Microsoft apologizes over 'Smoked by Windows Phone' controversy | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft apologizes over 'Smoked by Windows Phone' controversy

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53 pointsSlimy51 comments

I find it more interesting how incredibly shady and underhanded the entire "challenge" is to begin with. They get to choose the exact rules and conditions, for which they've specially customized their phones beforehand, even if it's completely outside the bounds of what an average consumer would ever do.

In this case, it was to show the weather of two different cities. The only reason the contestant won was because he happened to need that information enough in his day-to-day life to warrant the two separate weather widgets on his home screen. The Microsoft representative obviously knew what the challenge would be going in, and already had the tiles ready to go.

Reasonable that a contest Microsoft is hosting to promote their own product is skewered towards their own product.

The thing is, most of the Smoked by Windows Phone challenges (at least those that they did at CES and MWC) are actually pretty everyday tasks like uploading a photo, posting something to social networks etc. Those actually do make some sense.

Though, they did screw up this one pretty badly. Instead of giving out a $1k prize they're now paying way, way more with all the bad PR...

> Reasonable that a contest Microsoft is hosting to promote their own product is skewered towards their own product.

No. It's not reasonable at all. If you propose a challenge, I would assume you want to prove a point beyond how much you can stack the deck (we already know they can go very far with that).

Wouldn't it be nicer if they actually had a superior product instead? If they have a superior product, like they claim, why do they need to manipulate the rules to favor their product?

You can't objectively prove that one smartphone is the best. You can only point out some of the things one smartphone platform does better than other ones, and those are exactly the things that Microsoft has chosen for their challenge. That's what I meant with "skewer", but it's really just highlighting your own, unique strengths.

You can't, but you can make a phone that is easier/more practical than the competition for a couple common use cases. When you have a product that can stand on its own, then you make a campaign like this one. Whatever you do, you don't open yourself up for this kind of accusation.

http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/rdgtz/i_won_the_...

You may not have read the article this post was about. It's referring to exactly that incident.

If you read the link I sent, the thread was about the original article incident, but the post was about another, where, among other things, it seemed Microsoft was throttling the bandwidth so that competing phones would appear slower.

This just plain dishonest.

To be fair, I think consumers are pretty well aware that this is a stunt. No one I can see is looking at the results and claiming any kind of objective superiority. What MS wants is just to get you into the store and show you their cool phones -- "Can your phone do this?" stuff. So they dangle a carrot (the prize) to get you in the door.

Where it went off the rails is that somehow the store staff didn't feel comfortable actually awarding the prizes. That is shady, and it implies that the incentives are screwed up internally: if the stores get punished for prize awards, do they likewise get hurt for providing other stuff with dollar values attached (what would normally be called "good customer service")?

To be fair, I think consumers are pretty well aware that this is a stunt

I'm a pretty in touch, technically focused person and I didn't think it was the farce that it actually was. I thought they were legitimately demoing average things that people were doing, from scratch, highlighting the benefits of the platform.

That they pre-configure their device for ridiculous scenarios is simply incredible. That the now much more apologetic Microsoft rep originally offered a rematch on the incredibly long odds seemed extraordinary.

"To be fair, I think consumers are pretty well aware that this is a stunt."

Does that really make it OK though? Do you feel OK giving your money to companies that use "stunts", if you're aware of the stunt? I don't. I find it disingenuous. It feels like those door-to-door vacuum salesmen who dump crap on your carpet. Blech, no thank you!

Show me the product. Let me try it out. Trust me to recognize where you've done well. Feel free to point out areas where you think you've done well, but these "head to head" contests are just silly, and they can easily turn around and bite you, as we've seen here. Just skip it and let people make their own assessment.

I guess. But in a world where you can't even watch a youtube video or read a web forum without getting hit by the same kind of nonsense product marketing, it seems like awfully mild sauce to be condemning Microsoft for pulling the same tricks. The marketing itself (but not the refusal to honor the prize) just doesn't tickle my outrage meter, sorry.

The

Right, it's like midway booths at the State Fair. You know the games are jaded and you only play for fun. But if you win and they don't give you the toy, then it's just not honest.

"Specially customized their phones"?

If you mean specially designed the phones to be efficient at every day tasks, then you are correct. Don't get all bent out of shape because of your loathing of Microsoft.

I wouldn't call it loathing a company when pointing out the obvious flaws in a rigged contest.

I hope in future versions they rig WindowsPhones to do more things correctly.

You must not have read the article. The challenge was to pull up the weather in 2 different cities (later, the manager said 2 cities in different states)

The reps phone just "happened" to have LiveTiles setup so that the weather in 2 cities was the first thing on the home screen.

They knew the challenge, and setup their phone do win it as fast as possible. The "Specially customized their phones" comment is that they rigged the phone to be near-unbeatable ahead of time, since they made the challenge.

Can you honestly not see that they stacked the competition in their favor by customizing the device from its stock install state?

And not that it's relevant, but I like Microsoft's products. I think their direction of the latest Windows Phones are great. I'd rather they didn't resort to cheap tricks to try and "prove" that their product is better.

Smoked by Windows Phone? Is anyone else reminded of the funeral procession Microsoft held for iPhone a few years ago?

http://www.intomobile.com/2010/09/10/microsoft-windows-phone...

Not just the funeral procession, but also the recent Google-salesman ad, and just about every attempt at marketing MS has done in the last few years.

I really have to wonder, how is it that Microsoft is seemingly so completely disconnected from reality? In what crazy world did the Seinfeld ads look amazing and awesome? Where the iPhone funeral procession would look like anything other than premature celebration? Where the anti-Google ad looked anything other than sleazy and underhanded?

