Smart ways to tell the time

Your next wristwatch will display your day's schedule, stock quotes, weather reports, traffic updates and more


The wrist,'' says Bill Mitchell, "is the beachfront property on the body.'' Mitchell, one of Microsoft's big thinkers, has spent the last three years of his career figuring out how to plant the company's beach umbrella on that very space, so he has a tendency to say things like this.

He's the director of the company's Smart Personal Object Technology (SPOT) division, the software maker's latest move to make Microsoft technology unavoidable.

If Mitchell succeeds, your next wristwatch will do more than tell you what time it is; it will also display your schedule for the day, stock quotes, weather reports and traffic updates, as well as relaying instant messages from your office and friends.

The software giant has a lot of company in the pursuit of this Holy Grail of the tech-gadget world - including an attempt in its own past. Why the wrist as a place to park technology? To start, says Michael Gartenberg, research director at Jupiter Research, most people don't have to remember to take their wristwatch with them in the morning. A watch is so personal, it is practically part of the wearer's body.

"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, 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.

Evolution of watches

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 synchronising 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 1930s, with comic-strip detective Dick Tracy and his two-way wrist radio. It has floated in and out of pop culture ever since.

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 announced that HP and Swatch would make a new Internet-enabled timepiece to deliver customised 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 last 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 customised 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, with a monthly fee.

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.

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,'' Mitchell said.

In other words, people don't care that it's 12:40pm, they care about the fact that they have 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 1990s, 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 to focus on its own attempts at advanced watch products, such as the Speedpass watch.

One potential customer

Much of Mitchell's work comes down to one potential customer: his boss, Steve Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft. Ballmer, head of the world's most powerful tech company, doesn't wear a watch and doesn't carry a cell phone - because he doesn't like to be interrupted.

"He will point at his wrist during meetings and say, 'Still no watch here!''' said Mitchell.

Ballmer has promised the SPOT development team he will 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.

Fossil has developed a watch that uses Palm software, effectively making the watch a personal digital assistant. The Wrist PDA, as Fossil calls it, is scheduled for release late this spring.

Analyst reaction on whether this technology could be another success for Microsoft has been somewhat muted. Given the history of smart watches, it's certainly safer to be pessimistic.

Some bet that people won't care about carrying their schedules on their wrists. "There has definitely been a trend towards offering the user more features,'' said Keith Strandberg, watch editor of the trade magazine National Jeweler. "But I don't think everybody's going to want this. ... I don't think this is going to change the watch industry as we know it.''

Others bet that Microsoft will make an overly complicated interface that turns