More accurately put, "wearable tech needs to find a product." "genre defining" is easy - it's the Pebble, a kickstarted geek gadget that tells you things you already know in a vaguely more convenient way than whipping out your phone but is known about and talked about more than it's actually bought or paid for.

The Nike Plus is wearable tech going back to 2006. It's been a part of the iPhone ecosystem all along. Eight years on, how's that going?

However, the company let go as many as 55 engineers and other hardware and manufacturing specialists who oversaw the development of future wearable hardware -- including a slimmer FuelBand slated for the fall, a person familiar with the matter told CNET. And with no concrete plans to keep making those wearable gadgets, Nike is making a play to focus on software with Nike+.

"It suggests that they were struggling to make money with those products, and going the software route likely allows them to minimize the capital investment and ongoing investment in these markets," Buss added.

The rate of abandonment of wearables, right now, is 50 percent within 6 months. Now - you can go "that's because they're cheap and nearly disposable and people aren't going to do with a $300 AWatch what they do with a $85 FitBit" or you can go "people aren't going to drop $300 on an AWatch the way they will on an $85 Fitbit because they suspect they'll get bored with it in six months."

I'm guessing it'll be the latter, not the former.