The thing about the hour -- the part that's being abstracted away here -- is that (in most cases) it carries semantic meaning about daylight and thus about "waking-world" and circadian-rhythm expectations.
Yes, with timezones and UTC-offsets I have to keep in mind that 8:00 in my timezone might be 3:00 in someone else's timezone, but once I do the simple math of adding the offsets and doing any necessary modulos, I now know that the meeting time I've chosen almost certainly isn't a reasonable meeting time for that person.
I know from experience that for the overwhelming majority of people in the world, 3:00 is still probably sleeping time, regardless of what timezone that 3:00 is in. 3:00 in UTC is sleeping time in London, 3:00 in UTC-5 is sleeping time in Atlanta, 3:00 in UTC+9 is sleeping time in Tokyo -- in any case, 3:00 is sleeping time.
Attempts to have "one world timezone", even leaving out the existence of fractional-hour timezone offsets, will always throw away that semantic detail about human schedules.
For example, let's say you just enforce that everyone uses UTC. Congratulations, you no longer have to do offset math.
Except that you have no idea if 10:00 is a reasonable meeting time for anyone within a few timezones of you (which remember, no longer exist, so you can't really use them as references). You no longer have to memorize each participant's offsets, but now you have to memorize the daylight hours for each participant instead, and that's arguably harder (X's daylight hours are 8:00->16:00, but Y's daylight hours are 14:00->2:00, but then Z's daylight hours are 12:30->20:30).
Yes, there are companies with overseas contracts who dedicate some staff to working the same hours as their overseas counterparts. Do we really want that to become the global norm, though? Because if not, then "daylight hours" remains an important concept, and it's already baked semantically into the system of timezones we have today, more simply than the alternative.
So if we toss out the piece of information that conveys the detail about "daylight hours" (which is what this clock does with its letters-instead-of-hours), then we're losing that information, and making it much easier to trample all over somebody's reasonable working schedule.
Yes, with timezones and UTC-offsets I have to keep in mind that 8:00 in my timezone might be 3:00 in someone else's timezone, but once I do the simple math of adding the offsets and doing any necessary modulos, I now know that the meeting time I've chosen almost certainly isn't a reasonable meeting time for that person.
I know from experience that for the overwhelming majority of people in the world, 3:00 is still probably sleeping time, regardless of what timezone that 3:00 is in. 3:00 in UTC is sleeping time in London, 3:00 in UTC-5 is sleeping time in Atlanta, 3:00 in UTC+9 is sleeping time in Tokyo -- in any case, 3:00 is sleeping time.
Attempts to have "one world timezone", even leaving out the existence of fractional-hour timezone offsets, will always throw away that semantic detail about human schedules.
For example, let's say you just enforce that everyone uses UTC. Congratulations, you no longer have to do offset math.
Except that you have no idea if 10:00 is a reasonable meeting time for anyone within a few timezones of you (which remember, no longer exist, so you can't really use them as references). You no longer have to memorize each participant's offsets, but now you have to memorize the daylight hours for each participant instead, and that's arguably harder (X's daylight hours are 8:00->16:00, but Y's daylight hours are 14:00->2:00, but then Z's daylight hours are 12:30->20:30).
Yes, there are companies with overseas contracts who dedicate some staff to working the same hours as their overseas counterparts. Do we really want that to become the global norm, though? Because if not, then "daylight hours" remains an important concept, and it's already baked semantically into the system of timezones we have today, more simply than the alternative.
So if we toss out the piece of information that conveys the detail about "daylight hours" (which is what this clock does with its letters-instead-of-hours), then we're losing that information, and making it much easier to trample all over somebody's reasonable working schedule.