Can the Swiss Watchmaker Survive the Digital Age?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Smart watches will eat some quartz watch market share and some mid-range mechanical, but the cogent smart watch criticism applies: that it doesn't provide enough of a functional delta over a phone. People who want mechanical watches want mechanical watches. Otherwise they'd already be wearing a more accurate, more functional and less fussy quartz watch.
As an aside, in an ironic development, a Belgian mechanical watch maker (Ressence) has produced the best design I have ever seen for a smart watch:
http://ressence.eu/collection/type-3/
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CGmnh0_UYAANb_j.jpg
Available for the bargain price of 20-40k...
If a smart watch maker ripped this design off, and made the bezel touch-rotatable... Well, I might change my tune a bit.
Define “survive.” The article doesn’t state what to what extent the industry recovered, but surely not to pre-seventies levels.
[edit damn but that Ressence is dope]
Also the Most Valuable brands graph
A lot of the higher end Swiss watches have lifetime guarantees, meaning you could even pass it down to your kid and have it fixed for free. The mechanical movements also mean they don't need batteries replaced.
This is a barefaced opposite to the 'Smartwatches'. Next year there'll be an iWatch 2 or something. Next to the smaller issue of charging many people adore these Swiss watches for their ability to 'just work' for decades and decades.
Another thing I guess, is they're likely to retain their value.
But yeah, having a fancy watch only matters if you have enough money to buy it AND for it to be expensive (the "Aspirationals 14%")
Bill Gates can go into a store and buy the most expensive Rolex, no problem. It's at most, as expensive to him as a PS4 for most mortals.
A ps4 is therefore 0.58% of net worth of the median American A 500k Rolex is 0.00006% of net worth of the median bill gates.
Ignoring the amount of percentage of income available as disposable income, a 500k Rolex is .003% of a ps4 (maths check anyone?)
By that proportion, the value of a 500k Rolex to Bill Gates is equivalent to the median net worth of an American is (drum roll): $0.42
Bill Gates has 1.1 Million times the median net worth.
The secondary market for luxury watches is huge, and a Patek is about the worst example you could find in terms of a watch that doesn't hold its value over time.
The nice thing is that a used luxury watch usually holds its value really well - you buy a used Rolex in good condition, for fair market price, and you are not going to lose money if you decided to sell it five years from now.
"There are people claiming that a Rolex is magnificent technology, coincidentally signalling their intelligence. There are people claiming that a Rolex is beautiful, inadvertently signalling their good taste. There are people claiming that a Rolex is reliable and an heirloom, accidentally signalling that they are respectable. And there are people claiming that a Rolex is good for business, purely by chance signalling that they are clever businessmen."
"Of course, none of this applies to me. I honestly love Van Gogh paintings, not because it signals good taste within my social circle, but because they're intrinsically beautiful. I'm certainly not trying to raise my social status, or signal anything whatsoever. Not me, no."
Have mechanical watches, have a smart watch. The smart watch gets worn during the day because I have a separate personal phone that stays in my bag, and it's nice to be able to get alerts on my wrist.
The mechanical watches get worn in the evenings when the work phone goes away because in 2015 they're a fashion accessory. That's not changing, and the markets that swiss watch makers serve aren't going to suddenly toss their $40k watch - unless it's for a $40k digital version from the same swiss company.
Input: You cannot type on them, and the touch interface is not great scaled down to a square inch. If voice recognition worked reliably, it'd be a bit better but...
Output: You cannot read that much on a tiny screen, and while the vibration alerts are great, so what. Basically, notifications.
I say this with an iWatch on my wrist. It's like a watch that is less practical, durable and makes it less easy to tell the time.
I'm not sure there is any "of course" about it.
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/billions/2010/06/29/swatch-billi...
Also the Rolexes are almost artificially made scarce; adding to the allure of wealth.
We went thru this with music and photography. Tape & vinyl gave way to CDs which gave way to MP3 & AAC & FLAC. Film gave way to terabyte hard drives & multi-gigabyte flash cards. Sure, there's an occasional nostalgic resurgence of vinyl and film, but those technologies are largely relegated to artisan use. I was at Kodak when the photo industry pivoted; it's little more than a brand and a mostly-sold patent portfolio now.
There's the old line that when a news headline asks a yes/no question, the answer is invariably "no". So...no, the Swiss watchmaker won't, on the whole, survive the digital age. The Movado on my desk and the Apple on my wrist cost about the same, but one's on my desk and the other is used every few minutes for a variety of purposes (from accurate-to-50ms-and-50m time to up-next calendar to notifications to backup telephone to exercise monitor to mapping to ...). Yeah, the mechanical version (even a mere quartz movement, akin to an old literal-pulp novel) appeals more to the base senses, but given which will actually get near-constant use, well, ask Kodak how their film business is holding up.
It seems to me that most watches already fall into the "artisan use" category that you mention. Phones already tell time. There are accurate clocks everywhere. Wearing a watch seems to be much more about style, design, and status signaling than anything else.
1. To tell the time.
2. To make a fashion statement.
Digital watches (and now smart watches) add to that various functions, but, for most people, the fashion statement aspect of a watch trumps the functionality.
Analog watches will survive because they are, first and foremost, jewelry.
