Wow, this thread seems so bizarre to me. Basically a collective sentiment of "I can't believe how stupid they are for having tried this thing that didn't work out."
"Failing" has become such a well-liked buzz word in the last couple years, unless you're a company people don't like, in which case it is awful.
Well, there is failing, and then there is failing. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars to buy Danger and create the Kin, and they are cancelling it only a few weeks after release. This is beyond embarassing for a company with the size and history of Microsoft. The people who managed this project had absolutely no clue what they were doing. Many, many heads should roll over this.
To be fair to MS, a lot of the device's failure is on the carrier side - they're charging grown-up smartphone plan pricing for what amounts of a kid device. This was doomed from this fact alone - regardless of how great or shitty the phone itself turned out.
The real failure here is having gone and built this whole shebang without securing the pricing side first.
With the always-connected social features they want on the phone, there is really no alternative plan pricing.
Their failure was in capturing market, or more precisely, the lack thereof. There was simply no market for a half-smartphone like the kin, that wasn't really good at being a simple "dumbphone", and not even as "smart" as a last generation iphone which costs about the same.
With the iPhone 3GS going for $99, and a handy selection of decent featurephones available for free depending on carrier sales, anyone with half a brain would know there is no market for something like the kin. At least not now of all times.
> With the always-connected social features they want on the phone, there is really no alternative plan pricing.
Always-connected doesn't necessarily mean huge amounts of bandwidth. They could have built this thing as a social media device that was doing simple messaging and heavily restricted / optimized features for photo & video. I think there would be a space in the market for such a thing for teens, but MS clearly badly missed it. And if they have pissed off their carrier partners in the process then it is even worse because they desperately need their support if WP7 is going to be a success.
Yes. This should've been marketed as something that kids could buy when their parents refused to buy them an iPhone. Either the device would have to be free or the connectivity. A lot of social features could've been implemented on top of SMS or something else dirt cheap using UDP packets. Make something that can talk to a free featurephone over Bluetooth, so you don't compete with something free. Instead you make something free even better.
And the MS management should have known this had failure written all over it. Most of the people I know in the office have teenage kids that want an iPhone more than anything in the world, and their parents are not going to buy it for them. Why would any sane business plan include "we're going to market this to teenagers who'll have to beg their parents for the money to buy it"?
What teenage is going to be able to pay $70 a month? Their parents who are living off unemployment? If there are teenagers and parents fitting such bills they are doing so via a reburfished iphone for $50 and then paying the $70. Though AT&T for 200MB and 450minutes now costs $55 a month.
They launched this too early; wait til voice/data prices drop even further to reach this demo. Though to me it's still not an iPhone or an Android and all the cool kids will have one of those.
Hard to know if this is the carrier's fault, or Microsoft's for making a phone that consumes enough bandwidth etc. that carriers need to charge high rates to recoup their costs, without providing enough value to the end customer to justify the rates from his/her perspective.
If Microsoft made something that just did messaging and social tools based on messaging until it hit a WiFi spot, they could've gotten their intended market. Make something that can dial your phone over Bluetooth or dial it Google Voice style by sending a recognition code based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography to a central server. Charge the carrier cost for the SMS messaging used as infrastructure and make money on ads.
Microsoft makes $250 billion/year with 25% net margins. If they were not making some hundred million dollar mistakes, wouldn't THAT be cause for concern?
There is nothing wrong with trying and failing; instead, the problem a lot of us saw with Kin was focus.
From the limited samples we've seen, Windows Phone 7 seemed like a fairly competent response to the iPhone and Android. Whether MS can sell mobile os licenses in an age where Android is available to OEMs for free is an open question, but they seemed to be intensely focused on making it work.
And then Kin was announced seemingly out of nowhere. Suddenly MS had two, nonrelated mobile strategies. That Kin directly competed with the same OEMs that are the customers of the other mobile OS made the move seem even stranger.
This same story played out in the online music store business. Microsoft released the Zune and Zune Store in direct competition with their vendor-agnostic solution. The two platforms were mishandled to the point where the DRM on the mp3 files were incompatible. By splitting the focus on the company, they couldn't articulate a clear strategy and ended up ceding the market to Apple.
An op-ed from a former MS executive described the company as a collection of little kingdoms, constantly battling among each other, to the point where the only impression is one of chaos. Their mobile strategy is turning into the perfect example.
