The State of the Wrist
Swatch’s response to Silicon Valley encroachment
A couple weeks ago, Jean-Louis Gassee on Monday Note wrote a great piece about SwatchOS, a smart-watch OS in the works at famed Swiss watchmaker Swatch. SwatchOS is slated to launch at the end of 2018, and when it does, it will go head to head against Google’s Android Wear and Apple’s WatchOS.
The painting that Gassee paints isn’t rosy, and to think that a mechanical watch manufacturer can compete technologically with the likes of Apple and Google — particularly with ecosystem effects in play — fits somewhere between the realms of ridiculous and laughable. Remarkably, on top of the natural challenges of entering this space, Swatch boss Nick Hayek claims that SwatchOS will offer ‘absolute data protection and ultra-low energy consumption and will not need regular updates’.
SwatchOS will most likely fail for all the obvious reasons. As Gassee notes, Hayek’s proclamation that the OS will not need regular updates points to a desperate misunderstanding of the nature of software development, and the company’s attempt to launch a new platform for connected devices a decade after the industry incumbents is as naïve as it is ambitious. Anticipating the failure of SwatchOS on these points alone is sadly the only sensible thing to do.
Having said that, it’s clear what the company sees and is aspiring towards. Mechanical watches, the bread and butter of Swatch and the entire Swiss watch industry has long been propped by a very important assumption: watches are for checking time and are therefore passive devices. Until now, watches have never pushed us information, have never demanded our attention, and have never really required active interaction. When wearing a watch, one raises a wrist to check the time, and lowers the wrist to get on with their day.
These are obvious observations but important ones, because they adequately describe Swatch’s legacy-infused approach to smart-watches. Watches, as inherently passive and analogue devices should have nothing to do with the accumulation of user data, and shouldn’t require the inelegant clerical work of constant software updates. Additionally, coming from a long lineage of mechanical architecture, the notion of charging a device every night is genuinely offensive. SwatchOS is a mechanical interpretation of smart-watches in a digital age.
Swatch’s imminent entrance into the smart-watch world does raise some interesting questions. Swatch’s decision to create a wrist-worn smart-watch is likely a child of habit. A mechanical watch manufacturer seeking to defend their throne by building smart-watches is a logical and predictable move.
But in this day and age, why the wrist? With all the technology that exists today, do we have to rid ourselves of our assumptions around the role of watches, and that the wrist is the natural place for wearables? And as a second order consequence, what does this mean for the global watch industry which knows nothing but the wrist?
I’ve been wearing an Apple Watch everyday for the last two months after finally deciding to bite the bullet. It was a tough decision not just for the investment but also because it meant giving up a couple of analogue watches that I liked and wore a lot. You only really experience the value of a smart-watch if you wear it everyday. This fact alone threatens the incumbent business models of watchmakers which rely heavily on consumers buying multiple watches to collect or switch between. However, it may be the case that the revenue watchmakers lose in the evaporation of multiple purchases, they make up for through more frequent upgrades.
The smart-watch experience is interesting. Naturally, they’re fantastic for receiving notifications, adding something of a bumper within our technology interactions. With a smart-watch, I receive a subtle notification on my wrist first before deciding if I want to deal with it. Over time as the novelty has eroded, I’ve found myself interacting less and less with the watch, such that it has simply been reduced to that notification type device that many have predicted. If there is an action I actually want to deal with, more often than not, I just pull out my phone to achieve it.
There’s a few interactions that you’d think are tailor made for the watch, such as changing tracks on a current playlist, checking the weather, requesting an Uber, or sending a quick emoji. But the truth for any interaction on the watch, regardless of brevity is that they always require two arms. It seems a trivial limitation, but one that is quite profound in practice: you can’t actually use the watch with the same wrist that you wear it on.
That really is just a result of the wrist as a user interface. Unsurprisingly, the wrist has worked for centuries as the locale for the passive timepiece: you look, but you don’t touch. In fact, the single activity on a watch that does require rigorous interaction — manipulating the crown to change the time — more often than not requires you to actually take it off.
Now that wearable tech has become much more interactive, does the ‘watch’ have to move from the wrist? Or if the ‘watch’ stays on the wrist, how do we supplement the experience? The answer might be voice.
The launch of the Apple AirPods was a clear indication of the trajectory of wearables. As natural language processing, voice recognition, and artificial intelligence continue to get better, voice becomes a more pervasive part of the user interface. And when we can do more things with voice, our personal screens can get smaller too — small enough to wear. Maybe that screen stays on the wrist, or maybe it moves to AR glasses. Or maybe the phone sticks around in its current form longer than we think. We’ll wait and see.
In any case, the future doesn’t look friendly for Swatch and its nascent OS aspirations. As new technologies emerge — AI, voice, and AR in particular — the more possibilities arise to place technology in new places. In the past, high interaction technologies have been built for the palms of our hands and the tips of our fingers: the keyboard, the mouse, and the touchscreen. But its no longer just about what the computer can do through our explicit point and click commands, but what the computer can understand of the words we speak and the vast new layer of contextual awareness that is possible through AI, AR and IoT.
Because of this, our phones may naturally unbundle into various different things: smart-glasses and smart-watches will likely compete for the visual component of our interactions, and AirPod-like earpieces will likely facilitate voice interaction. Importantly though, with a screen so small, the watch likely won’t be enough, and will require a new interaction to pick up the slack. For Swatch, whilst it may rise to the challenge to build a great smart product for your wrist, the company likely doesn’t have the competencies to build out the rest of that ecosystem. To pour salt on the wound, who knows what strides Silicon Valley will have made by late 2018.
