Farewell Oceanus, and we thank you.

I'm going to continue the previous post's theme of consumer products because I'd like to talk about Oceanus.

Consider this list: the Bugatti Veyron; Concorde; the SR-71; the Hubble Space Telescope; the Saturn V. Each a shining example of daring, engineering excellence, and a combination of money and a certain amount of fiscal irresponsibility. That is the reason why literally none of them are mass-market consumer goods. They peerless in every way.

Fortunately the Japanese have other ideas. They thought that more such peerless pieces of technology should grace the marketplace, at least this seems to have been the reasoning Casio took when they decided to launch Oceanus.

For those who don't know, Casio is an electronics company from Japan. Their presence in many countries is decidedly downmarket, but they have their eye on excellence as well. Many people will be familiar with their cheap digital watches, so favoured by schoolboys and terrorists, but what you might not know is that the cheap watches are only the tip of the iceberg. In Japan there is nothing downmarket about Casio and one could easily spend a thousand dollars or more on one of their watches. To try to market to this bracket abroad (particularly the US and Europe) they took a leaf out of Toyota's book and created a new prestige brand called Oceanus.

The brief was simple: all the functionality of the digital watch with the elegance of an analogue appearance, wrapped up in the best materials available and topped up with all the best features from Casio's extensive experience.

The result of this confluence of technology was the original oceanus: the first atomic solar chronograph watch. For practicality there was a small LCD screen to address the various changes in mode. It had solar power and a titanium case and bracelet - for me the #2 and #3 most important things in a watch (#1 is telling the time ... duh). It was also very good looking and despite the analogue appearance it still packed a high resolution stopwatch, some alarms, atomic time calibration, and world time.
Their next effort took things up a notch: they threw away the digital display entirely and replaced it with another hand to create the five motor.
Next they replaced the world time dial with one that showed the day of the week, a tide graph, and various other functions to create the 700 series, and to my eyes the best-looking Oceanus ever made. They also took some of the lessons learned from the Oceanus to their MT-G lineup, resulting in the 1000 series (my personal favourite).

Now it seems that the mid-level Oceanus are all but gone. Some of the high-end watches remain, but who can say if this is only because they are slower to sell? It seems like Concorde and some of the other technological showpieces I mentioned it is destined to rot in the back of a drawer after one of its motors fail or the battery finally wears out. And to me, this seems sad. In many ways we see to be going backward. We create something wonderful and because it's not made in Geneve, it's not quite good enough for us.