8 ms·
Actually KIN Sold More Than 503 Devices
- st3fan 16y agoFunny how a number can be 20x higher but still very low ...
- GrandMasterBirt 16y agoDamn, ok so basically we just silenced the 503 rumor and replaced it with 8800 copies. That is an even bigger flop because now its not a rumor. Unless they sold over 100,000 items they are fucked.
- glhaynes 16y agoThey've cancelled the product, so they're fucked regardless.
- byoung2 16y agoKIN registers its Facebook app on Facebook, where anybody can actually see the total number of monthly active users of the application. The KIN Facebook app is only available on KIN devices and can only be used by people who have KIN devices. So how many people are actually using KIN devices that are connected to Facebook? 8,810 as of right now. There are about 2000 Verizon stores (http://www.vzwcareers.com/Why/Test.aspx?lid=//careers//why+verizon+wireless http://www.vzwcareers.com/Why/Test.aspx?lid=//careers//why+v...), and I bet each one had an activated KIN on display. So that brings the number down to 6810. Subtract from that people who returned their phones within the 30 day window (I don't think the return deactivates the Facebook app). But even if the real number were 8800, or even 88,000, that's nowhere near the 1 million+ Apple did on the first day for iPhone 4, or even the 500,000 estimated HTC EVOs sold.
- kenjackson 16y agoWait, so you're saying the Kin didn't sell as well as the iPhone or EVO? Why wasn't that reported anywhere?
- byoung2 16y agoI mentioned the iPhone and EVO as the "phones to beat" if you want to compete in the market for phones teenagers want. If Microsoft couldn't even get in the same ballpark (or even league) as these phones, pulling the KIN made sense.
- kenjackson 16y agoActually I disagree. I think they should have went after the EnV market, and I thought they were. They ended up doing the worst thing possible... a nice featurephone, with high-end smartphone pricing. It was obvious that it would fail, and from reading the Engadget story, it appears that even MS knew it would fail. I would be interested in knowing how much of Robbie Bach's and J. Allard's career rested on this product. Because, consider this, if reports are true, and MS knew this was a failure, why was Robbie Bach, the President of E&D presenting this phone at the Kin special event? They should have had a second tier GM doing the briefing. But I think at that point they already knew Robbie was toast, so might as well throw him out to the wolves. In anycase, I was just giving you a hard time about bringing up sales numbers comparing arguably the greatest flop in MS history vs arguably the greatest launch of any consumer electronics product in history. But clearly, I'm the only one who finds humor in that. :-)
- byoung2 16y agoarguably the greatest flop in MS history Right up there with Microsoft Bob (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob)! They ended up doing the worst thing possible... a nice featurephone, with high-end smartphone pricing I agree...maybe this strategy would have worked in 2008. In fact, that was the year Sprint released the Instinct, a nice featurephone with smartphone pricing. They even started requiring the everything plans with that phone. If we could rewrite history and swap out the Instinct for the KIN in 2008 (right after Microsoft acquired Danger), Microsoft would have looked a lot more forward-thinking, and they would be in great shape to launch Windows Phone 7 as a successor to KIN. Alas, that didn't happen...
- jonknee 16y ago> There are about 2000 Verizon stores Not to mention other outlets like BestBuy that sell Verizon products.
- miin 16y ago503 over the weekend is what he said - not 503 in total. MS probably needed to sell that many every hour to pay for that marketing campaign alone.
- jaaron 16y agoExactly. I don't understand why so many people can't actually read and understand a simple article.
- nooneelse 16y agoThat is a misinterpretation of the sentence on your part... "a well-placed little birdie told me over the weekend that they sold a grand total of 503 Kins before they pulled the plug". The "over the weekend" phrase is marking when he was told, not when the sales took place. This interpretation is further supported by the "that" which immediately follows it, so as to separate the part of the sentence about the act of telling from the part of the sentence about that which was told. And further supported still by the use of the term "grand total" in the phrasing "grand total of #X before time_Y". That pedantic enough to prove the point? Accounting for registrations by unsold units is a more likely source for the difference in numbers.
