Posted on July 1st, 2010 by Jon Honeyball

The real reason Microsoft killed the Kin

The news that Microsoft Kin, the recently released Yoof Fone, has been cancelled should come as a surprise. Microsoft simply doesn’t make decisions this quickly, which clearly indicates the overwhelming badness of the decision to launch the damn thing in the first place.

It was classic big business screw-up. Buy an outside company (in this case, Danger), and attempt to bring something new to market which was a long way from the core compentency of the parent company. Keep the group separate from the rest of the business, and hope this allows them to nuture something wonderful.

Unfortunately, this almost always leads to screw-ups unless the management oversight is extremely tough. Microsoft has made this work in the past — look at the early days of Windows NT for proof positive that the acquisition and force-feeding route to market works well. But be in no doubt that management eyes were focussed daily on that project.

With Danger, it’s clear that this was a division out of control. Anyone who manages to delete the entire user data base, and then take weeks to do a recovery, shows it has already gone over the cliff. To then tell them to change platforms to a Windows Phone-based one merely added 18 months to the death march.

And then, the project takes on its own painful inevitability, just like watching a train crash in slow motion. The third-party telco has been signed up, the marketing engine is gearing up for launch, the advertising budgets have been allocated. So the product crashes into the marketplace, only to be met with a huge collective “meh” from its intended audience, all of whom wanted an Apple iPhone 4 instead thanks.

So why the rapid cancellation? Well, it was done hours before the end of the Microsoft financial year. Clearly, this is an attempt by Andy Lees, the VP in charge of mobile, to wrap up all the pain and debt into the current financial year in order to give Windows 7 Mobile the best possible spreadsheet position in the next financial year. He really doesn’t want the difficult launch of WinMob7 to be tainted even further by Kin’s bad numbers, so Kin had to go. And yes, that is the very definition of desperation.

Tags: Kin, Microsoft, smartphones

Posted in: Hardware

Permalink

Follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

9 Responses to “ The real reason Microsoft killed the Kin ”

Darcy Dugan Says:
July 1st, 2010 at 11:56 am
But the scenario is repeating itself again, this time with Windows Phone 7.

Once again, Microsoft’s intended customers will be more interested in buying an Apple iPhone or Google Android phone.

Windows Phone 7, when it is released, will be technologically way behind the competition, yet cost just as much.. Who would want it? Nobody.

Windows Phone 7 only has one way to go, and that is to fail.
Danny Thomas Says:
July 1st, 2010 at 12:24 pm
Don’t want to sound like a fanboy, but MS need to think carefully about the decision Steve Jobs made with OSX. The Windows Code Base, whether server (least bad), desktop or phone, there is too much old code and backwards compatibility to maintain which means that the software is expensive and time consuming to produce and behind the user expectation when it is released. Virtualisation (similar to Parallels coherence mode) could allow MS to re-write from the ground up and support legacy virtually.

They need to cut away from 20 year old code!
Peter Says:
July 1st, 2010 at 12:51 pm
Agree with Danny that MS needs to dump all the legacy sh1t! But that need not affect Win Phone 7 too much.

The demos of Windows Phone look good, the hardware looks at worst “competent” and may, with a bit of luck be brilliant.
Handset manufacturers need to go for superfast processors and high pixel displays. MS nedss to make it VERY slick.

iPhone 4 is a very nice piece of kit desdpite users doint the beta testing as usual… But iphone 4 is NOT cutting edge. The CPU is outdated and relatively slow, and the rest of the silicon highly conservative.
milliganp Says:
July 1st, 2010 at 1:40 pm
@Peter, given that Microsoft is an OS vendor and not a hardware manufacturer they have no immediate way of being higher performance than Apple other than writing better code. All of the top end phones in production right now are based on similar hardware so it’s difficult to see where a killer plus for Win Phone 7 will emerge.
Ian Says:
July 1st, 2010 at 2:06 pm
@Danny amd Peter – it’s the full legacy support that keeps me happy with Windows – and makes it possible to run much older apps on Win7 to my liking withouth needing to virtualise or dual-boot. If Microsoft were to drop their support by cutting the backwards compatability lines of code, I’d certainly have looked at alternative OS options in more detail than I have done to date – and dual booting would be a requirement.

And Virtualisation isn’t, currently, a good argument – at least not until graphics drivers that allow higher end graphics cards to be used. I may be coming from a gaming perspective, but because the likes of VirtualBox and VMWare don’t support anything but the most basic of GPU drivers, gaming on a virtual machine simply isn’t possible – dual booting is the only viable workaround, and it’s exactly good for flipping between OSes

It’s a similar reason I’ve avoided games consoles – backwards compatability is generally non-existent or dropped very quickly – the only option is to hold onto the legacy hardware – I like that it isn’t currently necessary with a PC.

@milliganp – The Office integration may well be that – stock Android builds AFAIK don’t have that, and the app I’ve got on my SE X10 isn’t that practical.
Alan Bourke Says:
July 1st, 2010 at 10:10 pm
Legacy support in Windows is one reason you still don’t see Linux on the corporate desktop. All these ERP and payroll packages that you need to actually run a business are laced with legacy stuff. Word processing et al are neither here or there.
AndyB Says:
July 4th, 2010 at 4:19 pm
@Peter, dropping the legacy is exactly what they’re done with WinMo7 – hence the .net only code, and the rewrite away from 6. However, given the resource requirements that MS has taken for granted means you may need a superfast processor, lots of RAM and large pixel displays… and battery life measured in minutes rather than hours.

Windows is not the kind of platform for mobile, Microsoft is not the kind of company that can make it work either.

@Ian, Exchange integration is better on Android than WinMo7. Go figure MS’s relevance on mobile platforms.
Dan./ Says:
July 7th, 2010 at 1:27 pm
The WP7 user interface design is both bold and compelling. Inclusion of Push notification, MS Office (2010) compatibility makes this a must have for those who both work and play hard in the 21st Century. It makes the Iphone UI loke retro and not in a good way. The game is not over for MS in this by a long way…
MIchal Says:
July 15th, 2010 at 8:45 am
Jon – what is your take on the Iphone 4 signal strength issue? You have just a little experience in RF testing if I remember!