5 ms·

How Microsoft killed the Kin

23 points by dot 16y ago

ajg1977 16y ago
"Steven Sinofsky -- president of the Windows and Windows Live groups -- is making a play for the entire mobile division as well in an attempt to bring a unified, Windows-centric product line to market" Because that's why Windows Mobile has been shedding market share - it's not been "Windows centric" enough. I wonder how many painful years it will take before companies figure out that people don't want a Windows-family, or Apple-family, or Google-family set of devices or services. Personally, I just want to be able to pick the devices, websites and services I want and have them operate reasonably well together. That is why Android is so appealing to me. Or it would be if only they had decent media playing/syncing, which is the one thing the "device families" actually seem to do well :/
- awa 16y ago
  It would be interesting to see if Sinofsky does pick up Windows mobile, he has been attributed in large part with success of Office 2007 and was pulled to do Windows 7 after the Vista fiasco, so he has 2 good back to back performances. Many believe he is the current natural successor to Ballmer but don't quote me on that.
gojomo 16y ago
It seems that after doing some initial work on these phones based around Danger's proprietary Sidekick OS, Andy Lees -- the SVP of Microsoft's mobile division -- instructed everyone to go back to the drawing board and rebuild the OS based on Windows CE. It appears the company didn't want a project that wasn't directly connected to its Windows kernel. This move allegedly set the release of the devices back 18 months, during which time Redmond's carrier partner became increasingly frustrated with the delays. Apparently when it came time to actually bring the Kins to market, Big Red had soured on the deal altogether and was no longer planning to offer the bargain-basement pricing deals it first had tendered. The strategy tax kills again!
- hga 16y ago
  It's generally call the platform tax I thought. BTW, the original Sidekick OS is based on NetBSD.
sliverstorm 16y ago
I was pretty sure the death of the Kin was due to the horrid advertisements they aired.
jsz0 16y ago
This move allegedly set the release of the devices back 18 months This sure says a lot about the crazy pace of the SmartPhone market. I picked up my iPhone 2G the other day and had the sense of nostalgia typically reserved for things like my Apple 2, NES, Atari ST, etc. 18 months might as well be a decade with the current pace of innovation.
- danudey 16y ago
  To put it into a specific timeframe, 18 months ago was approximately 6 months after the iPhone 3G's launch (and 6 months before the 3GS). In fact, that puts it right around Christmas 2008. Wow. They could have launched that Christmas. That's around when the first Blackberry Storm came out too. It feels like forever and a day ago. They could have been on their second generation by now. Instead, they bungled it. I wonder how much the project cost them.
  - InclinedPlane 16y ago
    It's not just about the fact that this particular project cost them a significant delay, it's the fact that they are operating on time schedules which are wholly inconsistent with the pace of the market at the moment. Apple, Google, RIM, and maybe even soon HP (via their PalmPre acquisitions) are all well inside WinMo's OODA loop. Not just inside it a little bit, but running laps. You can't survive in this market with an 18 month release cycle, let alone a release cycle so long that 18 months is just a fraction of it. Even if MS manages by herculean effort to come out with a high-quality, highly innovative winmo 7 release they'll still be dead in the water due to the ability of every other competitor to iterate N times over between then and the next winmo release sometime in 2015. Step 1 in the winmo division should be making every effort toward a much, much shorter ship cycle otherwise they have no chance.
- hga 16y ago
  On other directly related factor reported at the time of the Danger/Sidekick back end data loss was that when Microsoft bought Danger, they, or by the time the decision above was made, ignored Danger's contract requirements with T-Mobile for the Sidekick. This wasn't one of Microsoft's normal "heads I win, tails you lose" (note at least for Microsoft the first option doesn't mean you'll necessarily lose). So Microsoft was forced to put much/most/nearly all? of the Danger development team to work on one last version of the NetBSD based Sidekick.
rodh257 16y ago
18 months ago the kin would have been more well received. Particularly at a lower price point.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  A dumbphone? Not even 18 months ago. They would have to launch this in 2005 for it to have a chance.
  - potatolicious 16y ago
