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Thursday, January 14, 2016

Open letter to Garmin.

You were the market leader in GPS long before cell phones became popular. Just saw you 2014 earnings report and noted that 20% of your revenue is from fitness devices but automotive was still 60%. You have a narrow window of opportunity to stay relevant in Auto and avoid the fate of one trick ponies like GoPro and fitbit.

1. Connect to obd2 port in the car and use the smartphone as display. You can enter new markets.

2. Get rid of dependence on connecting to a computer to update maps or firmware. Go direct with wifi.

3. Make all Garmin devices under the same account talk to each other. If user adds a new road or trail on one, all other devices must see it. Users have the option to share the maps with others as in crowd sourcing. "MyGarmin everywhere"

4. Seamlessly connect with Google and waze to get traffic info and other info in real time. People love the Garmin GUI but hate to connect to computer to update maps and hate to subscribe to traffic services.

5. Sell lifetime maps update for Android and IOS for 2x cost of adding that to your garmin units. Eg. difference in price between LM and non LM. You make money without investing in hardware.

6. Price your fitness device less than Apple or Android devices but a superset of the functionality with the plus of "MyGarmin everywhere".

7. On all your hardware devices, add SIM cards and offer lifetime data updates when on the road but wifi to do big updates.

8. Let the garmin auto unit be a hotspot if users insert their own SIM card.

Well. That is food for thought for now...



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