Adidas Cuts Digital Fitness, Raising Questions About Future of Wearables

Apparel companies appear to be realizing that attempting to compete with the likes of Apple, Google and Samsung is probably a costly - and ultimately losing - proposition. JL

Valentina Palladino reports in ars technica:

Nike made a similar move: it partnered with Apple for a special version of the Apple Watch after discontinuing its own FuelBand. Sports apparel companies may find partnerships with tech companies more fruitful than pursuing their own wearable development efforts.
Signs point to Adidas abandoning wearables or, at the very least, its own wearable devices. According to a Women's Wear Daily report, the activewear company recently cut its Digital Sports division, which was responsible for both hardware and software related to its in-house wearable devices. About 74 employees made up the Digital Sports division, and Adidas will make efforts to find those employees other places in the company.
Adidas started making wearables back in 2001, and in recent years it developed a fairly large MiCoach family of devices. MiCoach devices included a wristband running tracker, a heart rate chest strap, and a connected soccer ball, but Adidas stopped supporting MiCoach after it purchased Runtastic in 2015.The shuttering of the digital sports division comes as Adidas is reportedly shifting focus to its two most important mobile platforms: Runtastic and the relaunched Adidas app. Runtastic released its own wearable, the Moment Classic, a few years ago, but it's likely that it won't focus on making hardware any more.
While Adidas may be moving away from making its own wearables, it hasn't ruled out future collaborations. Fitbit is slated to release an Adidas-branded version of its new Ionic smartwatch in 2018, and that project is reportedly still happening regardless of Adidas' internal shifts.
Nike made a similar move in the past: it partnered with Apple for a special version of the Apple Watch after discontinuing its own FuelBand tracker a few years ago. It appears that sports apparel companies may find partnerships with tech companies more fruitful than pursuing their own wearable development efforts in the future.