Answer: Give every employee said phone.
If they want more developers, they are better of offering competitions to attract developers. They are already talking to popular iphone developers apparently.
Why do so many Microsoft tactics (paying for bing users, approaching iphone developers, giving away phones) seem so desperate and tacky?
Maybe the world is somewhere in between. Maybe it's a good thing for an employer to do: makes employees happy, gets a large user and developer base right out the gate, employees are more likely to evangelize a product and give it a shot than the average consumer, etc.
It'd be tacky if Microsoft was requiring or even pressuring employees to buy Windows 7 phones. Giving them away seems like a pretty nice perk for employess, and a good opportunity for MS to "eat their own dog food". If every employee has one, campus gossip should give you a pretty good idea what stuff users really like and what stuff they don't.
The Kin was based on the same kernel as Windows 7 phones (Windows Mobile 6.5), has a lot of the same cloud strategies as each other, and social media integration. The ROKR was a phone built by Motorola, that happend to integrate with itunes and playback media that you had already bought. It was a standard Motorola phone (E398) that they happened to paint white and add in some software to work with itunes.
Also, the kin was a nice idea, that price itself out of the market. It is exactly the phone my nieces and nephews would love to have, and had great online integration.
I welcome finding out more about the Windows 7 phone, but think it is too little, too late.
I don't think anybody who works at Microsoft should be allowed to make any comparisons anymore, you just don't seem to grasp the concept.
I shouldn't have used the crutch of analogy and should have spent more time writing a thoughtful reply, like you did.
I when I joined Microsoft late last year, it seemed to me that everyone I talked to knew that the Kin was going to be dead on arrival. It was well known that the team working on the phone was discouraged and that the phone was going to be nothing like the one they set out to build.
People didn't like the Kin, but they all seemed to make the excuse that they weren't in the target demograph for the phone.
To be honest, I think you are being overly generous in your comments about the Kin.
What I'm trying to say is that the Kin had almost nothing in common with the Windows Phone. But I think you get that.
Sure, the 7 phone has a different UI, and apps you can download, and higher specs for the phone. I can't think of much else that is different.
Do you guys really think that people are excited about Windows 7, much more than they were excited about the kin? At least the kin had its special niche, W7 phone is trying to take on giants like the iPhone, Android, whatever Nokia can pull out, revitablised Palm, Blackberry.
What else is left? Oh wait, they're both phones!
The gp was pointing out that for consumers, for service providers and for MS marketing, these are totally unrelated devices. My bet is also that the manufacturing supply chains weren't very similar either.
The mere fact that it has a CE kernel isn't visible to anyone except the people who built parts of the Kin interface (and in any case the kernel was probably customised for the Kin).
You're right, they are both phones. Anything else?