Will Smartwatches Continue to Be Successful

I have the privilege of moderating the CES Supersession(Opens in a new window) on smartwatches next Wednesday in Las Vegas, where execs from Samsung, Motorola, Intel's Basis division, and Yahoo will discuss whether there is a market for smartwatches.

As I have been doing my research for this event, studying the overall market for smartwatches, and testing about 10 of them so far, I continue to question the real value proposition these products bring to users. Sure, they can tell time, track health and fitness, give us alerts and notifications, but is that really enough to get the average consumer to buy them?

To be successful, smartwatches can't just mirror things that are on a smartphone. While I do like the fact that I can get a quick glimpse of email and messages on a smartwatch, I have that on my smartphone, and could take it out and scan for the same info once in a while.

One thing the Apple Watch will do is allow me to use Apple Pay from my wrist. But again, I can do that on the iPhone, too. If we try to judge the success of smartwatches today based on their current limited functionality, I am not sure that any of us can predict its ultimate success or even if there is a real market for smartwatches with what we know now. I will be intrigued by what my panelists have to say, and if they change my mind at CES.

Despite my reservations, I think smartwatches are an interesting new platform, and it is my sense that any of their future success will lie not with the hardware but rather the apps and services that may be created around this platform over the next few years. Historically speaking, we know that this was a critical component for the success of PCs, tablets, and smartphones that dominate the computing market today.

In fact, it took Lotus 123 and WordStar to launch the PC revolution and Microsoft Office to extend it. Sure, the hardware was important, but it was these apps that made them sing and dance and become important to business users. PageMaker had a similar effect on the Mac. Without it I am not sure the Mac would have been successful.

Smartphones really took off once mobile apps hit the market. While making calls are an important part of the smartphone experience, it was apps like messaging, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media apps that drove exponential growth in smartphones and even tablets.

I think we have to look at smartwatches in the same way we looked at PCs and smartphones in the early days. None of us in 1981 could have predicted that the PC would be a huge hit. In fact, IBM's own business plan called for the sale of only 400,000 IBM PCs during the total life of the product. Since 1981, we have shipped over 1 billion PCs. Meanwhile, when the first smartphones hit the market in the early 2000s, nobody could have predicted we would be selling close to 2.5 billion a year in 2014.

All of these products ended up having killer apps that ultimately caused them to take off and impact the market in ways none of us could have dreamed back when they first came out.

That is why I, nor anyone else, can predict if a smartwatch will be a big hit at this stage of the game. Many of us believe there is something there, but we're not sure exactly what that is. And for the life of me I can't think of what might be the killer app for the smartwatch.

However, that is where the role of an SDK and smartwatch platform comes in. I have learned to never underestimate the genius of the software developer community. I don't actually think there is one killer app for these devices, but perhaps the creative development community will come up with killer apps for different types of people or groups of people that make one of these devices indispensable to them.

Perhaps this is why a lot of people are excited about Apple's entry into the smartwatch category. It brings to the table great design, a rich OS, a solid SDK, and a services platform that will allow third-party software developers to experiment with and create apps that just might hit a major chord with some users. These are important elements for the success of any new platform. However, I don't think we have enough data to even come to a basic conclusion on this issue until Apple's watch has been in the market for at least 6-9 months, and Google empowers more vendors with the Android Wear platform.

My sense is that it will take all of 2015 and the introduction of new hardware from various vendors, as well as the third-party app community that innovates on these new devices before anyone can get a real sense of whether there is or is not a market for smartwatches.

The CES session I am moderating is called The Market for Smart Watches, and will take place on Wednesday, Jan. 7 at 10 a.m. at the Venetian, Level 1, Casanova 605. Anyone who is registered for the show is welcome to attend.

For more, see PCMag's roundup of the top five smartwatches.

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Source: https://www.pcmag.com/opinions/why-nobody-knows-if-smartwatches-will-succeed

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