Microsoft Band on the Run

Yesterday, Brad exclusively revealed Microsoft’s plans to retreat from its Band efforts: The firm won’t ship a Band 3 this year, and will almost certainly never do so. Now what?

If you haven’t, be sure to read The Future Of Microsoft Health Is Foggy carefully: Brad wasn’t just the first to uncover Microsoft’s plans, he also has more information than you’ll find in the posts that have popped up elsewhere. That is, Microsoft still has plans for future wearables. But those plans no longer include the Microsoft Band.

Speculating about future Microsoft wearables is fun, and maybe we can do that over a beer sometime at a future meet-up. Here, I’d like to reflect on what it is that Microsoft tried to accomplish with Microsoft Band and the Microsoft Health service that drives it. And how it failed utterly in making any mark at all in this very important emerging market.

How important is this market? This important: Apple literally just tied the success of its Apple Watch, the only major new product launched under Tim Cook, to fitness and health.

Put another way, Microsoft Health in particular should play to Microsoft strengths: Here is a back-end service, hosted by the most trustworthy and capable cloud computing vendor on earth, that has literally been ignored by every major health-care service and fitness wearable maker on earth.

Remember. When Microsoft first launched the Band in late 2014, the plan was to make both Band and Health open platforms. Health would work with any device maker and third party service that wanted to integrate with that back-end. And Band would work with any third-party service.

Virtually none of this happened. Microsoft was able to attract a few services into the Band ecosystem, but Band was never adapted to work with, say, Fitbit’s services. And Fitbit was likewise never adapted to work with Microsoft Health.

Part of the problem, I suspect, was that Microsoft treated Band like an experiment, or what Apple would call a hobby. It never seemed to get the big-bang advertising treatments that Surface and even Lumia received. And it certainly never got the distribution: The first version was sold only by Microsoft directly in limited markets, and the device regularly sold out and was hard to find.

It also suffered from massive reliability issues, with users complaining about straps splitting and other problems. Thanks to its limited availability, this didn’t impact too many people. But after the newly-redesigned and more attractive Band 2 appeared in late 2015, I was surprised to discover that this device suffered from the same problems. It was just as unreliable as the original, and it’s been on a fire sale all year long.

The theme here is familiar to Microsoft fans, and the fact that this story keeps getting retold is starting to grate. Microsoft creates an incredible platform—Media Center, Zune, Windows phone, whatever—and then releases it to the world. A small group of fans falls in love with this solution, proselytizes it to anyone who will listen, and is confused when the poorly-designed competition is more successful their favorite product. And then Microsoft, quietly, steps back. They stop making it, stop improving it, stop support it.

Well, it’s happening again. And the net effect of this steady stream of reversals is not hard to predict. Microsoft’s biggest fans, the poor boobs—myself included—who bought into these products and solutions, are simply left behind, twisting in the wind.

One gets the feeling that everything Microsoft does today is held to strict accountability requirements, that products must make sense within the wider Microsoft ecosystem, and must pull their weight financially. I get that, but Microsoft Health is the type of service with which the software giant should be spectacularly successful. And it seems like a device that can show off such a service’s strengths, even if it’s directly losing money, is still worth pursuing. Like so much in life, this issue is not black and white.

I selected Microsoft Band 2 as my wearable of the year last year because it struck a perfect balance between top-heavy smart watches like the Apple Watch and less capable fitness trackers. That was before the reliability issues became obvious, of course, but I still feel that Microsoft hit at the right part of the market. Apple thinks so too, apparently, given the recent rejiggering of its Apple Watch strategy.

Consider. Microsoft Band had GPS two years before Apple Watch.Two years.

But Microsoft also squandered its lead. It promised but only very belatedly delivered on proactive capabilities, like nudging the user to move every hour. More far-reaching promises—“we notice your heart rate is elevated before your weekly meeting, so here’s what you should do”—were just science fiction, plain and simple. That is, it’s not just Microsoft’s competitors slowly catching up. It’s Microsoft being Microsoft. Big talk. Little action.

And that is frustrating to me.

I’ve tried to help. In May, I wrote Fixing Microsoft Band, in which I spelled out the issues with Microsoft’s wearable. But later that month, I was horrified to discover that virtually everything I wanted from the Band was already provided by a much less expensive Fitbit that delivers a week of battery life.

That too is frustrating to me.

Look, I think we know how this story ends. Whether Microsoft does or does not release a Band 3, it will never matter in the wearables market. And regardless of your stance on Microsoft Health—or whether you confused it with Microsoft HealthVault or the now-defunct MSN Health & Fitness app, as so many did—it’s reasonable to think this, too, is just a waste of everyone’s time. Not because either isn’t any good—I think both platforms are amazing—but because Microsoft just can’t escape from itself or the utter apathy of the world around it.

Remember, this is a company that formalized the 2-in-1 device type with Surface, but it’s already being outsold by iPad Pro. This is the company that purchased the once-biggest smartphone maker in the world and then drove it into the ground in record speed at a cost of over $8 billion. Why on earth would anyone expect it to make a dent in the fitness/wearable markets?

On a related note, I’ve been roughing out an article that may or may not be called The Right Tool for the Job. In it are some musings about the major personal technology platforms of the day—PCs, tablets, smartphones and wearables—and that Microsoft only has a role in one of those platforms. And that that platform is the only one I’d describe as a “legacy” platform.

This does not bode well for any Microsoft wearable, especially if you believe, as I do, that Microsoft’s real future, its inevitable end-game, is as a provider or cloud services for enterprises only. That just doesn’t leave a lot of wiggle room for these other experiments and could’ve-beens, especially when Microsoft moves so tepidly and nervously.

Ultimately, the advice here for Microsoft is the same as it is for Groove: Do it or don’t do. But if you’re going to do it, go all in and at least pretend you give a crap. The software giant was really onto something with Microsoft Band. And they squandered it.