Android Wear is Google’s Windows Phone Moment (Premium)

Google controls the dominant personal computing platform. So why isn't Android Wear even remotely successful?

That's a great question, and it's an interesting problem for Google. And comes with obvious parallels to Windows phone and Microsoft's many other failed attempts at leveraging its own dominant platform.

First, some data.

Smartwatch marketshare and usage share numbers are a bit harder to come by than those for PCs, tablets, or smartphones. But what I was able to find is that smartwatch sales have seen explosive growth year-over-year. The Apple Watch dominates this market. And Gartner says that they will continue to do so through at least 2021.

Apple's dominance of the smartwatch market, at least from a unit sales perspective, is not assured: It's possible that smartwatches will follow the same trajectory as other personal computing markets of the past---PCs and phones---with lower-cost and more open offerings finally pulling ahead of Apple's more expensive and closed solutions. Or it's as possible that it will track like the tablet market, where Apple has maintained its lead and seen its dominance fade much more slowly.

It says something, perhaps, that the world's largest smartphone maker and biggest overall Android licensee, Samsung, doesn't even use Android Wear: It switched to Tizen for its own smartwatches. The question is what this says: As we've discussed in the past, Samsung has been trying to remove Google from its ecosystem as much as possible, and doing so in smartwatches may have just been an easy target.

But it's not just Samsung. If you look at the available smartwatches on the Android Wear website, you'll see something interesting. Yes, a handful of Android handset makers---like Huawei, LG, and Motorola---are represented. But most of the models there are from traditional watchmakers like Casio, Fossil, and Tag Heuer, fitness brands like New Balance, or broader lifestyle brands like Guess, Kate Spade, and Tommy Hilfiger. The smartwatch market is not evolving like the smartphone market at all.

And that, of course, was the same problem that Microsoft faced back when Windows ruled the personal computing world. Its subsequent attempts to leverage the Windows brand and enter other markets all failed. Not just with Windows phone, though that is a high profile and recent example. Windows Media, Windows Media Center, and Windows Home Server, and many others fall into this same bucket. (One wonders how Microsoft Band escaped this branding mistake. Maybe not.)

Some may argue that some of these products didn't fail because of the Windows branding. But I think the brand actually played a role in each case. Deserved or not, Windows hasn't been a great brand from a positive connotation perspective for quite some time. Many simply associate it with the drudgery of work at best or with instability and malware at worse.

But it's not just the brand. The parallels between Android Wear and Windows phone are a bi...

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