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Fred Wilson: Tech Investors Are Not Interested In "iWatch"

Fred Wilson: Tech Investors Are Not Interested In "iWatch"

March 4, 2015

Fred Wilson, AVC:

…I continue to think that these computers on your wrist are not going to be a mainstream thing.

Monday night we went out to dinner with a bunch of tech investors in LA. Not one of the women at the table was interested in wearing an iWatch or any other “smartwatch”. Not one of them. They all said that watches are jewelry for them and they are interested in beauty and fashion on their wrists, not features and functions. …

Yesterday at the Morgan Stanley Internet Conference, I was on stage with Bill Gurley and Alfred Lin and we were asked about the iWatch. There were several hundred public market tech investors in the room. I asked the room how many wore watches. About half raised their hands. I then asked how many were going to get the iWatch. About 20% raised their hands.

It’s hard to take a market analyst or investment guru seriously when he refuses to call products by their real names. It’s not iWatch, it’s Apple Watch. Seriously, is “iWatch” supposed to be an insult?

But loaded semantics aside, the main problem I have with people jumping the gun on Apple Watch flopping is that none of these folks have used it yet. And, to be honest, “tech investor” isn’t a good testbed for “tech consumer.” Wilson said he asked a room full of investors how many wore watches. Half said they did. Then he asked those respondents if they’d be getting Apple Watch, and says that only 20 percent raised their hands. That’s already 10 percent of the whole room. (Why he limited the question to people who already had occupied wrists is anyone’s guess. Apple is obviously going after people who don’t currently wear watches.) Can you imagine if 20 percent of the global watch-wearing populace (10 percent of the world, by Wilson’s “sample”) went out and bought Apple Watch? It would be a bigger hit than iPhone! Conservative speculation says even a seven percent adoption rate for Apple Watch just among iPhone owners alone would net Cupertino over 20 million annual unit sales and over 16 billion in revenue by 2020. That’s perfect vision. It really seems like some folks just don’t know what “flop” means any more.

This tweet from Neil Cybart captures it best:

I’ll admit, it’s going to take a lot of people who don’t wear watches to suddenly want to wear them to make this thing succeed, but if anyone has a chance, it’s Apple.