Though I have a theory. MS's marketing stunts have been known to be unnecessarily hostile to the competition, overly self-congratulatory, seemingly unaware of why people choose the competitor, has overtones of arrogance... remind you of a CEO? :)

I thought this ad was pretty good and makes fun of the old versions of IE: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=4...

Well, except that the protagonist is an obsessive ideologue nerd who would rather hate a Web browser than be happy. If that's supposed to be an apology then it's the ultimate "I'm sorry you feel that way".

The point is, how does it sell to your customers to do weird things like "show weather in 2 cities"? Are these valid common uses of the device?

The root issue is the competition itself, seems to be a bizarre way of marketing a mass-produced device OS... done right, it could be a great way to tout the qualities of your devices, but done wrong it has so many downsides.

That is but one of the challenges they use. This one might not be of interest to you, but what if the challenge was "open an IDE and create a 'hello world' application"? Microsoft's TouchDevelop just may win out on that.

For those of you not familiar with TouchDevelop (like me):

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/touchdevelop/

I can build a Hello World app on Android in under 2 seconds. It takes another 2-3 seconds for my phone to compile, install and run the package locally.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aide.ui is really, really slick.

I would love to see a race. I very much doubt WP7 could win but I'll be very impressed if it does. Anybody have the appropriate collection of devices and the time to film a demo? :)

  >I can build a Hello World app on Android in under 2 seconds.

Doesn't it take Eclipse at least 20 times that long to even start up? ;)

Ha, ha. Very funny. But the beauty of this is that AIDE isn't eclipse, and it takes < 1 second to start up!

I've got a Weather app set up to show me weather in 4 locations. One where I live, another where I used to work (hey, this is LA, temp differences of 15-20 degrees within 20 miles can easily happen), another where my brother lives, and lastly in my hometown (for nostalgia and to know about friends/family).

It would take me maybe 5 seconds to load the app from a cold start, but so what? Windows phone doesn't win because a specialized pre-setup could save me 3 seconds. It would win if it could do something my android couldn't do at all...

I agree, and I think Ben and Microsoft is doing it right. Its all in good spirit and they never directly put anyone down.

What happens if I go in with a Windows Phone ( yeah, I do have a Windows Phone and I think its good and all, but am sure an Android phone can smoke a Windows Phone in reasonable tasks.)

When I lose, do I get to say - "My Windows Phone was smoked"? :)

Maybe Microsoft could try a challenge of uploading a review to Yelp from your Windows Phone. The lack of apps and full functionality as compared to their iOS and Android equivalents is crippling.

This point would be valid, save for the fact that there a Yelp app on WindowsPhone.

There is but you can't do anything useful with it like login or submit reviews.

Yelp has a policy that bars reviews written on mobile devices. This is done to protect the quality of the reviews.

You can't submit reviews from an iPhone either. The functionality doesn't exist.

In Android, you can submit reviews written via a browser, just not via the Yelp app. Via the app, you can write and submit "quick tips" (which are often short reviews) and draft regular reviews with a star rating on your mobile device, but then you have to open the browser to submit them.

Alright, you can't login to the Yelp app then.

Are you just making this up? I just did that with my iPhone Yelp app right now.

Go to a yelp entry, "Add" and "Draft a review".

Yelp has a Windows phone app. Even if it didn't, you can do that from a web browser too.

Regardless, the point stands, WP7 receives a lot less app attention - which makes sense since it has 1.7% market share.

For example, the new Angry Birds launched on iOS and Android, and has no plans to port to WP7 due to the need to rewrite it for that platform,

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-22/-angry-birds-space-...

Good on them for making it right. Although at first he just told Katta to go in for a rematch.

@therobpoz is probably right, I don't think Apple would have gone back and given him the laptop. Of course Apple doesn't need to give away their products in the first place...

Apple wouldn't lose.

While I use an Android 2 phone, I must admit an Apple iPhone would be a better choice if all I wanted was a smartphone. What took me to the Android one was the things I couldn't do with the Apple product.

I'm sorry but you need to explain that statement a little more for me. You say the iPhone is superior as a smartphone but you chose Android because it can do things the iPhone doesn't? Isn't it true then, at least in your case, the Android phone is the superior product? Do you use your Android device as something other than a smartphone? Could you specify what that might be?

An iPhone is a better smartphone than my Android-based one is. I can, however, develop software for my phone without a Mac and deploy it to actual hardware without paying Apple for the privilege of deploying my software to my own phone.

Apple does give away their products - they give them to production studios for TV shows and movies.

Why do you think almost every movie and show made over the last few years features a laptop with a glowing Apple on the back whenever a shot calls for someone to be using a computer?

It's been said many times that Apple doesn't pay for product placement. That it's just a consequence of the show's writers and designers using Apple products. I tend to believe that. But I still suppose it's possible that providing free products is considered "not paying."

I'm not sure how true this is.

If you see the credits roll at the end of the show or movie, there is invariably a line that says "Promotional consideration: Apple" [and others].

Offering him a phone (presumably a Windows one) seems to be entirely missing the point.

"Here is your laptop and the phone you proved is not as good as the one you currently own".

Priceless.

What else would they offer? his money back?

They could offer a cash prize, which he could use to pay his telephone bills. I agree that it makes no sense to give him a phone he just "beat".

I guess he could sell it on eBay or something...

Kind of failed just like the rigging of Nokia to choose WP over Android right MS? :)

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