It didn't catch on and there are clues that this was pure marketing rather than an true effort to improve the world. It was not clear if other watch manufacturers could use the term ".beats". There was no need to move the prime meridian to Biel and so on.
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Perhaps more interesting than the decimal part was that .beats only had a single time zone. Based on Swatch's Biel HQ in Switzerland, so @ 000 .beats starts at midnight in Switzerland. The idea here was that you never need to convert. If an event happens anywhere in the world it can be written in .beats. Great for international meetings, flight times, etc.
It didn't catch on and there are clues that this was pure marketing rather than an true effort to improve the world. It was not clear if other watch manufacturers could use the term ".beats". There was no need to move the prime meridian to Biel and so on.
Also if you want a universal time you can already do that by offering a time in UTC. Anyway it is still fun and you still find occasional references to it on the internet and in software. Here is one of my #Casio F-91Ws using @joeycastillo's super cool #SensorWatch module to show a time in .beats.
But before I end this, one more bit of trivia, while we might not get a decimal time in the future, we had one in the past, that lasted longer and was used by more people than the French attempt (or .beats). China used decimal based time divisions long before the adoption of Western systems back in the 17th century. Until 1645, the Chinese measured time using units like the kè (刻), which was typically defined as 1⁄100 of a day, thus making it a true decimal unit. 🎉