Pebble CEO, Eric Migicovsky Confident On Ability To Compete, Tight-Lipped On Apple Approach

If there’s one product that highlights the awesomeness of crowd-funded projects, it’s Pebble. The connected smart watch launched on KickStarter to much hype and praise, raised a ton of cash and finally started shipping at the end of last month. In fact, it’s so popular, they’re still catching up with KickStarter backer orders. In short – it’s the “poster child” of the smart watch industry.

The company’s CEO, Eric Migicovsky, took part in an interview with CNBC, in which he responded to many questions. One topic was whether or not his company could still compete with the big guns once they get in on the act. For instance, if Apple decided to launch a similar device, could Pebble stand a chance?

“I think what’s going on in the smartphone space right now is we are seeing more and more devices work with the smartphone. With the massive market share that Apple has on the smartphone side, seeing other devices connect to the smartphone — almost as like a central part of connection to the Internet — I think it’s a pretty big opportunity.”

This inevitably led to questions around a possible buy-out by Apple. Mostly fueled by Tim Cook’s comments on his company’s rate of buying up small companies with huge potential, averaging around one each month. A cool “I can’t comment on anything like that, unfortunately” was his reply.

Should we read anything in to it? Probably not. But I can’t help but wonder if the typical “no comment = yes” rule applies here. If the answer is ‘no’, that’s normally the spoken response. Companies are a lot more coy when the possibility has been discussed.

That said, with Pebble being such an open-sourced platform for developers, I can’t see how Apple could possibly seek to incorporate it in to its business without changing the philosophy of the product.

What do you think? Should Apple buy Pebble, or just compete with it? Leave your thoughts below.

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