Gruber's source: Microsoft only sold 503 Kins. | Hacker News Reader

Gruber's source: Microsoft only sold 503 Kins.

daringfireball.net

67 pointsswilliams69 comments

From the wikipedia entry on Kin:

"The Kin was based on Windows CE"

"Kin only supports email attachments, and does not support attachments to other media (like MMS)"

"The handset does not store photos or videos. Instead, every photo and video taken on the Kin is uploaded to Microsoft's server"

"There is no photo editing software for Kin."

"Kin does not currently support playing video from sites such as YouTube or Hulu"

"Kin has no app store and no 3rd party apps can be installed on Kin."

"the Kin web browser does not support Flash web applications, and there are no games for Kin."

"Kin has no calendar or appointment application, nor any ability to sync with Outlook calendar or Google Calendar"

"Kin is unable to Instant Message (IM), or use any IM client"

"There is no spelling correction or predictive text input on the Kin."

"There are no MicroSD or memory expansion slots."

"Kin will not sync or transfer contact lists from some non-Microsoft services (eg Gmail and Yahoo! Mail)"

Wonder why it failed...

To be fair, iPhone launched with almost all of the same limitations. Not to say that today's Kin should be competing with yesterday's iPhone, but even today, none of those limitations is a dealbreaker for me.

To be fair, my first cell phone only displayed one line of text which was only numbers, didn't have a phone book, had terrible call quality, in addition to all the listed missing features. So the Kin is actually a great phone. Should have sold millions.

The iPhone also launched what.. four years ago? At the time, those limitations weren't such a big deal.

That's true. The difference is that the Iphone lacked features because of Steve Jobs' desire to only do something if you can do it perfectly. The Kin lacked features because of politics.

This is what will kill Microsoft.

I'm not sure Steve's desire of perfection was the reason for all lacking features. MMS comes to mind. Ditto for being able to send an SMS to multiple people. Common features of phones, no magical implementation by Apple, but not supported originally (hell, it took iOS 4 for you to know how many characters your SMS contains).

Does iOS 4 tell you how many characters your SMS contains? Mine doesn't.

You need to turn it on in Settings, since it's off by default.

It does but this is off by default. You can turn it on in Settings->Messages->Charcter count. When on character count is displayed over "Send" button when your input takes more than one line—interesting quirk. On the other hand it correctly switches to 70 available chars instead of 160 if I enter a char not in 7-bit GSM character set.

If you're gonna compete, you'll have to compete with the iPhone4 not 2007's iPhone. That said, I don't know if all these statements are true, but some would be quite dealbreaking for me.

If you think the Kin was meant to compete with any iPhone, let alone iPhone 4, you've missed a couple of memos.

That's part of the problem, it wasn't significantly cheaper, the majority cost is the cost of the plan. When you can buy an iPhone 3GS or a Droid incredible for a mere 10% bump in cost over the standard 2 yr plan it makes absolutely no sense to buy a Kin, which is why nobody did.

If your feature-wise competition is at a price point you can't even touch, then you made a huge mistake. If your price-comparable competition is at a featureset you can't even touch, then you made an even bigger mistake.

> If you're gonna compete, you'll have to compete with the iPhone4 not 2007's iPhone.

And if you really want to compete, you need to target iPhone 5, not 4.

> "The iPhone was based on Windows CE"

False

> "iPhone only supports email attachments, and does not support attachments to other media (like MMS)"

True for a year (2 years with AT&T)

> "The handset does not store photos or videos. Instead, every photo and video taken on the iPhone is uploaded to Microsoft's server"

False

> "There is no photo editing software for the 2007 iPhone."

Was only true for a year

> "iPhone does not currently support playing video from sites such as YouTube or Hulu"

False, iPhone always supported YouTube; Hulu is a special case due to DRM & their chosen technology stack and politics

> "iPhone has no app store and no 3rd party apps can be installed on iPhone."

Was only true for a year — but from the get-go, the iPhone supported rich mobile Web apps, even allowing them to be installed to the home screen

> "the iPhone web browser does not support Flash web applications, and there are no games for the 2007 iPhone."

True and false (though no non-web-stack games were possible for a year)

> "iPhone has no calendar or appointment application, nor any ability to sync with Outlook calendar or Google Calendar"

False

> "iPhone is unable to Instant Message (IM), or use any IM client"

False if you include browser-based chat (or AIM thru SMS)

> "There is no spelling correction or predictive text input on the iPhone."

False since day 1

> "There are no MicroSD or memory expansion slots."

