Stop telling me what Pebble did wrong. They were the first to the market with a smartwatch and had the temerity to believe that their primary business was selling watches. Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky cannot be blamed for that. I still believe their product is just so ”right” in so many ways that it will live on somehow, much the same way so much of what made Palm WebOS so right lived on with Matias Duarte at Google.
So where did Pebble go wrong? Well, the business model of owning the whole ecosystem and making a profit selling $200 (give or take) devices doesn’t work unless you can scale like Apple. I’m not even sure it makes sense then. One is only left to believe that Pebble’s business plan was to continue to build with additional investor money until such time as it either scaled to profitability or hit on a monetization strategy that would work with their assets. Such strategies may have included:
- Licensing the OS (an expensive component of their costs) to third parties.
- Additional (freemium?) services such as cloud integration products.
The entrance of industry heavyweights into the market polluted the space with ill-conceived products that killed any momentum the smartwatch category had within a year. This resulted in the evaporation of investor confidence that directly impacted Pebble’s sustainment until the above desired inflection point. At that point, a late pivot to grab some of fitbit’s magic was never going to work, even if it had succeeded. There just isn’t enough revenue at this time to support a real hardware and development team. Now fitbit has some assets it cherry picked at a discount to use to explore “smartifying” its existing product line and perhaps buy time to create a sustainable ecosystem around the Pebble OS. I wish them well, but they’ll probably need to think outside of the recreational fitness box.
When all is said and done, the established smartwatch ecosystem, Apple and the Android players, are struggling to find a raison d’être for their participation in the market and fail (IMHO) at a watch’s most basic task — being a good watch. This is something the Pebble watches have all done well from the start.
...That Eclipse's "Open With" pop-up context option is a persistent setting for the selected file. In other words, if you open a specific java source file with an alternate editor by selecting that editor in the "Open With" pop up, Eclipse remembers that decision for that file and will use the selected editor to open that file when it is double clicked on from then on. You need to use the contextual pop-up to reset your choice if you want to open that file in Eclipse again by default when its double clicked. That feature bedeviled me for two days until I realized that your previous selection is subtly highlighted in the pop-up -indicating its persistence.
Note to folks interviewing for a senior developer position: I see you have been productively working as a consultant for quite some time and you have broad experiential knowledge. I respect that, coming from a similar background, really, I do! You are not interviewing for a consulting position anymore, though, with an esoteric and fleeting requirement that pretty much paves the way for a generalist. Even though you have a great breadth of knowledge, show me that you are an 
Stationary needs to go. I mean, it’s cute that you can change your picture and all, but noone really cares anymore and its not like email is this shiny new toy. Do people still need to have a rocket ship picture on their memos to show how avant garde they are anymore? What’s the problem? Try previewing a Notes email thread in vertical mode. See how useless the stationary makes the preview? I know, its really a rich-text issue and its the nature of the beast, I am (er, was) a Notes developer and I am well aware of the engineering choices behind what we see, but stop making excuses and make Notes conform to user expectations, which brings me to… 
