RIP Microsoft Kin
mashable.com
mashable.com
"Failing" has become such a well-liked buzz word in the last couple years, unless you're a company people don't like, in which case it is awful.
The real failure here is having gone and built this whole shebang without securing the pricing side first.
With the always-connected social features they want on the phone, there is really no alternative plan pricing.
Their failure was in capturing market, or more precisely, the lack thereof. There was simply no market for a half-smartphone like the kin, that wasn't really good at being a simple "dumbphone", and not even as "smart" as a last generation iphone which costs about the same.
With the iPhone 3GS going for $99, and a handy selection of decent featurephones available for free depending on carrier sales, anyone with half a brain would know there is no market for something like the kin. At least not now of all times.
Always-connected doesn't necessarily mean huge amounts of bandwidth. They could have built this thing as a social media device that was doing simple messaging and heavily restricted / optimized features for photo & video. I think there would be a space in the market for such a thing for teens, but MS clearly badly missed it. And if they have pissed off their carrier partners in the process then it is even worse because they desperately need their support if WP7 is going to be a success.
They launched this too early; wait til voice/data prices drop even further to reach this demo. Though to me it's still not an iPhone or an Android and all the cool kids will have one of those.
I think the consensus is to fail small and fail often.
Actually, scratch that, it should be: prototype often, so to keep failures small and easy to rebound from.
Regardless, you do not want to spend countless hours and dollars bringing a product to market only to realize it was a failure 3 weeks later. That's a rookie "big company with lots of money" mistake that Microsoft should have outgrown decades ago.
To quote Jason Fried on failure: "You might know what won’t work, but you still don’t know what will work. That’s not much of a lesson."
After all their success, Microsoft should know better.
From the limited samples we've seen, Windows Phone 7 seemed like a fairly competent response to the iPhone and Android. Whether MS can sell mobile os licenses in an age where Android is available to OEMs for free is an open question, but they seemed to be intensely focused on making it work.
And then Kin was announced seemingly out of nowhere. Suddenly MS had two, nonrelated mobile strategies. That Kin directly competed with the same OEMs that are the customers of the other mobile OS made the move seem even stranger.
This same story played out in the online music store business. Microsoft released the Zune and Zune Store in direct competition with their vendor-agnostic solution. The two platforms were mishandled to the point where the DRM on the mp3 files were incompatible. By splitting the focus on the company, they couldn't articulate a clear strategy and ended up ceding the market to Apple.
An op-ed from a former MS executive described the company as a collection of little kingdoms, constantly battling among each other, to the point where the only impression is one of chaos. Their mobile strategy is turning into the perfect example.
Right. Don't compete in the smartphone space with something like Kin. Make something cheap, without a monthly charge, but which shows iAd style ads. Make it something that doesn't make calls, but which can work with a kid's free featurephone to give a lot of the utility of a smartphone with no or negligible monthly charge. Make the money off the ads. Share the ads with the carriers.
The Kin's short history is a long series of WTF moments from the market without any echo from Microsoft.
A few other rumors/half-truths:
1) Kin Studio, the client software was the one thing reviewers (what customers?) liked about Kin. It was largely developed by the Zune client team.
2) The Kin team was formed from remaining members of the SideKick team acquired with Danger.
3) Dislike of Microsoft tech and Windows Phone politics caused many SideKick engineers to leave post acquisition because they were forced to build Kin on the Windows Phone OS, which was very much like building the plane while flying it. Those who left tended to be the talented ones who could get other jobs.
4) Many designers didn't share the Windows-hate, so the resulting team was very designer heavy.
5) The talented folks left on the Kin team were poached quite greedily by the Windows Phone 7 initiative.
6) Some bigwig was in charge of Kin and Microsoft lets CVPs piss away tons of money to keep them from going to competitors. I've never seen this strategy work out.
They developed a family of phones, created marketing plans, made partnerships with carriers and it had to be the market to tell them it was a stupid idea?
Nobody in the thousands involved would have noticed that?
You work for a company. There is no reason to keep your project, or your division, running longer than its useful life.
I think all of these mobile efforts by MS are doomed, but I don't see why Kin was a worse idea than WP7.
My friends on the Kin team seem to have been caught by surprise. Those of us who watched for years from the outside: less so.
And that's the whole point. There must have been some serious reality distortion inside the company for this project to go on for as long as it did. It was obvious, from anyone but the most clueless on the outside, it was doomed. Why smart people inside the company could not realize it will be studied for decades and will spawn many papers and books.