Bingo. I enjoy the satisfaction of having an extremely complicated mechanical device winding away on my wrist, but it's ultimately a piece of jewelry. This is evident in the industry itself. Most watches inherit the same class of movements; in-house is becoming rarer. But each looks different, and appeals to a different person. As long as fashion is alive, mechanical watches will continue to be bought.
This is definitely true, particularly among some of the ultra-thin quartz movements. A good chunk of the ones I've seen (and owned?) have used Japanese quartz movements. What differs is the packaging.
- That a smart watch cannot be a fashion statement.
- That a smart watch isn't also jewlery.
If it turns out that a smart watch CAN make a fashion statement and IS jewelry then traditional watches just offer less functionality overall without offering any unique advantages.
Also, your smart watch will be obsolete in a couple of years, and will likely break soon after. I'll be passing my collection down to my son.
FWIW, I have a mid-range Omega that is partially style, partially status and partially a beautiful piece of engineering. I _like_ it and I don't like the Apple watch.
Like top hats? One day everyone had one and good ones were a status symbol, the next they're all be relegated to special occasions (and even then rare).
People make these claims a lot but they have it backwards. Good watches were a status symbol because at one point "everyone" had a watch and you could stand out from the crowd by having a good one. Now nobody has one and they're now a differentiator rather than a status symbol (which means they appeal to a different demographic).
I personally think if watches survive as a format at all (smart watches aren't assured to stay around, by the way), traditional watches will diminish as people buy high end smart watches for status AND functionality, rather than simply buying a traditional watch for status alone (and appearing a bit hipsterish for doing so).
On the other hand 2-3 years ago watches were gone as far as I could see. I remember a college student commenting that only old people wore them and that clearly they were pointless now that everyone had a phone.
Purely anecdotally that trend seems to have reversed and I'm seeing more and more watches. I still haven't seen an Apple watch in the wild and I've only seen 2 android watches.
This hasn't happened and high end watches are still selling and thriving. These have always been cosmetic jewelry items and aren't going anywhere. I'm more technically inclined than most people and don't want a smartwatch, but just bought my first real Swiss IWC last month. As long as the brand keeps their quality up, there still will be lots of people buying them.
Smart watches are another category entirely: they're wearable computers. The timekeeping aspect is backtracked, and they might well dominate on basis of their utility. But Swiss and other artisanal watches will persevere as at least a niche for their elaborate mechanical aspects that give them value beyond the prime use of timekeeping.
As for paper, I thought the dominant argument in favor of ebooks is that it's easier on the eyes.
Storage and recording mechanisms are a whole other ballpark. They're fetishized for nostalgic reasons, but such things are replaceable by their definition.
Sometimes a person WANTS to spend a LOT of money on something otherwise mundane & expensive. You want _The_Hobbit_, do you pay $0.50 for a used & worn paperback, or first-edition copy for $200,000 (see recent news)? same content. You want _Dark_Side_of_the_Moon_, do you order the $0.11+shipping used CD from Amazon and play it on your computer's disc drive, or pay $200 for an original vinyl copy and listen to it on a $100,000 record player? same content.
Until recently, watches really did nothing other than tell time, all with about the same accuracy. A $5 watch was not meaningfully less useful than a $500,000 Swiss marvel. Yes, many of the premium watch makers will continue, because some people WANT to spend a mind-boggling amount on premium craftsmanship applied to mundane ends.
But MOST people don't.
A Swiss mechanical watch is more of a fashion statement/accessory than a device to keep track of time. You wear it with a nice suit to a business meeting. If I were to shake your hand and happened to notice you were wearing a Patek Philippe, that says something about you - your wealth, taste, status, etc.
The Swiss watches will be fine. So will Ferrari and Lamborghini and Austin Martin, so will Apple, so will Jimmy Choo and his shoes.
That said, I still much prefer the Omega because it's beautiful, it's timeless, it's an incredibly complex and precise mechanical movement built by hand by skilled Swiss craftsmen, and it'll run forever without electricity.
That is true, but when I buy a new book from No Starch, I expect it to smell nice. I anticipate it, and I can tell my No Starch books from the others by scent. So when I'm considering which book on a subject to buy, this anticipation of a superior sensory experience (they also use nice paper, and a nice binding, that can be felt) does affect my judgement. It's not all the points, but it's definitely a few points.
The mechanic of a watch is mind boggling. All those little pieces moving together in harmony. It's beauty.
Sometimes (developer) friends haven't understood my attraction to automatics, but became interested in the mechanics when I showed them videos like these :
Good mechanicals need not be swiss, of course. On the lower reasonable end where people aren't making their own movements, there's still a lot of expense in what folks like ETA are doing to things, and there's a lot of price padding in Swiss stuff (and even rising prices from German companies like Sinn and Nomos, though a lot more affordable, still not cheap). There are plenty of smaller US watch-companies too (Lum-tec is a good example) making reasonable margins.
These things tell time without a battery, and aren't something that will distract you and cut into your attention like a smart watch.
I use my phone, I appreciate it, but I also realize it cuts into attention and concentration, and in some ways, liked it better when it did not exist. I don't want a second phone doing the same thing to the way I think in long-form, and I definitely don't want a watch I have to remember to check the battery on every day. There are times when I'd like to have a dumb phone again, really.
Well put, people who can afford a Rolex, a Breguet, etc. Don't give a damn about some silly digital toy.
Now he is poised to be right back in his old business :)