Reasons not to buy Fitbit shares

OK, hands up all of you who, every year, make and break New Year's resolution to lose weight?  My word, there are a lot of you.  And by the way, I've got my hand up too.  It's human nature.  We all want firm, toned bodies, but when it comes to actually putting in the hard work, well, it can always wait for next year, right?  You can all put your hands down now.

So this is the story of my experience with Fitbits, but first let me digress for a second.  In our family we don't like surprise presents.  Birthday or Christmas, we like to be asked what we want, and if we're not, usually the unrequested gifts are swiftly consigned to the back of a wardrobe until such point that they can be tossed out without causing offense to the giver.  We just don't like surprise presents.  So last Christmas I asked my wife what she wanted, and she immediately shot back that she wanted a Fitbit.  "What's that?", I asked.  "Oh, they're great.  Everyones got one" she replied.  In fact, she even offered to place the order herself, so it was a done deal.  Who says romance is dead?

So Christmas Day arrived, and after scoffing our enormous traditional breakfast we sat down to open our presents.  My wife opened her Fitbit (that she had chosen, ordered and wrapped) and feigned surprise and delight.  I dutifully opened my presents - a selection of electronic components for my latest project, that I had also chosen, ordered and wrapped.  It was a touching moment.  Finally there was one gift left unwrapped, and it had my name on it.  Slightly bemused, I tore at the wrapping.  Inside there was a Fitbit Charge of my very own.

"Oh", I thought to myself.  "I'm not going to get away with hiding this in the wardrobe".  So, since I didn't have everything I needed to start my electronics project, I decided to fire up the Fitbit.  And after an hour of setting up my account, syncing with the dongle, syncing without the dongle, hopping on one leg, hopping on the other leg, hopping on both legs, I was hooked.

You see, the Fitbit is a brilliant example of how to build a story around a very simple piece of technology.  And it's not just marketing either - I've lost about 14kg since I made my latest New Year's resolution, and I give all the credit to the fine people at Fitbit.  What they've done is to take a measuring device that's been around since the '50s, brought it into the 21st century by bolting on Bluetooth, and packaged it in a modern looking wrist watch.  But, and this is the brilliant bit, they give you an app on your smart phone that allows you to capture your exercise statistics (calories out) as well as your food intake (calories in).

Your phone then connects wirelessly to a website where you can analyse your weight loss performance, and look up the calorie content of any food you can imagine from published databases.  Then, as if this were not enough, they will sell you a set of bathroom scales that measure your weight and body-fat percentage, and transmit the results through your WiFi intranet to your dashboard website.  No cheating.  It's brilliant!  Oh yes, they also added some social networking so you can share your progress with other Fitbit buddies.

So what then has possessed me to suggest reasons not to buy their shares?  After all, just before their recent IPO the company was valued at $4bn, and afterwards the shares immediately surged by 60%, and now stand at double their initial price!

To start my explanation, let me briefly digress again.  I am a major follower of Apple.  I've owned Macintosh computers (desktop and laptop) since the '80s.  I've written applications from MacOS 6 until the latest OSX.  I've owned iPods, iPhones and iPads, and my latest project is learning how to program for iOS.  If it weren't for my determination not to buy version 1.0 of anything, I would certainly already be wearing an Apple Watch and programming in WatchOS (yes, that's really what they call it!).

The fact is, to me Apple signifies quality.  When I first bought a Nokia phone I put it in my pocket with my keys and scratched up the face terribly.  Nothing like that has ever happened with my iPhone.  I don't even bother to use a screen protector because the iPhone simply doesn't need it.  Mine coexists very happily with my house keys, and any loose change I may care to carry around with me.  So far not a single scratch.  Now I understand that Apple products come with a premium, but my father taught me that it was better to pay extra and buy good quality than to save a few bucks and upgrade often.  The MacBook Pro I'm writing this on was top of the range in 2010, and 5 years later it's still as good as anything on the market.

