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Five years ago, a collective mania overtook the industry. Nobody could think of a clear reason why consumers needed an expensive "smart" watch when they already had a smartphone in their hand, pocket or bag. What value could it deliver? Even Google didn't seem sure: in its now notorious launch video, a punter used a watch simply to replicate features on their phone. But the industry convinced itself that wearables were another platform, and nobody wanted to be a sad second in this race. So the giants entered the market. Not because they wanted to, but as a hedge. Someone else might take a lead.
As we predicted in 2014, this was a solution looking for a problem. And an expensive one, at that.
Are wearable devices whose OS wakes up only when needed for smart features the answer?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 19 2018, @05:44AM
Ohhh, new technology! All proprietary - you won't know how it works, only what they tell you its supposed to do. It may or may not be doing other stuff too. But you can't verify, so you are left to your own imagination what it may or may not be doing, or what it may or may not be capable of. But we are supposed to embrace it?
Funny thing, yesterday, a co-worker was leaving us ( in good graces, leaving because of illness in his family ), and brought boxes of stuff in he had accumulated but did not want to move. Just so we could pick through his "treasures" to see if there was anything in there we may want.
In one of those boxes was an alexa. No-one dared bring it home. We kept it in a tin until we could get it in the dumpster. Although we saw what it was, nobody knew what its function really is, or trusted being around it.
I did get several really nice boxes to keep my junk in.
Sure brought home the old saying that one man's junk is another man's treasure. He valued that stuff enough to keep it for years... while none of us seemed to place much value on any of it. I would say 99% of what he brought in was picked over then forwarded to the dumper. Which stirred up an interesting little discussion at work regarding the stuff we have here, and what its value is. We came to the conclusion that we did not have a thing in this whole workplace that would sell for more than $20 at a swap meet... the only thing that gave the stuff its value is that *we* knew exactly how to use *our* stuff. Someone else's stuff had little meaning to us because we already knew how to do anything we want with *our* stuff. The things that had the most value were tools - whatever it is that enabled us to do the things others would pay us to do.