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.
"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.