am a gadget geek and was pebble as original smartwatch was always on my top buying list, unfortunately they didn't shipped to India for most part of the company life, I was among the first one to order a pebble when they actually shipped it to India. Though it was not as glossy and fitnessy as fitbit, but it always have certain elegance to it.

My pebble is out in wild on it's own.

The thing I don't understand how pebble was in trouble, it was the most successful kickstarter project and every pebble crowd funding project achieve its target in record time.

It only means one thing that as the market competition goes up, pebble owners sit together and thought over it and said "Fuck it!". We got our profits and time to kill it.

And now Fitbit owns pebble, discontinuing its products, basically bury a worthy competitor to sell its own fitness band as watches. Face it Fitbit is not a watch its a fitness band with a $50-100 Propitiatory bands, people go to run with it. It has a effective battery life of 3 days and you have to keep flicking your wrist to watch time.

Pebble was a watch, it was with minimalist features which works, battery life of amazing 7-10 days. When other smart watches were quoting GB's of memory/RAM, GHz of processing power, pebble was using KB's of RAM and KH'z of processor clock speed. They were back to basic and it feels that there is something fundamentally right and reinvented in these watch's. It has good amount of application on it to, but somewhere down the line other some software creators like Evernote and Google ditched it in favors of their own platforms or internal politics. If it would have some serious note taking capability using google Keep or something, it would have been a killer watch (my personal choice).

For now, my pebble out in wild now, no software updates, no bug fixes. probably no new application. I am not sure even if it is legal to drop sudden support for a product which is still under warranty, may be the community crusaders will soon find out.
  
When you create something awesome, you should cling on to it, even though pebble creators feels that they should sell their company to Fitbit, they should have insisted hard to keep the pebble line alive. I feel sorry for a promising product (not owners, because they might be having fun with loads of cash).