    A dumbphone with a few select (and highly refined) features from the smartphone, but with dumbphone pricing (plans and hardware) could have done well then. Hell, it can still do well now. Imagine a facebooking, tweeting feature phone that costs you $20 a month to operate. It would be a huge hit.
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      The Kin has the hardware of a smartphone and costs the same to manufacture. Still, it has dumbed down functionality. It would have to be sold at a huge subsidy and it's unclear how much of the $20/month would actually be profit. Anyway, there is a hole in the market for aggressive bandwidth management on smartphones.
hop 16y ago
Still doesn't explain why they would bring a shitty product to market and spend millions promoting it. Truly think Ballmer has no shame and doesn't get embarrassed. Its npt like the phones didnt come across his desk. MicroSoft needs a general for a CEO that can bring everything together, know what a great product is, focuses R&D, and ships products people love.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  > know what a great product is, Microsoft has long lost this ability. Too much Kool-Aid, IMHO. They really believe they are a cool company.
- InclinedPlane 16y ago
  Why? Win Phone OS 7 (or whatever the fuck they're calling it these days) is further out than most people appreciate. Meanwhile, winmo smartphones have fallen off the map amidst the fast pace of iPhone and Android development, winmo is approaching ipaq and palm levels of market irrelevancy and it's only going to get worse. MS just doesn't have the development pace in the winmo division to keep up with Google and Apple pumping out new hardware / software every few months. Kin was a stopgap measure to try to throw something, anything, at the problem. It was dumb, but dumb moves are born out of desperation.
pavs 16y ago
I want to think of something positive about MSFT but I can't find anything. Can anyone remember the last time MSFT innovated something (not followed an existing market/paradigm) and led the market by sheer quality of the innovation (not because of monopoly)? The only product that I can think of is Xbox360.
- pclark 16y ago
  MSFT has pretty much always been a second mover. When you're as large as Microsoft you need to confirm the markets you enter are $2BN+ and a good way to do that is wait for someone to prove the market first. Also Bing is a very innovative search product.
- daeken 16y ago
  I don't know about the numbers on it, but as far as I'm aware, .NET is quite successful. While the original release was fairly poor and highly derivative of the Java world, they've done an incredible job from .NET 2 and up. With each release, they've made the framework more useful, they've improved their languages (I'm not a fan, but C# has come a long way), and MSR has been doing awesome work on the research side of things. There are a lot of negative things you can say about .NET, but I don't think a lack of innovation is one of them.
- ido 16y ago
  XBox Live (which was available way before the 360) & its marketplace were quite innovative (although not the first of their kind, I think they were both the first really successful implementations).
- WalterGR 16y ago
  Can anyone remember the last time MSFT innovated something (not followed an existing market/paradigm) and led the market by sheer quality of the innovation (not because of monopoly)? I can't remember the last time any tech company created a market/paradigm and then proceeded to lead it [1]. Can you think of any companies? [1] Presumably you meant for some particular measure of time.
  - 16y ago
thirdsun 16y ago
While those devices could have been appealing to teenagers - at least in combination with a cheap data plan - i really don't understand why microsoft wanted to go into that niche market with a stripped down OS that shares some interface similarities with its big brother windoes mobile 7. Add those experimental devices and the average, non-geeky customer, which this is clearly aimed at, is totally confused. We, of course, know that this isn't WM 7, but the average Joe who read 4 lines of text about WM 7 in some magazine could easily assume that this is microsofts next big thing, which of course it isn't. It just feels so unnecessary, dead before it launched.
- danh 16y ago
  > the average, non-geeky customer is totally confused I must be average and non-geeky then. I'm totally confused by Microsofts mobile strategy.
Aaronontheweb 16y ago
I should note that as of this evening Microsoft was still running Kin ads on Hulu.
bitwize 16y ago
Good riddance. The Kin was the Hip-e of smartphones.
JunkDNA 16y ago
This is what is so sad about MS. At some point they forgot they are a software company, and started thinking they were a Windows company. They are imposing a requirement on themselves that competitors don't have.

