The difference is though that a lot of people use Strava and aren’t even slightly arsed about Garmin Connect (me for one). Therefore using information from the site folk care about, plus the hardware they do want to use makes sense to me!

Garmin we probably very aware than Strava could hook up with someone else (that new Polaris looks quite nice for example) and/or start marketing their own device.

I think the Garmin Connect Segments are awful, and if you loaded a Strava Segment to your Edge there was no easy way of uploading into Garmin Connect anyway, you had to re-create the Segment in Garmin Connect.