Jesus christ, I thought .beat died in the early 00's with the failure of the Swatch physical watch line.

The main problem with .beat is that it's decimal. Decimal is a terrible base for time keeping. 12, 60, and 360 all complement each other, with divisibility being more important in the end than how many fingers we have. There are good reasons why even the French stopped short of trying to decimalize time, reasons Swatch didn't think through when they tried to find a new way of getting everyone to buy new watches.