Microsoft SPOT Watch

» see msndirect.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

the spot watch was north-american by license. microsoft leased fm subcarrier slots from radio stations in roughly a hundred us and canadian cities, and that grid of broadcast antennas was where the data came from. anywhere outside that grid the watch was a watch.

bill gates announced spot at comdex 2002 as part of a longer microsoft thesis about 'smart personal objects', a category that was supposed to also include weather stations and gps units down the road. the watches were the only category that ever shipped at consumer scale. fossil and suunto launched the first models in january 2004. tissot and citizen later added designs of their own. the data came in over directband, microsoft's name for piggybacking digital data onto the unused subcarrier of an existing fm broadcast.

the product never crossed into mainstream awareness. msn direct cost ten dollars a month or sixty for the year, and the watches retailed in the $129-$200 range. the data was pull-only. you could not reply to a message and there was no real interactivity. fossil's last spot model came out in 2007. by the time the iphone shipped that summer the entire concept had been quietly retired. msn direct kept broadcasting until january 1, 2012, since microsoft had committed to the existing subscriber base, and any spot watch made between 2004 and 2008 still received its weekly weather forecast for almost a decade after the product line was killed.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

directband was a clever piece of engineering. microsoft's research team had figured out how to encode roughly 12 kbps of digital data onto the existing subcarrier band of any fm radio station, the same broadcast slot that some stations used for elevator music and traffic data. the watch carried an arm7 chip and a small fm antenna. it woke periodically and pulled down digest packets in the background. you woke up at 7am and your watch knew the local weather and the close of the dow. it was the cleanest implementation of background data delivery any consumer device has shipped, and the iphone obviated the entire premise three years later.

~ the funny part ~

the spot watch is a piece of consumer hardware that depended on an fm radio business model in 2004. microsoft was paying broadcast stations a leasing fee for an unused slice of their analog spectrum at the same moment when half of the developed world was buying a 3g phone with an internet connection. the watch was outdated by its own launch year, and somehow it still shipped four model generations.

~ what got buried with it ~

microsoft had real smartwatch ambitions a decade before everyone else. the spot project ran from 2002 through 2012, which is most of the period during which apple and google were not yet thinking about wrist computing. when microsoft band came along in 2014 the institutional memory of spot was already gone, and band died inside two years. the wider lesson is that microsoft can ship hardware that is technically interesting at almost any moment in its history, but it has trouble shipping hardware that becomes a cultural object. spot was the first long version of that lesson.

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