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 w...