Microsoft Band

» see microsoft.com/microsoft-band as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

microsoft band never reached turkey on the official channel. it shipped first in the us in october 2014, made it to the uk in april 2015, and stopped there. anyone in ankara wearing one had brought it home from a trip or asked a cousin in london to mail it, and they were the small minority who cared enough about a microsoft fitness tracker to do that.

the device itself was strange-good. ten sensors crammed into a $199 plastic strap with a tiny color screen: heart rate, gps on the wrist, skin temperature, galvanic skin response. uv and ambient light on top. it could measure your stress response in real time, which fitbit could not, and it ran on any phone that mattered: ios or android. the first run sold out in a few hours.

a year later microsoft band 2 arrived with a curved oled and a barometric altimeter. it got better reviews than the first one. then on 3 october 2016 microsoft yanked the product page from microsoft.com and stopped sdk development. there would be no third generation. the companion app stayed alive on a maintenance schedule until 31 may 2019, when it too was decommissioned and microsoft offered refunds to users with active subscriptions.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was ~

microsoft health, the cloud service the band fed into, was the actual product. the band was a sensor harness for it. you could build third-party apps on the microsoft health sdk and the band could surface them on its screen with custom tile colors. the rest api let any developer pull the sensor stream. for an engineer this was the most open of the three big wearable platforms in 2015. fitbit was a closed garden and apple watch wanted xcode. microsoft band shipped a rest api in english.

~ what really happened ~

the band did not die because nobody bought it. it died because nadella was already cutting the consumer hardware portfolio, and windows phone went the same year. lumia and nokia mobile had already been written down before that. the band sits in the same wing as kin and zune: hardware bets satya nadella decided microsoft was not going to win, and stopped paying for. the bands that already shipped kept working until the cloud api shut, which is a generous death, but no firmware updates ever came.

~ the long tail ~

microsoft re-entered the wearable conversation only in late 2025, with a hololens-3 prototype reveal that has nothing to do with wrists. the actual band community migrated to garmin or to amazfit. used band 2 units still float around ebay at $40 a piece, mostly bought by people who want a curved oled for diy projects, not a fitness tracker.

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