23 points by dot 16y ago

ajg1977 16y ago

"Steven Sinofsky -- president of the Windows and Windows Live groups -- is making a play for the entire mobile division as well in an attempt to bring a unified, Windows-centric product line to market" Because that's why Windows Mobile has been shedding market share - it's not been "Windows centric" enough. I wonder how many painful years it will take before companies figure out that people don't want a Windows-family, or Apple-family, or Google-family set of devices or services. Personally, I just want to be able to pick the devices, websites and services I want and have them operate reasonably well together. That is why Android is so appealing to me. Or it would be if only they had decent media playing/syncing, which is the one thing the "device families" actually seem to do well :/

awa 16y ago
It would be interesting to see if Sinofsky does pick up Windows mobile, he has been attributed in large part with success of Office 2007 and was pulled to do Windows 7 after the Vista fiasco, so he has 2 good back to back performances. Many believe he is the current natural successor to Ballmer but don't quote me on that.

gojomo 16y ago

It seems that after doing some initial work on these phones based around Danger's proprietary Sidekick OS, Andy Lees -- the SVP of Microsoft's mobile division -- instructed everyone to go back to the drawing board and rebuild the OS based on Windows CE. It appears the company didn't want a project that wasn't directly connected to its Windows kernel. This move allegedly set the release of the devices back 18 months, during which time Redmond's carrier partner became increasingly frustrated with the delays. Apparently when it came time to actually bring the Kins to market, Big Red had soured on the deal altogether and was no longer planning to offer the bargain-basement pricing deals it first had tendered. The strategy tax kills again!

hga 16y ago
It's generally call the platform tax I thought. BTW, the original Sidekick OS is based on NetBSD.

sliverstorm 16y ago

I was pretty sure the death of the Kin was due to the horrid advertisements they aired.

jsz0 16y ago

This move allegedly set the release of the devices back 18 months This sure says a lot about the crazy pace of the SmartPhone market. I picked up my iPhone 2G the other day and had the sense of nostalgia typically reserved for things like my Apple 2, NES, Atari ST, etc. 18 months might as well be a decade with the current pace of innovation.

danudey 16y ago
To put it into a specific timeframe, 18 months ago was approximately 6 months after the iPhone 3G's launch (and 6 months before the 3GS). In fact, that puts it right around Christmas 2008. Wow. They could have launched that Christmas. That's around when the first Blackberry Storm came out too. It feels like forever and a day ago. They could have been on their second generation by now. Instead, they bungled it. I wonder how much the project cost them.
- InclinedPlane 16y ago
  It's not just about the fact that this particular project cost them a significant delay, it's the fact that they are operating on time schedules which are wholly inconsistent with the pace of the market at the moment. Apple, Google, RIM, and maybe even soon HP (via their PalmPre acquisitions) are all well inside WinMo's OODA loop. Not just inside it a little bit, but running laps. You can't survive in this market with an 18 month release cycle, let alone a release cycle so long that 18 months is just a fraction of it. Even if MS manages by herculean effort to come out with a high-quality, highly innovative winmo 7 release they'll still be dead in the water due to the ability of every other competitor to iterate N times over between then and the next winmo release sometime in 2015. Step 1 in the winmo division should be making every effort toward a much, much shorter ship cycle otherwise they have no chance.
hga 16y ago
On other directly related factor reported at the time of the Danger/Sidekick back end data loss was that when Microsoft bought Danger, they, or by the time the decision above was made, ignored Danger's contract requirements with T-Mobile for the Sidekick. This wasn't one of Microsoft's normal "heads I win, tails you lose" (note at least for Microsoft the first option doesn't mean you'll necessarily lose). So Microsoft was forced to put much/most/nearly all? of the Danger development team to work on one last version of the NetBSD based Sidekick.

rodh257 16y ago

18 months ago the kin would have been more well received. Particularly at a lower price point.