That Kin directly competed with the same OEMs that are the customers of the other mobile OS
Right. Don't compete in the smartphone space with something like Kin. Make something cheap, without a monthly charge, but which shows iAd style ads. Make it something that doesn't make calls, but which can work with a kid's free featurephone to give a lot of the utility of a smartphone with no or negligible monthly charge. Make the money off the ads. Share the ads with the carriers.
I think the consensus is to fail small and fail often.
Actually, scratch that, it should be: prototype often, so to keep failures small and easy to rebound from.
Regardless, you do not want to spend countless hours and dollars bringing a product to market only to realize it was a failure 3 weeks later. That's a rookie "big company with lots of money" mistake that Microsoft should have outgrown decades ago.
To quote Jason Fried on failure: "You might know what won’t work, but you still don’t know what will work. That’s not much of a lesson."
After all their success, Microsoft should know better.
It's a vicious cycle. Next time there's a new Microsoft product people will be more wary of buying in ("Is it worth the risk? What if they scrap it like the Kin?"), leading to fewer sales, making another failure more likely.
I bet there's more to this than just a product failure. Why admit defeat so quickly and publicly? Even if the product itself was doomed to be a failure the timing is really suspicious. Why not just ignore the Kin for the next few months and quietly kill it only when WM7 is on the market? It's almost like they were looking for an excuse to kill the project and a few weeks of bad sales was a good enough reason.
Gossip suggests that the people in charge of the WP7 team were never happy with the Kin project existing at all. They always wanted it killed and absorbed into WP7 - the Kin's poor reception just convinced top management to finally grant them their wish.
I was nowhere near close to these decisions, but I was working on phone related projects when I was at Microsoft (I quit very recently). What you say is basically my understanding of the situation.
A few other rumors/half-truths:
1) Kin Studio, the client software was the one thing reviewers (what customers?) liked about Kin. It was largely developed by the Zune client team.
2) The Kin team was formed from remaining members of the SideKick team acquired with Danger.
3) Dislike of Microsoft tech and Windows Phone politics caused many SideKick engineers to leave post acquisition because they were forced to build Kin on the Windows Phone OS, which was very much like building the plane while flying it. Those who left tended to be the talented ones who could get other jobs.
4) Many designers didn't share the Windows-hate, so the resulting team was very designer heavy.
5) The talented folks left on the Kin team were poached quite greedily by the Windows Phone 7 initiative.
6) Some bigwig was in charge of Kin and Microsoft lets CVPs piss away tons of money to keep them from going to competitors. I've never seen this strategy work out.
They developed a family of phones, created marketing plans, made partnerships with carriers and it had to be the market to tell them it was a stupid idea?
Nobody in the thousands involved would have noticed that?
It's a great question. The same should be asked of many recent Microsoft initiatives. It's okay to roll the dice, but someone somewhere should have noticed.
My friends on the Kin team seem to have been caught by surprise. Those of us who watched for years from the outside: less so.
> My friends on the Kin team seem to have been caught by surprise
And that's the whole point. There must have been some serious reality distortion inside the company for this project to go on for as long as it did. It was obvious, from anyone but the most clueless on the outside, it was doomed. Why smart people inside the company could not realize it will be studied for decades and will spawn many papers and books.
I talked to someone who was at Motorola when the Kin was out for hardware bid. They repeatedly asked what the strategy was, why was a separate O/S needed, and eventually turned it down.
I believe Panasonic eventually got the bid, but pretty much stole Motorola's design according to my friend.
I've worked on a few projects that seemed extremely stupid at the developer level, but were financially successful (despite being stupid).
Microsoft has a lot of weight so maybe they thought they would have some leverage for a certain demographic. Though they would have had to sell a _lot_ of Kin's to break even on their investment (if rumors around Redmond are true).
I imagine this was a case where everything was in planning and development for a long time and they thought maybe they could take a shot in the dark at recouping those costs, knowing full well that it would probably fail. Should have just canned the project and devoted the resources to Windows Phone 7 as soon as that was deemed the future for their mobile division. Textbook lesson in how not to handle sunk costs.
And devoting resources to Win Phone 7 is going to be a big win? How does one know? What if Kin caught on and Win Phone 7 flopped? Some people would be praising the Kin team and others would be making fun of MS for wasting their time with Win Phone 7.