True, though it offered gigabytes of storage, much more than (at list virtually) any other phone in 2007

> "iPhone will not sync or transfer contact lists from some non-Microsoft services (eg Gmail and Yahoo! Mail)"

False, you could easily import, and often sync, any contacts that you could possibly export as CSV or vCard (through Address Book or Outlook)

"Almost all" is a bit of a stretch, teaspoon; I count just under 50%.

seriously? "only true for a year" = iPhone didn't launch with it, therefore, same as Kin.

Do you know what browser the Kin has? It doesn't seem unlikely that the Kin would support web apps.

Yes please compare apples to apples. Claiming that iPhone did not support something for only a year is BS because thats how it launched. what about multi-tasking? Oh iPhone didn't support that for a couple of years only.

GRANTED that iPhone is first-to-market and actually created the market, so they get the brownie points because there was nothing even close available. Now if you want to compete with the iPhone to any extent you MUST compete with the iPhone of today, not the iPhone of 1G.

It failed due to high plan and device costs plus a healthy dose of internal sabotage. The Kin's market was not nerds - it was your teenage cousin with a QWERTY feature phone that texts approximately one novel per day. Same as the Sidekick that came before it - but those plans were totally reasonable.

I hope the desktop software resurfaces, that part actually looked interesting.

You're right. The Kin was a phone designed to meet the market Sidekicks served. Only one problem... That market hasn't existed for three years. Your teenage cousin already bought an iPhone.

The design team of the Kin either could not envision or stubbornly ignored a world in which true smartphones are sold in Walmart for $100.

For teens I think the iPhone is more aspirational than actual, which in many ways is worse because you'll never stack up against people's hopes.

True, but I have found that many teens in fact have iPhones.

Once the decision is made to buy an internet-capable phone, the main cost is the service plan. Most teens can make up the difference in the fixed cost of the unit through a part time job, a birthday gift, or daddy's money. After the price of the 3G was lowered to $99, even these small differences in cost became nill.

The Kin was a ten year old concept, executed with five year old technology, and competing against gadgets from the future. Put simply, it was a mistake, executed poorly.

Find a way to deliver 85% of the Kin functionality without a monthly fee, or with a monthly fee with a cheap device, and you could sell to tweens and grade-schoolers.

Funny those people I know have blackberry bolds.

In any case the market still exists but more importantly is that the sidekick had instant messaging, apps, games, etc. You cant sell to kids and not have games.

I know as a fact that this not entirely true. For one, the Kin definitely supported MMS. I used its MMS functionality extensively as part of a project I have been working on.

EDIT: I also can confirm that the Kin does store media on its internal storage. it is not uploaded to msft servers.

Wow. Amidst tons of Android phones coming out which are not brain-surgery to set up, and the sidekick still going kind-of strong... MS Releases the most feature-missing phone possible. 503 copies though. That is not bad... that is "lets close shop" embarrassing.

There are 42 reviews of it on Verizon Wireless' site. Pretty amazing ratio if only 503 were sold.

http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/store/controller?item=pho...

That depends on how many of the reviews are from real customers.

There's also ~215,000 fans on Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/KIN#!/KIN?v=wall

One could probably count up the number of comments which mention owning a Kin, to confirm whether 503's lowballing it or not.

Wow. It looks like MS has a staffer managing the Kin facebook group by actually responding to posts. Looks like they're putting their social media budget to good use. From the page: As you probably heard, we have made the decision to focus our efforts on the upcoming Windows Phone 7 launch, and will not ship KIN in Europe this fall as planned. We will continue to work with Verizon Wireless in the U.S. to sell KIN phones and support customers. (7 hours ago). Back to beating the dead windows mobile horse.

The total users of the Kin Facebook app (which requires the device to sign up) is around 9,000.

Good pickup.

I tried looking for the Kin app on Facebook and found nothing. Do you have a link?

From the comments of a MS employee on the Mini Microsoft blog [1]:

> A billion dollars wasted on Kin, 500 phones sold and a huge amount of ground lost in the mobile space.

Two million dollars per user??

[1]: http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2010/07/kin-fusing-kin-clusion-...

I wouldn't trust Gruber's sources. There are other sources that put the number at more than 1,000, but less than 10,000.

I heard from a couple reliable sources that 1,000 < KINs sold < 10,000, too.

This article quotes 500 from a Microsoft employee. While they may be quoting Gruber I find it more unlikely that they wouldn't have at least a ballpark figure.

http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2010/07/kin-fusing-kin-clusion-...

503 Service Unavailable.

Heh.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/02/life-and-death-of-microso... http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/30/what-killed-the-kin/

These two articles from Engadget explain what happened very well. Essentially the thing was dead and cannibalized before it was released, it's a very sad story.

Not sure how conclusive or infallibly accurate this is, but it seems a lot more credible than the rumors people have been floating lately: http://pocketnow.com/rumor/actually-kin-sold-more-than-503-d...

And 500 of those were Microsoft employees.

clever, but how do you explain the rest of the 3 units!

