Eric Migicovsky is a smart watch pioneer. His new Pebble Time kickstarter has raised over $16 million and Pebble has sold more than a million watches. He has a rare voice of experience and insight into what Android Wear has done and what Apple brings to the market.
Barron’s interview with Migicovsky is an interesting read. A few excerpts:
Notifications are fun and useful and wonderful, but it’s not the only part of the future. The real thing is, the number one reason, is to tell the time. When you look down at your wrist, you have to be able to see what time it is. But more important, what’s the context around time? Am I late? Am I early? What’s the traffic like?
On Pebble’s pins in a timeline interface:
What is important is not the app but the content of the app. If you overlay it on top of time, everything clicks. You see these pins on your timeline, and you could have 20 different ones, but it won’t be complicated.
ESPN is taking the idea of the current engine, where you follow teams that you like. They are putting that into the past, present and future organization. So, you have a single pin from a provider like ESPN that in future, exists as a heads-up of when a game starts. In the present, that pin traverses time and becomes a real-time score keeper. In the past, that exists as a record keeper. It’s time-based context.
On Android Wear and the slow moving smart watch market:
We have a million users, the biggest smartwatch population. Android Wear, I don’t think anyone ever respected them. They didn’t have any new ideas. I like their voice responses, though. We looked at that. The benefit we have are passionate users that care. Looking at the competition, it’s crazy that we launched three years ago and it’s taken people this long to launch their first.
On sales:
The only one that has a chance of selling a lot is Apple Watch. If you look at the numbers from [research firm] NPD for the holiday quarter, Pebble outsold everyone else including Samsung. We were twice the volume of Motorola [360] in terms of units. All the other ones are smaller footnotes at the bottom. It’s cheap to make a watch but they don’t actually get sold.
And on taking on Apple:
I think Apple is a massive competitor. They are Apple, and there’s no reason to underestimate the power they have. We are specifically doing things Apple can’t do, like having a battery life of 10 days, like having this new interface, being waterproof, working with both [Google’s] Android and with iOS.
Good stuff. I think Migicovsky has Pebble right where it needs to be, a real sweet spot in the market.
I like the Pebble folks a lot. They are doing something that Apple and Google aren’t, and they do it very well. I don’t think that they will be negatively affected by the release of the Apple Watch – if anything it will improve their sales.
“The benefit we have are passionate users that care.”
The Palm Pre and webOS also had passionate users that cared.
And it didn’t help Palm much at all*.
[* Palm has earned a revered place among the “footnotes at the bottom” in the history of mobile development. In the too-little-too-late chapter.]
“Doing things Apple can’t do”?
No….Apple can do all of those things. They don’t want to. Big difference.
Sounds like a guy who’s done some actual thinking about users, as opposed to the drivel I hear from most Android watch presentations.
Sorry. But Pebble is history. To believe that they won’t be washed out by the tide that is Apple Watch is to be blind to history. If they’re lucky, someone will buy them out before long.
I still wouldn’t rule out the persistence of an anything-but-Apple population. Especially the ones who are regarded as the source of reliable tech advice by friends or family.
For sure, there will be a non-Apple watch industry. But it won’t be a standalone Pebble. You need an ecosystem to survive. Someone else will need a viable watch platform, and will buy Pebble if Pebble doesn’t die on its own. But within 6 months, Pebble won’t be recognizable anymore.
Interesting. I haven’t ever followed Pebble’s details, so I didn’t realize it wasn’t tied into any existing system.
It’s compatible with both iOS and Android. But that’s not the same as having an ecosystem. Apple Watch is fully integrated into iOS. In fact, it positions iPhone as a server, which is the future of iOS, given HomeKit, HealthKit, and now the watch.