Microsoft Building (Photo credit: Artotem)
The Wall St Journal is quoting Microsoft Asian suppliers who have been asked by the Redmond firm to send it the kind of components that could be used to make smart watch. So a Windows watch is on the cards. According to Business Insider:
Executives at Microsoft's suppliers in Asia told Bloomberg that the company asked them earlier this year to ship 1.5-inch displays for touch-enabled watch device.
The rumor follows on from many others, not least a rumor this weekend that firms up the idea that Apple has an iWatch in the works. We also heard that Google and Samsung are thinking about it and so too is Baidu in China. Sony already makes one.
In Microsoft's case it is hard to escape the impression that it is carelessly pursuing hardware projects where it doesn't belong. The same could be argued of Google, but in Google's case radical adjacencies like tablets, phones, Glass and cars, are the norm. The don't run against the firm's culture. Microsoft needs to be bigger than this.
The smart watch field is different from many areas of high tech product innovation - there have been plenty of attempts already and there are good products already in the market. To date nobody has come out with a good explanation of what consumer challenges a smart watch might solve.
For Microsoft it is surely a distraction - an opportunity for observers to wait on another less than stellar product. On the other hand, Microsoft has a strong position in burgeoning areas like White Space spectrum and alternative telecommunications infrastructure.
It is also by far the largest global telephone company with as many as 600 million sign-ups (global as distinct from Chinese or American).
The problem Microsoft surely faces is not believing enough in these new industries and what they might bring. Alternative telecommunications plays nicely with Skype, and is likely to be license free to the provider, so no time-consuming regulatory hurdles to get over.
I offered the view earlier that Microsoft should become one of the first US high tech companies to seek out a truly global partnership or acquisition to help create American champions for the new era of business. Big business is going very big - I pointed out that Samsung's investments in 2011 amounted to $38 billion (and last year $21 billion).
Companies like Samsung are not scaling up just for the sake of it - they are scaling up for a global market that is also huge. In mobile, for example, subscribers are already measured in the billions. In health, the next major target industry, the customer base is on a similar scale.
My view? Microsoft should not waste its time with watches - it needs to figure out what the American enterprise of the future looks like.
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