But my Fitbit Charge is not like that.  You see, I chuckled when I heard that a friend of ours had to replace hers because it broke.  Then my wife's Flex started to play up - it wouldn't hold a charge for more than a few hours.  When we looked it up on the web, we saw pages of people suffering from the same problem.  And Fitbit Support were fantastic about it.  They didn't even ask her to send back the defective unit.  Then last week I noticed that our friend's husband was walking much less than usual.  I asked if he had broken a hip.  He replied that his Fitbit was "suffering technical difficulties".  In fact, everyone we know who owns a Fitbit has had cause to replace it at least once within the warranty period.

My turn came earlier this week.  The button on the side fell off.  It wasn't even knocked off.  It fell off.  I saw something small and black in the
sink that looked like a Fitbit button, and sure enough, when I checked it had fallen off.  As in my wife's case we checked the internet and saw that this happens very regularly.   I reported it to Fitbit Support, who duly offered to replace it with almost no proof of damage at all.  Clearly they were well versed in the process.  My replacement unit is hopefully in the mail as I type.

The point is, Fitbits are not built to last.  They're not even built to last the warranty period.  I'm really struggling to understand how a company can build a commercial model around a product that will have to be replaced at least once at no cost to the customer.  Are Fitbits so cheap to produce that the $130 retail price covers the production cost of multiple units?  Maybe so.  Maybe the markup includes that eventuality.  But from the customer's perspective, am I really going to be happy to replace my Fitbit every 6 months?  Especially after the warranty has expired and it's at my own expense...

Then there are the other little irritations that would discourage you from being a return Fitbit buyer.  Mine has started to jump into console mode when I try to recharge it.  That means I get the word "console" frozen on the display, and no amount of shaking or button pressing will get rid of it.  Apparently this again is a common issue, and can be fixed by resetting your device.  But should I have to do this?

Finally, although Fitbit support are extremely helpful when they inevitably have to replace your unit, they will only ship it to a very short and select list of countries.  Malaysia was not on that list.  Singapore was not on that list.  Even though they retail their products in these countries, they won't ship replacement units there.  Does that really sound like a globally-aware company to you?  No, me neither.

So, whilst I really love my Fitbit and the concept behind it, and I really do credit them with motivating me to finally make good on a New Year's resolution, I wouldn't touch their shares with a barge pole because I have no doubt at all that once the big boys jump wholeheartedly into the wearables market, quality will eventually prevail.  In ten years time will the next generation have heard of Fitbit?  Probably not.  It's a sad case of poor execution letting down a brilliant concept.

Gun Control - America's problem, not mine

If you live in a middle-class community, chances are you are occasionally invited to dinner parties.  If that community also happens to include Americans you will almost certainly be pulled aside by the host or hostess, who after nervously glancing around them will tell you that "there will be Americans coming so don't bring up Gun Control or Religion".  Ha!  For me that's like telling a child not to pick at a scab.  To mix my metaphors, I'm going to be the first to bring matches to the party so I can light the touch paper, sending fireworks in all directions, leaving women and children sobbing while their menfolk eagerly beat their bared breasts in anticipation of fisticuffs!


The reason I'm putting my thoughts down on paper, proverbially, is that I just saw Richard Branson had posted this image on a Virgin website.  Forget that the poster is obviously out of date (West Germany ceased to exist as a state 25 years ago!).  I don't doubt for a second that the statistical gulf between the US and the rest of the civilised world is still wide*.

Honestly I used to get angry every time I saw that some disaffected youth had gone on a rampage with automatic weapons and a sackload of ammunition, slaughtering dozens of innocent people who happened, unfortunately, to be in range of this mental case when he had his meltdown.  I was irritated by the ease with which anyone could buy guns and as many bullets as they could possibly use in two lifetimes.  And not just ordinary handguns like the one in the poster either... we're talking about serious military grade equipment here.

So when a killing spree happens, the story can run on CNN for anything from a few days to a week depending on the body count and the age of the casualties.  Maybe over a week if the death toll  reaches double figures.  That is followed of course by the full inquest into what caused the protagonist to commit such a heinous crime.  Video games?  Violence in the cinema?  Bullying in school?  Disengaged parents?  Whatever.  The important thing to recognise is that "Guns don't kill people.  People kill people".  Yes, some people actually do say that.  Anyway, as soon as the news goes cold everybody goes back to waiting for the next atrocity, and the ugly cycle is stuck in an infinite loop.