- ulvund 16y ago* how many of those 8800 copies were sold * how many were given away for free * what was the time of the '503 sales'-report :)
- sailormoon 16y agoThe daring fireball article did say "sold". Other comments here have indicated that Verizon were giving the units away just to get rid of them. Maybe they didn't pay MS for those. Who knows what was in their contract. Maybe MS decided to scrap the deal 2 months ago and told Verizon to dump its stock. Until Microsoft releases its Official Kin Sales Report, it's all just speculation. I am inclined to believe Gruber. If he stakes his reputation (very important to his massively inflated ego) on a specific number, it means he's satisfied it's correct, and that's a pretty strong vote in my book. Could be wrong of course but in the absence of hard evidence I go by gut & human nature...
- rauljara 16y agoI have no problem believing Gruber believes it. And I have no problem believing whoever told Gruber believes it. And no offense to your gut... but there are just too many ways for numbers like these to be messed up. Maybe it was 503 on opening day. Maybe it was 503 for the state of California. Maybe someone at MS who wanted to politically annihilate the kin team and leaked some false numbers to someone honest who took them at face value. But 503 never seemed remotely plausible to my gut. As others have said, it seems like MS employees would have bought more than that. 8,000 kins on facebook - ~2,000 display models still seems like an embarrassingly small number, but at least it exists in the realms of plausibility.
- megablast 16y agoThis can easily be solved with MS coming out with there own number. Or verizon. And I am pretty sure if someone told me that they had sold 503 phones, I would have asked some more questions. "They only sold 503 phones on the weekend" "What, for the enture country" "Oh no, just at this one store in Arizona, and they were only open for 1 hour, and they ran out of stock". "Oh, not so bad then"
- macrael 16y agoI wouldn't say Gruber "stake[d] his reputation" on the number. Here is what he said: > I can’t vouch for the following, but a well-placed little birdie told me over the weekend that they sold a grand total of 503 Kins before they pulled the plug. 503. That phrasing does not put absolute confidence in the number. It is very possible he was misinformed. But 8000 (as pointed out, a probably over inflated number) is still pathetic.
- commieneko 16y agoI've no idea how many units Microsoft actually sold, but just wanted to point out the active accounts does not equal units sold. There are probably several thousand units activated for development, testing, marketing, and point of sales demonstration.
- eli 16y agoAnd I'm sure there are also people who bought the phone and never set up Facebook
- roadnottaken 16y agoThe DF article said they sold 503 devices "before they pulled the plug." I'm sure MS didn't go around getting all the un-sold devices back from vendors -- they continued selling their stock. It's just that 503 devices were sold when MS decided to kill the program.
- mechanical_fish 16y agoYes. Unless this is going to be one of those "Atari 2600 E.T. cartridge" situations -- where you find a reason to dig a giant hole in the desert and bury all your warehoused stock -- every Kin that was manufactured is going to end up being turned on somewhere, somehow, at some price. And surely they manufactured far more than a few thousand.
- TallGuyShort 16y agoI've seen Microsoft brag about how popular Silverlight is because of the number of downloads. I myself have downloaded the installer at least 10 times on various machines trying to get some demos working, and I've always had problems during installation. I wonder how many "users" Microsoft thinks I am, since I currently don't have a single working installation. edit: In case it isn't clear, my point is that there's a lot of ways that number can be inaccurate and bloated. How many prototypes and test devices are there? How many demos?
- markkanof 16y agoA valid point about how they count Silverlight users, but this case is different because you won't have a single user "downloading" multiple instances of the phone hardware.
