Garmin finding the right way, Polar a bit lost...
Not surprisingly GPS and navigation company Garmin are navigating away from Finnish Heart Rate Monitor company Polar. I was pleased to see that not only do they do Training Center on OS X but now also their web updater is OS X native and works with the Forerunner and Edge series. Couple this with online training resource MotionBased (also supports macs) and its a good starting point for runners, cyclist, triathletes etc. Also an ecosystem has started to develop with the cool and free/donationware Trailrunner etc., which imports direct from Garmin's own Training Center - thats "ecosystem".
Now back to Polar, sure Garmin Products
are not entirely direct competitors to Polar Heart Rate Monitors having GPS functionality, but Polar are extremely lost in their out of touch attitude towards end users which can be summed up as "the only athletes are Windows athletes". Polar only support their range of products on the Microsoft platform but even worse expect a tariff for anyone who develops software to interface to them. Wake up, these people can add value and innovate in a hundred ways that you may never have thought up. Publish you APIs, assign a couple of developers to oversea a wiki part-time, and participate in forums, perhaps collaborate with a few Universities and get more diverse software out there at a low cost - you'll reap the benefit in hardware sales, brand recognition and reputation.
Finland is the country that gave the world Linux, surely you can trust independent developer to develop training software across multiple platforms. Wording like this belongs to another, earlier, century:
This platform is meant for professional third party SW developers with whom we will make a license agreement. The reason for aiming this to professionals is simply lack of resources to support each individual programmer. This package is, however, also available for research institutes. In any case, Polar Electro Oy reserves the right not to enter in such an agreement if it so desires.This show a basic misunderstanding on the value of ecosystem. If your primary revenue stream is hardware, such as the Polar range, then getting as broad a bunch of ISVs and individuals to hack together software which works with your products is a bonus. Then Mac users, Linux users, Solaris users, Symbian users etc can take advantage and the product can work to being more ubiquitous.
Don't get me wrong, I want Polar to get it right as I do like their hardware and my 720i was a great piece of kit (though they do need to work on the "Human Computer Interface" angle that Apple do so well). Mac users if you don't want to abandon Polar yet then you can take a look at iSmarttrain. Linux users there is some stuff out there and Solaris users - perhaps someone can port that Linux software over. Won't be me though as my Polar 720i is back in its box and I'm 100% switched to my Garmin Forerunner 305
- great piece of kit though longer battery life would be nice.
Must stop, time to go for a run...
