Unpacking wearables

I’m slowly becoming convinced that the ‘iWatch’ was a practical joke within Apple that was accidentally or deliberately leaked in order to see what companies would be foolish enough to embrace it as a product.

[Edit: Apple did finally in fact announce the iWatch, but much of my above sentiment remains intact]

Today, there are a handful of “wearables” (the term you’re coming to come to hate over the next five years) in the digital/connected watch space. I’m a huge fan and proponent of connected products and technology and believe that the race to make independent devices talk to each other and work seamlessly is the business opportunity of the next several years.

But a watch?

The problem lies in a simple but infinitely complex question: how will it improve your life? Or put another way: what’s the compelling market need a smart watch solves?

There are a number of companies banking on the concept that after ten years of the mobile phone eliminating people’s desire to wear a watch suddenly the world will reverse course and start wearing a digital display on their wrist. Pebble, a San Francisco company that used Kickstarter as their funding model had a funding goal of $100,000, but wound up quickly raising $5M in a month. Clearly someone believed in the concept, yet at the Consumer Electronics Show this year the connected watch was met with passive interest from the mass market. The reason for the tepid response? There’s not a compelling use case yet.

Seeing a text message come through on your wrist is fine, but is it really that much more convenient than just looking at the mobile phone in your pocket? Pushing a call that comes in on your wrist to a Bluetooth headset is another easy use case… but is it a relevant one? Are people willing to carry with them a phone, smart watch and a BT headset and wear them around at all times?

Five years ago the world was filled with people who wore the Bluetooth headset in their ear at all times. It became a symbol of the tech early adopter, but it never really went further than that. Yes, there were safety benefits in the car and some convenience to not holding a phone up to your ear. But neither was compelling enough to convince the mass market that wearing a piece of plastic in your ear if you didn’t have to was a good idea. Sales of Bluetooth headsets have diminished, so what does this tell us about the incoming push for wearable technology?

1. It can’t be an inconvenience.

For as many problems as the Bluetooth headset solved, it also created new tasks. It was another device you had to charge, keep track of, and pair. None of these things were insurmountable, but consumers were already feeling some exhaustion from having to manage their phone, laptop, MP3 player and other digital devices.

2. It can’t make us look foolish.

Technology is a very hard nut to crack when it’s visible on the body. Aside from physical discomfort there’s an undeniable fact that it makes the wearer look like a Star Trek cosplayer which, for the majority of the population, isn’t a plus.

3. It needs to bring something important that we don’t have today.

The smartwatch makes it faster to see a text message or run a simple app (like weather) than pulling the phone out of you pocket… but only by a second or two. Is that very slight advantage enough? If you want to respond to the text message (and most people do; that’s the nature of a text message) you’re likely going to need to pull out your phone anyway.

Three years ago there was a big buzz that tablets would take over the world. While the tablet market share has certainly grown, it sent the market down a very strange path where the “hottest” feature in the tablet space was their ability to work underwater. A nice feature for some I’m sure… but hardly solving a mass market problem. Several articles were written about how Apple was falling behind in the tablet space because of their lack of “underwater tablets”… as you can see today the iPad continues to do just fine even though it will absolutely break if it’s tossed in the pool.

Wearables feel a bit like the same effect… Google Glass is by and large a miserable experience (I say with personal experience having forced myself to use it for a week) and there hasn’t been the killer feature that leads me to believe it’s anything more than a niche market. That doesn’t mean the killer feature doesn’t exist; in fact, I’m sure it does… but we haven’t seen it yet.

The market is aggressively behind wearables as a concept. Lots of funding and attention have made it the VC darling… but if it never gets any further than where it is today we should expect the same result as the waterproof tablet. A lot of buzz that was ultimately all wet.