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Posted by Mr magoo on 20 January 2003 - 13:58 · 3 comments & 276 views
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"It's in a category we call 'invisible,' " he said. "It transcends the notion of having to carry another item -- like a PDA, a cell phone or a laptop -- to hold your information."
And there's another attractive aspect. As a potential market for Microsoft or any other company, it certainly doesn't hurt that the wristwatch industry sells about a billion watches a year.
Trenches to Trenchcoats
In the grand scheme of things, the wristwatch isn't really all that much older than the computer. Watches started to make a regular appearance on wrists only after World War I, when Army officers found early models -- they looked like pocket watches attached to a wrist strap -- better for synchronizing movements, and much more efficient than digging in uniform pockets and inside greatcoats.
Civilians caught on in the 1920s. And the high-tech fantasy of strapping a smart piece of technology onto one's wrist kicked in in the '30s, with comic-strip detective Dick Tracy and his two-way wrist radio. It has regularly floated in and out of pop culture ever since. The 1960s spy spoof "Get Smart" furnished bumbling spy Maxwell Smart most famously with his shoe phone. But he also made use of a watch containing a mini-phonograph player, one that had an antenna to reach things and one that furnished a garrote, the better for strangling the evildoers of KAOS. In 1973, James Bond's Rolex came with a handy electromagnetic, bullet-deflecting feature in "Live and Let Die." And the '80s saw David Hasselhoff whispering into his digital watch whenever he needed to summon his computerized supercar in the TV show "Knight Rider."
But for all the fictional visions of the super-smart watch, there have been enough failed real-world products to fill a display case.
In 1972, for example, chipmaker Intel Corp. became convinced that digital watches would become a new high-tech business requiring innovative microchips. So the company acquired a watchmaker called Microma. The watches were of notoriously poor quality, and when competitors began selling digital watches for $10, Intel quickly jumped out of the business. Intel co-founder Gordon Moore still occasionally wears his Microma, which he refers to as his "$15 million watch," a not-so-subtle reference to how much the foray into watches cost the company.
Hewlett Packard Co. tried its hand at a calculator-watch instrument in 1977, the HP-01, which sold, poorly, for a whopping $650 ($750 if you wanted the gold version). "Clumsy and cumbersome -- long on technology and short on fashion" was how HP co-founder David Packard remembered the product in his memoirs.
Jump forward a couple of decades, to 1999, when HP chief executive Carly Fiorina wore a Swatch watch onstage at the Comdex trade show and announced that HP was teaming up with Swatch to make a new Internet-enabled timepiece that would deliver customized news to its wearer -- a description that sounds pretty similar to the new Microsoft watches. No such watch was ever released, and the company was mum on that product's fate this week.
There are even current examples on the market, a Speedpass watch from Timex (a swipe of the wrist buys gas at Mobil or Exxon or a hamburger and fries at McDonald's) and Casio's wrist camera/watch, electronic memo pad/watch and TV remote control/watch, of all things.
Using SPOT technology, Microsoft's high-tech watch wearers would receive news and instant messages by picking up customized information transmitted on FM radio waves on a nationwide network that Microsoft is in the process of building by leasing airwave space from radio stations in major cities. This would entail a subscription service, of course, with a monthly fee.
Strangely, the technology used to make the SPOT chips has roots in the early days of the video-game industry. In 1984, engineer Larry Karr, founder of a small firm called SCA Data, developed an early version of the technology at the behest of video-game company Atari as a way to wirelessly deliver games to the Atari 2600 game console. But the game company went under and the product never saw the light of day. Karr used the modern equivalent of that same technology to help Microsoft design the new chips.
Three watchmakers, Fossil, Citizen and the Finnish company Suunto, have signed on to make SPOT watches, which should be available starting in the holiday season of this year. Microsoft has said the watches will start at about $150, though it hasn't announced what the monthly or yearly price will be to subscribe to the network service.
Expanding 'Time'
This new revenue stream would depend on nothing less than changing the very way people think about time.
"We're trying to expand the notion of time so that people think not just of time, but to the things that time is linked to," said Mitchell. In other words, people don't care that it's 12:40 p.m., they care about the fact that they've got a meeting across town in 20 minutes. Having timely information on your wrist, such as traffic conditions or weather, could be just as important as knowing the clock time, he argues.
Mitchell, as it happens, was a key player in an earlier attempt to wed the computer to the wristwatch. The first product he worked on at Microsoft was the Timex Data Link watch in the early '90s, which stored appointments and messages. To sync it up with their computers, users had to hold the watch up to their computer screen, which transmitted information to the watch by flashing a series of bar codes.
Timex is sitting out on SPOT watches for now, however. Wilson Keithline, director of advanced development at Timex, said the company rejected a partnership with Microsoft on this technology in order to focus on its own attempts at advanced watch products, such as the Speedpass watch.
Much of Mitchell's work comes down to one potential customer: his boss, Steve Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft. Ballmer, head of the most powerful tech company in the world, doesn't wear a watch and doesn't carry a cell phone -- because he doesn't like to be interrupted.
"He'll point at his wrist during meetings and say, 'Still no watch here!' " said Mitchell.
Ballmer has promised the SPOT development team he'll start wearing a SPOT watch if it lets his administrative assistant unobtrusively message him during meetings and lets him follow baseball games on the fly.
Is Fashion Still Fickle?
One of the lessons Microsoft says it has learned from previous generations of computerized watches is the importance of fashion -- and that fashion may not be one of Microsoft's core competencies. In the past, watches with computer technology have typically appealed only to the pocket-protector crowd, not the average department-store shopper.