rbanffy 16y ago
A dumbphone? Not even 18 months ago. They would have to launch this in 2005 for it to have a chance.
- potatolicious 16y ago
  A dumbphone with a few select (and highly refined) features from the smartphone, but with dumbphone pricing (plans and hardware) could have done well then. Hell, it can still do well now. Imagine a facebooking, tweeting feature phone that costs you $20 a month to operate. It would be a huge hit.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    The Kin has the hardware of a smartphone and costs the same to manufacture. Still, it has dumbed down functionality. It would have to be sold at a huge subsidy and it's unclear how much of the $20/month would actually be profit. Anyway, there is a hole in the market for aggressive bandwidth management on smartphones.

hop 16y ago

Still doesn't explain why they would bring a shitty product to market and spend millions promoting it. Truly think Ballmer has no shame and doesn't get embarrassed. Its npt like the phones didnt come across his desk. MicroSoft needs a general for a CEO that can bring everything together, know what a great product is, focuses R&D, and ships products people love.

rbanffy 16y ago
> know what a great product is, Microsoft has long lost this ability. Too much Kool-Aid, IMHO. They really believe they are a cool company.
InclinedPlane 16y ago
Why? Win Phone OS 7 (or whatever the fuck they're calling it these days) is further out than most people appreciate. Meanwhile, winmo smartphones have fallen off the map amidst the fast pace of iPhone and Android development, winmo is approaching ipaq and palm levels of market irrelevancy and it's only going to get worse. MS just doesn't have the development pace in the winmo division to keep up with Google and Apple pumping out new hardware / software every few months. Kin was a stopgap measure to try to throw something, anything, at the problem. It was dumb, but dumb moves are born out of desperation.

pavs 16y ago

I want to think of something positive about MSFT but I can't find anything. Can anyone remember the last time MSFT innovated something (not followed an existing market/paradigm) and led the market by sheer quality of the innovation (not because of monopoly)? The only product that I can think of is Xbox360.

pclark 16y ago
MSFT has pretty much always been a second mover. When you're as large as Microsoft you need to confirm the markets you enter are $2BN+ and a good way to do that is wait for someone to prove the market first. Also Bing is a very innovative search product.
daeken 16y ago
I don't know about the numbers on it, but as far as I'm aware, .NET is quite successful. While the original release was fairly poor and highly derivative of the Java world, they've done an incredible job from .NET 2 and up. With each release, they've made the framework more useful, they've improved their languages (I'm not a fan, but C# has come a long way), and MSR has been doing awesome work on the research side of things. There are a lot of negative things you can say about .NET, but I don't think a lack of innovation is one of them.
ido 16y ago
XBox Live (which was available way before the 360) & its marketplace were quite innovative (although not the first of their kind, I think they were both the first really successful implementations).
WalterGR 16y ago
Can anyone remember the last time MSFT innovated something (not followed an existing market/paradigm) and led the market by sheer quality of the innovation (not because of monopoly)? I can't remember the last time any tech company created a market/paradigm and then proceeded to lead it [1]. Can you think of any companies? [1] Presumably you meant for some particular measure of time.
- 16y ago

thirdsun 16y ago

While those devices could have been appealing to teenagers - at least in combination with a cheap data plan - i really don't understand why microsoft wanted to go into that niche market with a stripped down OS that shares some interface similarities with its big brother windoes mobile 7. Add those experimental devices and the average, non-geeky customer, which this is clearly aimed at, is totally confused. We, of course, know that this isn't WM 7, but the average Joe who read 4 lines of text about WM 7 in some magazine could easily assume that this is microsofts next big thing, which of course it isn't. It just feels so unnecessary, dead before it launched.

danh 16y ago
> the average, non-geeky customer is totally confused I must be average and non-geeky then. I'm totally confused by Microsofts mobile strategy.

Aaronontheweb 16y ago

I should note that as of this evening Microsoft was still running Kin ads on Hulu.

bitwize 16y ago

Good riddance. The Kin was the Hip-e of smartphones.

JunkDNA 16y ago

This is what is so sad about MS. At some point they forgot they are a software company, and started thinking they were a Windows company. They are imposing a requirement on themselves that competitors don't have.