I think all of these mobile efforts by MS are doomed, but I don't see why Kin was a worse idea than WP7.
I think it's pretty obvious that Kin is ignorant of the current landscape but Windows Phone 7 is at least cognizant of it. The chances for success are still slim, but they're at least a little better.
You know what I'd rather have than a Win Phone 7? Something I'd pay money for. A decent mobile office app for my Android. That's the kind of thing MS should be focusing on now. They've missed the boat with the platform, time to pivot and start building the applications.
I'm curious as to what made anyone there think it was a good idea to introduce a new line of phones with a new OS separate from their main phone OS. WP7 seems like it's going to be a hard enough sell already; the smartphone business looks like it's going to be between Apple and everyone else, with everyone else running Android.
I'm guessing that back when the project started it wasn't terribly clear what their main phone OS would even be. Given how uncertain things were, they probably figured letting a couple different teams try a couple different approaches would give them a better chance of stumbling on something that worked.
Man, Microsoft seems desperate these days. It's getting sad, really, like watching someone grasp at straws as they sink into quicksand... albeit the quicksand is made of gold.
I am sorry for all those talented folks who work there that have to endure this kind of mismanagement. Keeping their faith must require almost toxic quantities of corporate-issued Kool-Aid...
I wonder how long it'll take before the current crop of bad management gets shown the door and we get some new blood. With the talent, history and resources of MS, they should be dominating anything with an integrated circuit inside of it.
Instead, like an aging football fan trying to relive glory days as the high school quarterback, they're languishing on old glories and screwing up on most new efforts - badly.
They should start a completely new "startup division", similar to the Xbox business unit, roughly autonomous from the rest of the brokenness in the org, and just fund it to the tune of about a billion or two a year. The mandate? Start new "companies" completely autonomous from Mother MS, and they can be anything from new software, to web apps, to heck, even iPhone apps. That's got to give better ROI than the current brain-dead strategy.
How many ground zero startups could have been incubated for the money sunk on just the Kin?
However that only gets you your first or maybe second version (I'm thinking PC AT for the latter). Microsoft famously blew it when they tried to bring too much of the core engineering in house with the Xbox 360. Sort of like how the IBM PC unit utterly failed once it was totally IBMized (the Microchannel and PS/2).
Plus the "new blood" are going to be (almost by definition) managers that thrived in the current culture. It's not at all clear to me that they're likely to succeed.
And then there's the politics that drive the platform tax; the Xbox started with "150K lines" of Windows NT 4 code (appropriately, NT 4 was the version that brought the GDI inside the kernel...) and the Zune runs a version of Windows CE.
> the current crop of bad management gets shown the door
It may take a while. It's the current crop of bad management that has to show the current crop of bad management the door. I cannot attribute any of their successes to good management practices. I am more inclined to point out to very clever products that fit niches that passed under management's radar (would it be pedantic to write "RADAR"?) and hit the market by sheer luck.
I also doubt the "start new companies" division would be completely free. They would, most probably, be forbidden to use any competing technology.
No question. It seems like there are a lot of very smart, enthusiastic people with great ideas floating around in Microsoft, but every time we see one of those ideas surface (Kin, Courier, etc.) they get squashed. It's almost as though the tallest blades of grass keep getting cut by the lawn mower of upper management.
No. no. You got it backwards. The Kin is the hardware of a smartphone, with the cost of a smartphone and the bandwidth of a smartphone with dumbed down functionality. It's a terrible idea.
And the Courier was pure vaporware. It's like calling Apple's Knowledge Navigator a product.
It really is impossible not to use "corporate" in a sentence with "Microsoft" these days. I get what Steve Jobs means when he likens Apple to a start-up.
I have no illusions about the kind and quantities of Kool-Aid Apple issues its workers. The current iPhone 4 antenna problem is a nice demonstration of how bad news can go ignored not to spoil the presentations you give your managers.
It's absolutely impossible nobody had noticed that problem before the phone being shipped.
I was actually just at a Verizon store and got a chance to see both Kin devices in person. I wasn't expecting to be blown away by any means, but I was amazed at how bad they were.
The physical construction seemed fine, but the interface was so choppy it was hardly usable, and the colors looked really washed out. Noticeably worse than the LG and Samsung dumbphones sitting next to it.