- rbanffy 16y agoAll my Linux computers count as happy Windows users because all of them were sold with Windows installed. They obviously tweak their numbers to save face. They must do it at all levels and the fact this ill-conceived aberration actually made into production and hit the market must have involved some pretty heavy sugarcoating of actual numbers. It's a charlie-foxtrot, no matter how you look at it.
- adolph 16y ago503, 8,810, this is all proof of Prince's point: "all these computers and digital gadgets . . . just fill your head with numbers and that can't be good for you." Whatever is going to happen to KIN's real person, Rosa? They are already disappearing her from Hulu: http://www.hulu.com/watch/148231/rosas-journey-intro http://www.hulu.com/watch/148231/rosas-journey-intro
- ShabbyDoo 16y agoThe actual number of units sold isn't nearly as important as how quickly Microsoft decided to cancel the product. Imagine that you are a really rich guy who bought up 100% of Microsoft shares six months ago with the goal of maximizing NPV over a long time horizon. You have a carrier agreement to launch a Microsoft branded phone, but you're pretty sure that the phone you've developed sucks. You have to worry about your relationship with your carrier and customer perception. Two choices are obvious. You can negotiate with the carrier to cancel the agreement. Some sort of exclusive on Windows 7 Phone Edition might sweeten the deal. Consumers will never really know that you'd promised a phone. Or, you can invest in remediation steps to make the phone not suck so badly to save your brand's reputation (or what's left of it). What Microsoft did makes no sense. Now, I can't trust that Microsoft will support their products for longer than it takes them to get their first screen scratches. And, how could a carrier consider entering into future agreements with Microsoft when this one led to so much public embarrassment? That such a decision was made suggests significant internal managerial distress (to be euphemistic).
- thought_alarm 16y agoKin sales amount to a rounding error, any way you want to look at it.
- raganwald 16y ago8,810 is far, far more than 503. Many folks are saying that it is still far too low a number for the difference to matter. Bollocks! As long as we're trading rumours, an anonymous Microsoftie complained that the entire cost for Kin (including the Danger acquisition, R&D, marketing, and so forth) was a billion dollars. $1,000,000,000 divided by 503 units is $1,988,071.57 per unit. Call it two million dollars. $1,000,000,000 divided by 8,810 units is a mere $113,507.38. Call it a hundred grand. From where I'm standing, losing two million dollars per unit is a lot more than losing a hundred grand per unit. Let's give Microsoft some credit for keeping losses at such a manageable level. Who knows, when the final numbers come out they might have managed to lose even less, maybe as little as fifty grand per unit!
- nose 16y ago8,810 is the number of monthly active users, so I would venture to guess that they've sold much more.
- raganwald 16y agoPossibly. And possibly not. As others have pointed out, some of those 8,810 may be demo units in retail stores, units given to employees, and other freebies. Also, it may be that 503 was the number of units sold when the decision was taken to kill Kin. Who knows how many were sold since that moment? The number of units sold may be higher or lower. It's all guesswork at this point.
- zweben 16y agoHow is losses per unit sold relevant to anything? Overall profits or losses are what matter. I don't know how much Microsoft made off each one, so I'll be generous and guess $400 average revenue after subsidy payments. 1,000,000,000 - ($400 x 503) = $999,798,800 lost 1,000,000,000 - ($400 x 8810) = $996,476,000 lost The difference is negligible.
- panacea 16y agoI'm pretty sure he was joking.
- chaostheory 16y agoI wonder how many MS employees/friends/family the 8800 registrations account for?
- gcb 16y ago500 users 8300 test emulators with test accounts
- alanh 16y agoComment by Jeff Enderwick, on page: "8810 is just a different flavor of zero."
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- JabavuAdams 16y agoSomeone pointed out in a previous thread that HTTP status code 503 is "service unavailable". I think the 503 number is just a prank, and apparently a very successful one.
- binaryfinery 16y ago"The KIN Facebook app is only available on KIN devices and can only be used by people who have KIN devices." Or by the people who wrote it. Microsoft.