Just a few years ago, Jawbone, the nearly defunct maker of wearable technology, was handing out its brightly coloured fitness tracking wristbands like lollipops to VIPs at Davos. Today, it’s selling itself off piece by piece. You could argue that the company was a victim of many things, like being too early into the market (it launched Bluetooth-enabled devices in the late 1990s), or not realising soon enough that things like sleep monitoring and step tracking would eventually be apps that would live on the largest platforms run by companies like Apple and Google, rather than standalone technologies that would warrant their own devices and ecosystems.
就在幾年前，現在已垂死的穿戴式技術製造商Jawbone將其顏色鮮豔的健康追蹤手環分發給參加達沃斯論壇的貴賓，就像發棒棒糖一樣。如今，它正在出售自己的資產。你可以辯稱，這家公司是多種因素的受害者，例如過早進入該市場（該公司在上世紀末就發佈了具備藍牙功能的設備），或者沒有很早意識到，類似睡眠監測和步數追蹤的設備最終會成爲在蘋果(Apple)和谷歌(Google)等公司運營的最大平臺上存在的應用軟體，而不是擁有自己設備和生態系統的獨立技術。