[jacquesm]

My bad, I missed that, I remembered the 'beat' system (and swatch is Swiss anyway).

As for the rest, I don't know. Decimal time may have had its advantages, but once a system is sufficiently entrenched swapping it out for a better one gets costly, and if the costs outweigh the benefits then it won't get done.

For a nice example try explaining the benefits of metric to an American or Canadian contractor, and for the Canadian one that's in a country where everything else is metric.

It sure sucks to be a canadian mechanic, you never know whether that bolt staring at you has a 3/8" head or a 10mm one, the difference (less than half a mm) is hard to eyeball.

The French tried to standardize on something when standards were still fluid enough that it might have worked. If they had not done that the SI system as we know it today would not have existed and I think that science owes a lot of its progress to standardization.