Microsoft has a lot of weight so maybe they thought they would have some leverage for a certain demographic. Though they would have had to sell a _lot_ of Kin's to break even on their investment (if rumors around Redmond are true).
I believe Panasonic eventually got the bid, but pretty much stole Motorola's design according to my friend.
I bet thats going to be one interesting event in San Antonio tomorrow
And the Courier was pure vaporware. It's like calling Apple's Knowledge Navigator a product.
It's absolutely impossible nobody had noticed that problem before the phone being shipped.
Instead, like an aging football fan trying to relive glory days as the high school quarterback, they're languishing on old glories and screwing up on most new efforts - badly.
They should start a completely new "startup division", similar to the Xbox business unit, roughly autonomous from the rest of the brokenness in the org, and just fund it to the tune of about a billion or two a year. The mandate? Start new "companies" completely autonomous from Mother MS, and they can be anything from new software, to web apps, to heck, even iPhone apps. That's got to give better ROI than the current brain-dead strategy.
How many ground zero startups could have been incubated for the money sunk on just the Kin?
Plus the "new blood" are going to be (almost by definition) managers that thrived in the current culture. It's not at all clear to me that they're likely to succeed.
And then there's the politics that drive the platform tax; the Xbox started with "150K lines" of Windows NT 4 code (appropriately, NT 4 was the version that brought the GDI inside the kernel...) and the Zune runs a version of Windows CE.
It may take a while. It's the current crop of bad management that has to show the current crop of bad management the door. I cannot attribute any of their successes to good management practices. I am more inclined to point out to very clever products that fit niches that passed under management's radar (would it be pedantic to write "RADAR"?) and hit the market by sheer luck.
I also doubt the "start new companies" division would be completely free. They would, most probably, be forbidden to use any competing technology.
zing
The physical construction seemed fine, but the interface was so choppy it was hardly usable, and the colors looked really washed out. Noticeably worse than the LG and Samsung dumbphones sitting next to it.
With a browser and reasonably powerful components, it could have been a nice complement to the Zune lines. My guess was that it was just a field test for MS cloud services for mobile users, and for some reason they didn't want to do it with Windows Mobile.
When the left on life support back end data loss occurred we heard a lot about how terribly clueless the management of Project Pink was and how terribly unhappy the assimilated into Pink Danger employees were.
Disaster was expected, predicted, etc., the interesting question as others have noted is why did Microsoft take so long, spend so much money to realize it.
With Kin, I don't see them revolutionizing anything, so "just rolling with it" doesn't justify this mysterious venture to me. Xbox was different, though.
I guess they're still in a position where they can keep failing - or "experimenting" - without suffering too much for it.
This is why there market cap is falling, and Apples is rising. Microsoft does 100s of stupid things that fail, because they can, and nobody inside the company seems to care. Here, have $10 million for your project, if you fail, we will move you somewhere else.
Today's smartphone market reminds me of the airline industry prior to deregulation. Since all phones are sold for roughly the same price (on contract) in the US - and you don't get a discount for avoiding a contract - there's really no price competition between handsets. The Kin would have had a shot if it was a choice between a $200 Kin and a $700 iPhone or Android, but at the moment superior quality is the only differentiator between smartphones.
It's interesting to note that one of the main points of the announcement is that the Kin team will be merged with the Windows Phone 7 team.
This is likely a move that has been planned for a while, but only announced today, since the official re-organization will go into effect tomorrow.
Many managers' core competency is shifting or escaping blame; in this case Microsoft was palpably panicked over the prospect that the disaster would reflect on Azure and their general cloud competency and tried to cast blame on anyone other than themselves and all the non-MS technology Danger was using. Firing her would have put the lie to that.
This is a company with billions in cash, smart employees and profitable projects. It's sad that they can't get together and be seen as anything but the gang that sells software to my dad.
I wonder when shareholders will start to demand that MS stop throwing huge amounts of money away on foolish endeavors just increase the stock dividend.
Good for them for consolidating, but it honestly amazes me that the project even got this far.
They must indeed have some units left to sell still -- just today I heard an ad for the Kin on the radio.
Aside from the particular products, this behavior over the past several years has caused MS to lose all credibility with me. I wouldn't trust them with any critical or even moderately important aspect of my life -- business or personal -- outside of their well established, cash cow products.
I have no interest in having my own investments (in time, not just -- or, rather, more so -- than money) subject/captive to this behavior.