Pebble was an interesting company. While the company didn’t invent the smartwatch concept, I have a Fossil smartwatch running Palm OS that came out way before the Pebble, it did popularize the market. But making a product concept popular doesn’t mean you’re going to be successful. Pebble has filed for bankruptcy and effective immediately will no longer sell products, honor warranties, or provide any support beyond the material already posted on the Pebble website.
But what really got me was how the announcement was handled. If you read the announcement you may be lead to believe that Fitbit has purchased Pebble. The post talks about this being Pebble’s “next step” and the e-mail announcement sent out yesterday even said that Pebble was joining Fitbit:
It’s no surprise that a lot of Pebble users were quite upset with Fitbit since, based on the information released by Pebble, it appeared that Fitbit had made the decision to not honor warranties, release regular software updates for current watches, and discontinue the newly announced watches. But Fitbit didn’t buy Pebble, it only bought some of its assets:
Fitbit Inc., the fitness band maker, has acquired software assets from struggling smartwatch startup Pebble Technology Corp., a move that will help it better compete with Apple Inc..
The purchase excludes Pebble’s hardware, Fitbit said in a statement Wednesday. The deal is mainly about hiring the startup’s software engineers and testers, and getting intellectual property such as the Pebble watch’s operating system, watch apps, and cloud services, people familiar with the matter said earlier.
While Fitbit didn’t disclose terms of the acquisition, the price is less than $40 million, and Pebble’s debt and other obligations exceed that, two of the people said. Fitbit is not taking on the debt, one of the people said. The rest of Pebble’s assets, including product inventory and server equipment, will be sold off separately, some of the people said.
I bring this up partially because I was a fan of Pebble’s initial offering and did enjoy the fact that the company offered a unique product (a smartwatch with an always on display that only needed to be charged every five to seven days) but mostly because I found the way Pebble handled this announcement rather dishonest. If your company is filing bankruptcy you should just straight up admit it instead of trying to make it sound like you’ve been bought out by the first company to come by and snap up some of your assets. Since you’re already liquidating the company there’s nothing to be gained by pussyfooting around the subject.