https://thegcteam.com/

If I had to live anywhere near San Francisco or even work there, I would ask Garmin how fast can you move me to Kansas. I own a Garmin and as far as I am concerned, I had rather talk with/work with someone in "flyover country" Kansas than someone on the left coast.

???

You need to spend more time in SF. Not sure why you're hatin' on a great city.

Bummer for the Garmin team. But Garmin seems like a great company from my consumer point of view. They're stood behind their products.
SF, however is a great city. Kansas, however... save me.

"For as much as the team in San Francisco loves working on Garmin Connect, most of us – if not all – are choosing not to relocate to Kansas."

Sounds like they were given the option, not like they were done wrong.

-R

I would consider moving to Kansas City. The rest of the state? Forget it. The people are fine, it's just that I like trees and mountains and I really like it if the wind doesn't blow constantly.

I think Garmin is cutting cost since almost everyone has a car GPS and demand and prices are dropping.

Cost cutting for sure. But if the current team is mostly (if not all) not planning to relocate to Kansas (as someone living in a costal city I would not want to move to a land locked state) then who will continue?

Could Garmin be planning to dump Garmin Connect?

I don't see the problem here. They wanted to move out of a place where it costs a ton just to exist to a place where they can do the same work for a fraction of the cost.

This move is far better than out-sourcing abroad. Had they done that, all the employees affected in the states would simply have been out of a job. In this economy, I'm surprised some wouldn't move. I expect pump prices to go to $4.00 a gallon or more this summer, fueling the recession, increasing inflation and causing more job losses.

Big thing is that, if you live in the SF Bay Area and are a nerd, there's a LOT of tech firms, so whatever your skillset, there's likely to be another job.

Go to places like Kansas City and you may not have the variety of tech jobs. Thus, if you were to move and then Garmin lays you off, you'd *need* to uproot to find a new job.

(Now, granted, this might *not* be entirely the reality, but that's how people in the area feel)

I think it is more of an issue that if you live in a coastal city that is alive 24/7, the idea of moving to Kansas is just not very appealing. Goodbye bay. What if I have a sailboat or powerboat? Well the ocean will be far away.

Sure Kansas has lakes - but come on. My "lake" is the Atlantic Ocean. I am 50 miles away from The Bahamas. A muddy little puddle of a lake is just not going to cut it.

And then there is the matter of friends and family. If you have kids, they have friends. They have their school. Uprooting and moving far away is rough.

So there is more to this than a simple decision. Garmin wants to cut costs - which is fine. But they may suffer some brain drain out of all this. I am sure that there are nerds in Kansas that can take up the program and continue it - but they will have to build a new team. The employees in SF most likely found other jobs, or decided to start their own companies - otherwise they could have moved to Kansas simply because they needed to keep the job - and keeping the job was more important than all the other issues related to moving far away.

In the end, I think that the end users of Garmin Connect will not notice a thing.

I was mainly concerned because it's very, very unlikely that whomever takes over the site from Kansas will be a rider. Say what you will but I'm convinced that unless you eat the dog food so to speak of your users (in this case cyclists) then you are entirely unable to produce something which is truly useable- we see it all the time- crappy software and products made to a somewhat arbitrary spec and list of features which turns out to be painful to use. That's what I'm afraid will happen to Garmin Connect. Connect may not be the greatest but it's at least usable and if it won't for it I think I would have just kept using my trusty Etrex rather than upgrading to the 705. I didn't mean to spawn a discussion of SF vice Kansas just to note that losing more or less the whole development team basically right after the product finally became usable cannot be a good thing. I'm kind of shocked actually unless the development team was a PITA to deal with as the cost savings can't really be significant.

I agree. I'm not sure how this turned into an argument over the morality of what Garmin did to its team or which city is a better place to live. Purely from a customer perspective a major shakeup like this can't be good. Then again, given how long it took Garmin to get Connect working properly in the first place, it suggests that their commitment to it was never all that strong. If it were, I'd feel more confident that they could pull off this transition without a major disruption.