Lorraine Luk and Shira Ovide at The Wall Street Journal:
This isn’t the first time that Microsoft has shown an interest in wearable gadgets. Microsoft a decade ago unveiled a “Smart Watch” powered by the company’s software. For a subscription fee, Smart Watch wearers could have news headlines, sports scores and instant messages beamed over FM radio to their wrists. But sales stopped in 2008.
Microsoft has gotten into a nasty pattern of launching products nobody wants, then after the market matures responding with something nobody wants. They did it with tablets and smartphones, so it’s hard to be optimistic about their chances with a smart watch.
Thing is, they have the talent and the resources to do wearable computing right. If they focused on it as a completely new thing with no (visible) link to the past, I think they could quickly take the lead, regardless of whether Apple is working on something similar.