I have been wearing a kinetic Seiko Premier for the last 10 years and I totally love the idea of the spring, gears and an eccentric weight working in harmony to make a beautiful, functional, piece of jewelry.

The other big selling point for me was that changing a watch battery requires opening the seal and, unless the work is done by the manufacturer, your water-resistance guarantee just went out the window. With a kinetic, there's no reason to open the case, so my watch is as water-resistant today as it was a decade ago.

So, I've really no interest in owning a smart watch.

I worked for ASK/Ingres when it was acquired by CA. It was a pretty ugly time but in the end I stayed on at CA for a couple of years afterwards. During that time, it became clear that CA's strategy was to:

1. sell Ingres to all their existing customers
2. sell their other products to the Ingres customers
3. Buy another company and goto 1.

So, I suspect that the reason for this announcement is that CA is struggling to sell Ingres in the face of Oracle's market dominance and CA's poor image as a supplier; and CA is looking for ways to extract more value from the product.

As I see it, in this case, the value is probably twofold:

(a) get some good PR and hopefully make a few friends
(b) assign some of those expensive DB engineers to something more profitable

Is this a reasonable assessment of the situation and if not, what future does CA see for the Ingres database?