Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

The rumors are that Apple is building a wristwatch. Will they learn from the experience of Texas Instruments?

Apple is supposed to be building a wristwatch. Some call it the “iWatch.” Here is just one of hundreds of posts about it.

This has happened before: a really smart, really successful tech company enters the world of wristwatches. Decades ago, Texas Instruments or TI tried this. I call that episode the great digital watch fiasco.

It is a simple story. TI knew how to make these new-fangled integrated circuits. They designed a chip that would drive a watch. They started pumping out the chips. Make a million or two and the per unit costs would be ten cents or something. Flood the market with digital watches and make a zillion dollars.

I bought one while in college in the late 1970s for less than ten bucks. It worked just fine. Actually these digital watches worked better than all the expensive mechanical watches. TI had a gold mine. A few years later McDonald’s was giving away these TI watches free in Happy Meals. TI lost money on the deal.

What happened?

There is a simple fact known by everyone who has been in the watch-building world for any length of time:

A watch is a piece of jewelry, not a timepiece.

What?

Sad but true. It has to look nice or look fashionable – whatever or whoever “fashionable” means this week.

So, now Apple is supposedly building a wristwatch. If the rumors are true, it will be a great timepiece. It will probably have a camera and a music player as well as lots of other neat iOS features. The question that will determine its success or failure has nothing to do with any of that. The question is:

Is it fashionable?

Apple has succeeded in the past ten years with fashionable products. Maybe they can do it again or maybe they will flop just like TI did.