

RIP Microsoft Kin - rbanffy
http://mashable.com/2010/06/30/rip-microsoft-kin/

======
evansolomon
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.

~~~
nickelplate
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.

~~~
potatolicious
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.

~~~
makeramen
I disagree completely.

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.

~~~
zmmmmm
> 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.

------
jsz0
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.

~~~
contextfree
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.

~~~
snprbob86
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.

~~~
hga
The bigwig CVP was Roz Ho: <http://www.google.com/search?q=Roz+Ho>

------
rbanffy
I am really curious.

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?

~~~
davepeck
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.

~~~
rbanffy
> 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.

~~~
joezydeco
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.

------
marknutter
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.

~~~
rbanffy
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...

~~~
elblanco
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?

~~~
hga
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.

------
andrewcaito
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.

~~~
hga
See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_%28company%29> for a bit more info.

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.

------
whyenot
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.

~~~
contextfree
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.

~~~
Andys
You've just hit on one of the probable reasons for the failure of Kin :-)

------
spoiledtechie
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.

------
rbranson
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?

~~~
megablast
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.

------
gamble
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.

------
jf
For what it's worth, this announcement comes at the end of Microsoft's fiscal
year.

It's interesting to note that one of the main points of the announcement is
that the Kin team will be merged with the Windows Phone 7 team.

This is likely a move that has been planned for a while, but only announced
today, since the official re-organization will go into effect tomorrow.

------
nickelplate
I wonder if Roz Ho will resign or go into early retirement...

~~~
famfam
You mean she wasn't shitcanned after the whole san upgrade failure thing?

~~~
hga
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.

------
callmeed
Wow, that was fast. Maybe I should buy a Kin as a collectors item.

~~~
narrator
You can put it right next to your Apple Pippin.

------
aspiringsensei
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.

------
sabj
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.

------
samratjp
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.

------
thought_alarm
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.

------
treblig
Funny how we preach "failing fast" in our startups, but we jump all over
Microsoft for internalizing this concept.

Good for them for consolidating, but it honestly amazes me that the project
even got this far.

------
hernan7
". We will continue to work with Verizon in the U.S. to sell current KIN
phones.”

They must indeed have some units left to sell still -- just today I heard an
ad for the Kin on the radio.

------
pasbesoin
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.