Just a quick aside...  I find the arguments used to oppose gun control so amusing.  There's the constitutional argument (if there was ever a document that badly needs dragging into the 21st century...).  Let's be honest, the UK government has cut back spending on the armed forces to the extent that they don't have enough redcoats to send over to rampage through American villages anymore.  And of course, the US government controls the most expensive, most advanced military forces in the world, so I'm fairly confident that they could fend off even a substantial redcoat attack without too much assistance from the general public.

Then there's the brilliant argument that if the victims had themselves been armed, then the psycho wouldn't have attacked them in the first place.  Wasn't that called Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD for short) during the sixties?  I'm pretty sure that absurd idea was canned a long long time ago.  Alternatively, if the psycho wasn't deterred by all the weaponry pointing back at him, at least the victims (and I use the term loosely) would be able to fight back.  Yes, rather than eliminate the a handful of psychos, we should transform the whole population into psychos, thereby leveling the playing field.  Makes sense.  Seemingly intelligent politicians argue this point without a hint of irony.

And finally of course, you have to realise that people get murdered all over the world, even in places where guns are heavily controlled.  So it's clearly not a gun control issue at all.  America got it right again!  Well, read the numbers above (or below).  Yes, people do get killed all over the world, and guns are often involved.  But no gun control in the US = many deaths, while gun control in the UK = few deaths.  So yes, I would have to concede that gun control might only eliminate 99% of the problem*.

There's no doubt that this is an extremely emotive subject for Americans.  It used to be an emotive subject for me too, given my opposition to anyone killing anyone, anywhere.  But after I had witnessed the loop completed a few times I realised that this is about Americans killing Americans in America.  It's an American problem for Americans to address.  If they don't care enough to fix it, why should I lose sleep?  With this rationalisation in mind, I now witness every new incident dispassionately.  After all, if Americans are preoccupied with killing each other, maybe they won't feel the need to leave their shores to kill non-Americans.  That's a deal I can live with.  So it's a few muttered words of sympathy for the victims, and flick over to the BBC, taking the greatest care to skip swiftly over Fox News. 

Don't misunderstand me.  I'm not unsympathetic, especially towards the victims.  I'm just fed up with being in the loop.  Do something about it or stop reporting it, I say.  If this is the kind of society you want to live in, fine.  If not, then do something about changing it.  But please stop with the outraged bleating.  It's pointless and impotent.

*For the sake of accuracy, here are the 2014 statistics for firearms deaths per 100,000 population per year for the nations in the poster.  Source: Wikipedia

     Japan                 0.6
     Great Britain     0.25
     Switzerland        2.91 (mostly suicides - who'd have guessed...)
     Canada              2.22
     Israel                 1.87
     Sweden              1.47
     Germany           1.24
     USA                  10.64

Retirement is the best thing

I retired at 53 years old.  I realise that's pretty young by normal standards. But I started planning it, financially at least, in my mid-thirties.  When I hit 48, Excel informed me that I could stop working, but I didn't really listen until last year.

I was warned by well-meaning friends that I would be bored to death within weeks.  Apparently I would soon lose all self esteem, and descend into deepest depression.  But the thing is, I've never really had any issues with my self esteem, and after 32 years of working in a job categorised by our HR department as "exempt", I had a personal to-do list as long as your arm.  "Exempt" means that you are not constrained by regular working hours - or in other words you work until you're exhausted, sleep where you drop, and then start working again.  Every day for 32 years.  I put a brave face on it, but if I'm honest with myself I would rather have been doing almost anything else.

For the sake of background, let me take a step back to when I was 36 years old.  My company has a policy.  When you hit 15 years seniority you sit down with two levels of management, and they either tell you that you are an invaluable employee who can look forward to a bright and rosy career, or that you aren't going anywhere and it would be best for all concerned if you wouldn't mind awfully submitting your resignation... immediately.  If it's the former, they take away your lump sum payoff and convert it into pension rights (not something anyone really cares about at 36).  In the latter case, you get the payoff, a limp handshake and an economy plane ticket home.