With a browser and reasonably powerful components, it could have been a nice complement to the Zune lines. My guess was that it was just a field test for MS cloud services for mobile users, and for some reason they didn't want to do it with Windows Mobile.
When the left on life support back end data loss occurred we heard a lot about how terribly clueless the management of Project Pink was and how terribly unhappy the assimilated into Pink Danger employees were.
Disaster was expected, predicted, etc., the interesting question as others have noted is why did Microsoft take so long, spend so much money to realize it.
I always thought one of MS's great strengths is that they stick with things, even if early iterations are not successful. Windows and the XBox being two examples. Here they dipped their toes into into a whole new market (phones -- but not smart phones), and just a few months later they drop the whole thing. Not what I would have expected from MS.
Since there was never a third-party developer platform associated with Kin, they can kill it without pissing off developers as much as killing off Windows or the Xbox would.
That is definitely an important argument to make to counterbalance the argument that Microsoft is out of touch with basically everything and keeps failing to see the writing on the wall.
With Kin, I don't see them revolutionizing anything, so "just rolling with it" doesn't justify this mysterious venture to me. Xbox was different, though.
I guess they're still in a position where they can keep failing - or "experimenting" - without suffering too much for it.
This is sad. Microsoft is now a late to market type company. They don't want to invent anymore. They just want to see a market thrive and then jump into it. They invest a lot of money and then can rule all. By last months quote that Apple is now worth more, it seems like Microsoft is losing its edge fast. I wouldn't be surprised in the next 20 years, Microsoft loses on a lot of other areas they try to jump into.
Yet again, Microsoft attempts to target the cheapy market and ends up with lame results, while Apple goes for the high end and continues to create magic. What is that quote about the definition of stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results?
Microsoft does lots of things that no normal company can get away with (Vista, ME, Bob), and still survivies. Part of the problem is that Microsoft has so much cash, that they can do stupid projects like this, that fail, and they have no reason to learn.
This is why there market cap is falling, and Apples is rising. Microsoft does 100s of stupid things that fail, because they can, and nobody inside the company seems to care. Here, have $10 million for your project, if you fail, we will move you somewhere else.
I knew the Kin was doomed when the $70/month plans were announced. All that's surprising is how quickly they pulled the plug.
Today's smartphone market reminds me of the airline industry prior to deregulation. Since all phones are sold for roughly the same price (on contract) in the US - and you don't get a discount for avoiding a contract - there's really no price competition between handsets. The Kin would have had a shot if it was a choice between a $200 Kin and a $700 iPhone or Android, but at the moment superior quality is the only differentiator between smartphones.
A quick check with Google indicates she still had her (or a) job as of spring this year.
Many managers' core competency is shifting or escaping blame; in this case Microsoft was palpably panicked over the prospect that the disaster would reflect on Azure and their general cloud competency and tried to cast blame on anyone other than themselves and all the non-MS technology Danger was using. Firing her would have put the lie to that.
What do you guys think this means for the company? Would firing Steve Ballmer do anything for their feudal management structure?
This is a company with billions in cash, smart employees and profitable projects. It's sad that they can't get together and be seen as anything but the gang that sells software to my dad.
To me, this isn't really RIP... it's just, die, die, go away please, but learn from the mistake. That's my biggest fear; a certain, big $x amount was spent on this, and after folding it into the wash of profits, the important take-aways could very easily be missed.
If Microsoft made a portable device with Xbox live capacity, hmm, there's a thought - I'd actually consider researching into maybe consider buying it. I mean Xbox Live arcade got some good things right, only if they applied what they learned there to Win 7 mobile.
The rationale for the Kin would have been compelling up until the end of 2006. But that was an eon ago.
I wonder when shareholders will start to demand that MS stop throwing huge amounts of money away on foolish endeavors just increase the stock dividend.
The umpteenth MS product launch killed off within 3 years.
Aside from the particular products, this behavior over the past several years has caused MS to lose all credibility with me. I wouldn't trust them with any critical or even moderately important aspect of my life -- business or personal -- outside of their well established, cash cow products.
I have no interest in having my own investments (in time, not just -- or, rather, more so -- than money) subject/captive to this behavior.
"Failing" has become such a well-liked buzz word in the last couple years, unless you're a company people don't like, in which case it is awful.