The Microsoft Band — The Sensor-Packed Wearable Microsoft Wore Out in Two Tries

Summary

The Microsoft Band was Microsoft's attempt to wear technology on the wrist, and after two generations and two years it was discontinued, quietly pulled from the company's online store on October 3, 2016 with no third model to follow. It launched on October 30, 2014 at $199 — a slim, screen-bearing fitness tracker that crammed ten sensors into a stiff plastic-and-rubber strap and promised to read heart rate, skin temperature, sun exposure, and sleep while doubling as a notifications display. A second version, the Band 2, arrived a year later at $249 with a curved screen, a barometer, and eleven sensors. Then the team was disbanded, the device was delisted, and Microsoft walked away from the wrist.

It was not killed by a single rival or a fatal flaw so much as by the accumulated weight of its own compromises. The Band did a remarkable number of things, and it did most of them adequately and none of them with grace. The strap was rigid and uncomfortable for all-day wear; the battery lasted roughly two days, less with GPS; and — most damningly — the rubber had a habit of cracking and splitting along the seams, a defect common enough that Microsoft revised the materials for the Band 2 without ever quite admitting why. A wearable's first job is to be worn, and the Band made that a chore.

Microsoft's exit was characteristically tidy and characteristically final. There would be no Band 3; the software development kit was pulled; and the company folded its Health-branded apps into a backend it hoped third-party wearables would use instead of building its own. That hope, too, expired. On May 31, 2019, Microsoft shut the Microsoft Health Dashboard and removed the Band apps from every app store, deleting the cloud data that made the device smart and leaving the surviving Bands as offline pedometers.

What the Band left behind was not a community in mourning but a cautionary spec sheet: a device that out-sensored every competitor and lost anyway, because it never solved the unglamorous problem of being comfortable on a human arm.

Timeline

The Wrist Microsoft Wanted

For a company that had watched the iPod, the iPhone, and then the wrist itself slip past its hardware ambitions, the Band was an unusually disciplined bet. It was not tethered to Windows Phone — already a fading platform — but worked across iOS and Android, because Microsoft had concluded, correctly, that a health device chained to its own dying mobile OS would die with it. The pitch was data: a Microsoft Health cloud that would ingest a torrent of biometrics and hand back insights, with the Band as the most sensor-dense sampling device a consumer could strap on.

And the sensors were the point. The original Band counted ten of them — optical heart rate, accelerometer, gyroscope, GPS, skin temperature, UV exposure, and galvanic skin response among them — a list that read like a wishlist next to the step-counters most people were buying. The Band 2 added a barometer for elevation. On paper, nothing on the wrist measured more: Microsoft had built less a fitness band than a small instrument array with a notifications screen bolted on, and for early adopters who wanted the numbers, that was genuinely compelling.

It also sold. The Band sold out on its first day and stayed scarce through the 2014 holidays — a supply story Microsoft was happy to let stand in for a demand story. But scarcity at launch is the easiest metric in hardware to mistake for success. The harder questions — would people keep wearing it, and would they buy a second one — were already written into the strap.

The Strap Problem

The Band's defining flaw was the most physical one. The body was a rigid block of electronics, and the strap that carried it was stiff, unyielding rubber that fought the curve of a wrist all day. Reviewers admired the sensors and complained, almost uniformly, about the comfort; a wearable that is uncomfortable to wear is a contradiction the spec sheet cannot resolve. Battery life compounded the irritation — roughly two days nominal, and as little as five hours once GPS was running for a long ride or run — so the device demanded both tolerance and frequent recharging.

Then the rubber began to split. Owners reported the original Band's strap cracking and tearing along its seams, a failure widespread enough that it became the device's most durable reputation. Microsoft's response was instructive: for the Band 2 it quietly revised the strap with tougher materials and a more flexible design, fixing the defect without ever making a fuss about having had one. The Band 2 was more comfortable and more durable, and reviewers said so — while also noting it still wasn't flexible enough for true all-day wear, scratched alarmingly fast, and wasn't waterproof. It was a better version of a thing that was hard to love.

The deeper trouble was strategic. The Band was simultaneously a fitness tracker, a smartwatch, and a sensor platform, and it was beaten at each by something more focused. Fitbit was cheaper, simpler, and more comfortable for people who only wanted steps and sleep. The Apple Watch, launched in 2015, owned the premium smartwatch conversation outright. A device that out-measured everyone but out-pleased no one was caught in the gap, paying for sensors most buyers would never read while losing the buyers who just wanted something that disappeared on the wrist.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

There was no petition and no community campaign for the Microsoft Band — it never accumulated the devoted base that turns a shutdown into a wake — but its few hundred thousand owners were left with a real, narrow loss: the cloud-deleted history of their workouts, sleep, and heart rate, erased on May 31, 2019, with refunds the only compensation. The device's engineering did not vanish so much as migrate; the optical heart-rate and health-sensing ambitions that drove the Band fed forward into Microsoft's broader health research and, indirectly, into an industry that kept stuffing more sensors into smaller wrists, more comfortably than Microsoft had managed.

Microsoft's exit from wrist hardware proved permanent. The company that had tried to own the desktop and the phone declined to fight for the wrist a second time, ceding it to Apple, Fitbit, Garmin, and the Android camp, and turning its health ambitions toward software and cloud services where it was stronger. The Band's lasting mark is a textbook one: it is remembered, when it is remembered at all, as the wearable that won the spec sheet and lost the wrist — a reminder that the gadget closest to the body is judged less by what it measures than by whether anyone wants to keep it on.

Lessons

References

• Microsoft discontinues its Band fitness wearable Engadget
• End of support for the Microsoft Health Dashboard applications and services: FAQ Microsoft Support
• Microsoft will shut down its Health Dashboard site and Band apps MedCity News
• Microsoft unveils the Microsoft Band 2 for $249, available October 30 VentureBeat
• Microsoft Band Wikipedia