So let’s say you’re the CEO of a highly touted startup that’s just clearing the runway, when Google announces that it’s creating an ecosystem in your product category that you’re not part of. What do you do?
One thing you and your investors do is give an optimistic interview to a publication that’s as high on the journalistic foodchain as you can manage. Say, Fortune magazine.
That’s what Pebble CEO Eric Migikovsky after Google announced Google Wear. Migikovsky told Fortune that the formerly crowd-funded Pebble has shipped 400,000 watches in the past year or so — an impressive number, truly. And the upcoming Pebble Steel metal watches look good, too.
But there really can’t be any doubt that Android Wear makes Pebble’s road much, much tougher. It’s one thing to compete against a lot of startups and Samsung, which is only interested in connecting to its own products. It’s quite another to compete against the likes of Fossil, one of the world’s leading watch companies.
So what’s Migikovsky going to actually do?
For now, Migicovsky is more worried about making his products better than Google shaking up the market.
Which is probably right. Worrying about Google is useless, because all he can really control is his own product and his own distribution. His margin of error, though, just got much narrower.