So this is obviously a fairly important watershed, and I prepared for the meeting by firing up Excel (a very old and basic version) and attempted to capture what I wanted out of life, and when I could expect it to happen.  Slowly but surely the spreadsheet evolved and became quite sophisticated.  I defined three lifestyle targets... survival, comfortable and luxurious.  Actually that was the easy bit.  The difficult bit was figuring out my wealth, and how it was likely to evolve over the next 20 years or so.  But after 13 versions, I had a spreadsheet that I was proud of.  It had six or seven sheets filled with various parameters and extremely complex equations, and it all distilled down to just 3 cells.  A retirement date for each of the three targets I had defined.

The point of explaining this is to demonstrate that I have actually been pondering retirement every day since I was 36 years old!  Seriously... every day I would get to work, immediately open up Yahoo finance, and diligently transcribe exchange rates and stock prices into my spreadsheet.  After 10 minutes or so I would eagerly click on the sheet that would tell me if my retirement dates had got closer, or receded.  If you're that analytical about your future, it's fairly obvious why the final decision was so easy to take.  My spreadsheet made the decision, and I just did what I was told.  How could I argue?  It would be tantamount to admitting that I had wasted 10 minutes of every day for the last 17 years.  It wasn't even an option!

I put it off for a few years by adjusting my targets, but eventually I couldn't think of anything else that I needed.  What nudged me over the edge?  It was fairly obvious actually.  My spreadsheet told me how much I was earning after all the various deductions, and how much my pension would be worth.  What I realised was that the difference between the two was shrinking fast.  I was actually winning contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars for my company, while clearing just a fraction above my pension for myself... not much more than if I quit and flipped burgers in MacDonalds!  Maybe one day I'll write about the reaction I got from HR when I tried to explain this to them, but to cut a long story short I wrote a short resignation letter, slapped it on my bosses desk and told him where he could stick the job.  He laughed - we'd been discussing it for months and he was surprised it had taken me so long!

The next step was to figure out what projects to take off the back burner.  There was a lot more than I realised!  In fact, far too many to tackle.  Here are just a few...

• Lose weight and get fit.  Put a check mark in this box.  With my dear wife's help (she bought me a FitBit!) I have lost about 22kg.  That's a fully laden large suitcase.  I'm surprised that airlines actually to let me fly!  I've now got my BMI down to 24.7, which is in the "healthy" range.
• Learn to cook better.  Check this box as well.  My recipe book is now bulging... just like my waistline used to!  My panna cottas are superb, as are my ice creams and creme brulee.  Pasta and bread have been mastered.  Thai food is my specialty.  Yum!
• Return to programming.  Another check in the box.  I've taught myself Objective-C and Python, and I'm writing apps for Mac OS and iOS.  Also bought myself a Raspberry Pi, and I've still got plenty to do to master that.
• Improve my guitar playing.  I've now got a Fender Telecaster to go with my Les Paul.  Unfortunately, I just haven't had the time to spend on getting really good.  Loads of room to improve.
• Get my golf handicap down to single figures.  Major work in progress here.  I didn't touch my clubs for 3 years while I was having problems with my toes, and my handicap has suffered badly as a result.  But... we just joined a fantastic club in KL and we're getting good use out of it.  Ask me this time next year...
• Learn to take decent photos.  Well, I bought myself a nice camera but I'm still yet to master more than the basic automatic functions.  Another one to try harder on.
• Read more books.  I'm doing quite well here.  I try to fit in half an hour of reading before going to bed every evening, and I'm slowing ploughing through the stack of books on my bedside table.  Half a check mark in that box.

There are lots more.  So many that I'm not anticipating getting bored anytime soon.  In fact, I'll go as far as to say that I'm enjoying this new phase of my life more than any other.  I do what I want, when I want.  If I don't want to do anything, I do nothing.  I spend more time with my family.  Stress is a thing of the past.

To finish this off, let me just relate a recent experience I had.  I asked a friend of mine of similar age who has just retired, albeit not as voluntarily as I did, what his plans for the future were.  He told me he was going on a long holiday, and then he might start looking for a job.  I was a bit surprised at this answer, so I asked him why he would want to do that.  He told me that he didn't really want to, but he just felt like he was too young to stop working.  Almost like society expects you to work until you're old and grey.

Well, I refuse to follow that expectation.  I've got twenty, maybe thirty years left and I will not waste the best of those years in an office generating wealth for other people.  That valuable time is for me and my family, and I intend to savour every minute!