Autonomous mobility and the mythical mass market
In the fall of 2002, Microsoft announced the Smart Personal Objects Initiative (SPOT), which aimed to inject software into everyday objects like watches and pens to make them smarter. It projected a very large target market for SPOT devices, with keychains, pens, and watches alone potentially amounting to “hundreds of millions of units, even billions of units a year.” In reality, SPOT was a miserable commercial failure.