They thought they were ordering a kindle.

phone mart was out of iphone 4s and evo 4gs.

I doubt you were serious, but thinking about the Microsoft employees I know, it makes the 503 figure sound very dubious.

The iPhone is a kind of forbidden love among (some) Microsoft employees. Many of them want to/feel pressured to use Microsoft technologies wherever possible. I would expect more than 500 to be sold just among folks in the Microsoft bubble.

Unless it were just really terrible, and everyone knew that from the beginning.

It seems obvious to me from playing with one in a store that few people would look at both the Kin Two and the Android-powered LG Ally, which have identical prices for phone and service and pick the Kin. I think the only way it could have worked would have been for the Kin to have a much cheaper plan.

Pocketnow says 8810 were in use: http://pocketnow.com/rumor/actually-kin-sold-more-than-503-d... Not a lot, but more than 503

I think the proper approach to something like this would be to build a social network and then introduce the device, not the other way round. You can't expect users to flock when the barrier to entry is the price of a device and the success of the network is questionable at best. If Facebook made a deal with a mobile device company (say HTC) and made a similar product, they'd be oodles more successful. Although the fact that our phones nowadays support apps and can browse the web makes this sort of moot anyway.

The price wasn't theirs to set. The Kin was a pretty cool product for the market. The price, however, was unreasonable.

Apple get's a free pass with the iPhone despite AT&T, but MS releases a good product, and people blame the phone companies issues on MS.

Prices can be negotiated with the carriers. Remember the original iPhone's 600$ price tag? Infact, MS supposedly got a very good pricing deal with Verizon which they botched up by not meeting the agreed upon timelines.

> Remember the original iPhone's 600$ price tag?

Yeah, it's still that high.

> MS supposedly got a very good pricing deal with Verizon

For the market, no. It was pretty clear when the product came out the pricing for the market it was going after was still too high.

According to the Engadget articles linked above, Verizon changed the pricing late in the development process because they smelled a rat on Microsoft's side and didn't trust them to deliver a product that would sell well. By all indications, they got wind of Microsoft's political struggles and at that point were as willing as Microsoft's managers to just fulfill their contractual obligations as quickly as possible and let the thing die quietly.

he's wrong, there you go: http://pocketnow.com/rumor/actually-kin-sold-more-than-503-d...

This is most definitely false. Verizon was giving them away for free with a contract just to get rid of them, so I'm sure they got rid of more than 503.

Microsoft Bob 2.0 :D

With only 503 sold, it's almost a limited edition. I thought about getting one, but Ebay auctions for contractless Kins end over $150

Maybe they will become collectors items... but probably not given Microsofts ineptitude.

Where did the idea come from that the Kin was supposed to fight agains the iPhone? The product was good. The target audience is there, even still, but the pricing is where the problem was.

But no, it wasn't going after the same market the iPhone is.

The Kin was going after the iPod Touch crowd otherwise known as the iPhone minor-leagues. MS figured there were enough folks who needed the phone but not quite the full smartphone experience. Too bad it required a smartphone data plan at full price.

> MS figured there were enough folks who needed the phone but not quite the full smartphone experience.

Yes...

> The Kin was going after the iPod Touch crowd

... but that's not the iPod Touch crowd.

I've run into a lot of children and teenagers who own an iPod Touch. It's much easier to get parental funding/permission for a one-time cost than $30-50 month changes to the family phone bill.

But, again, those are not the Sidekick-user type of users Microsoft was going for.

why not provide the source http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-rank-and-file-felt-...

Clearly Kin was a big flop, but the "only 503" sold claim lacks credibility.

[edit] I see that I was mistaken on Gruber's source, thanks for the correction AlanH. (of course, I still think that the "503" claim doesn't have much credibility)

That isn’t the source, Credo. Gruber claims a source told him directly, on the HN submission's link.

Gruber's sources have been wrong before, at least one time I recall somewhat recently. I wouldn't put much stock in it.

Apparently Passion Pit played the release party.

It was upon actually seeing the phone, that they got the inspiration to write a song called "The Reeling".

They marketed it as a way to keep tabs on "your people" 24/7. Not sure that many people are that hyper-social, no matter how hip.

I do wonder how many they made, and what will happen to them. Landfill, recycling, or remaindered?

Same landfill as the Atari "E.T." cartridges.

They seem to still be trying to sell what's left. I heard a Kin ad on the radio yesterday and saw the ex-girlfriend ad on Hulu at some point this week.

I guess the discontinuation doesn't really matter to most users, as long as MS keeps the Kin Studio site running (which I believe they are).

this statement proved Gruber is an Complete Idiot of first order if he even cites 503 to be sales number.

+ ppl who comment without pointing this out are complete idiots as well

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