Microsoft Kin Discontinued After 48 Days

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Was it just me or did anyone else wonder wtf was up with Microcrap putting this device on the market? At fist I thought it was another crap phone design for seniors or the mentally impaired....similar to the cell phone for seniors called "Jitterbug".

48 days though...wow Microcrap, you gave Windows ME and Vista longer times to fail than this cell phone.

SAN FRANCISCO — That didn’t take long.

Just 48 days after Microsoft began selling the Kin, a smartphone for the younger set, the company discontinued it because of disappointing sales.

The swift turnabout for the Kin, which Microsoft took two years to develop and whose release was backed with a hefty ad budget, is the latest sign of disarray for Microsoft’s recently reorganized consumer product unit.

“It’s an absolute failure,” said Charles S. Golvin, an analyst with Forrester Research. Mr. Golvin said he was surprised to see Microsoft kill a product so quickly, given the company’s history of sticking with new products and improving them over time.

Perhaps the 2 years that had been wasted in making this joke of a cell phone should have been spent making the MS O.S.'s they make have less flaws and work without having security threat fixes to download on a monthly basis.

Does anyone know anyone that actually purchased one of these?

[Xog]

But you can take a picture and tweet it on your facebook instantly! .. or some shit?


LOL. i'd change the channel whenever I saw a commercial for these POS

[project dragon]

Engadget gives a nice story on what exactly went terribly wrong:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/02/l...npage_engadget

It sounds like the Kin's that we were presented with were not the Kin's that we were supposed to get. It sounds like a change of project managers (the new manager didn't care much for the Kin, as his baby was Windows phone 7, so all the resources went there), along with a contract made with Verizon prior to the change in power forced Microsoft to release a completely redesigned and shitty Kin.
I am pretty sure they were supposed to be geared towards teens who don't really need a phone so much as they need a device to text and manage their social networks, and the data plans that were supposed to go along with the Kin were supposed to be extremely cheap and affordable, but all of the benefits fell through and we ended up with a product that nobody, even microsoft, wanted.

[saetep]

So then why did Microsoft advertise it so heavily if everyone knew it would be a failure? Were the commercial deals contracted before all of the changes happened?

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So then why did Microsoft advertise it so heavily if everyone knew it would be a failure? Were the commercial deals contracted before all of the changes happened?

Makes you wonder, as the TV ad's had been non stop for about a month or two. Everytime I saw the commercial I just pondered to myself...WTF?



But on the bright side, at least Windows 8 is in the works and getting ready to replace Windows 7.

coming to a store near you!

[Creature]

Take those engadget articles with a grain of salt....they aren't always completely true. However, Engadget definitely does tell a mostly accurate story other then painting Andy Lees in this "no-nonsense numbers" driven guy, which, in my opinion does not describe him at all. He is quite the visionary and J Allard definitely had significant input (and still does, as an advisor to Ballmer) on the user experience of both Kin and WP7. Simply put, the Windows Phone 7 timeline and Kin timeline were never supposed to be that close together.

The Kin team is being collapsed into the greater WP7 team is probably better as a whole for us. The lessons learned from Kin will undoubtably be very useful when WP7 is released around Xmas time this Winter. Plus, since the fiscal year just finished its a good time for MSFT to reorganize. I think it's way more important to MSFT's mobile strategy to focus 100% of their effort on WP7....honestly the Kin was a side project of some sort and pales in comparsion to how WP7. I can understand MSFT's reasons for killing the Kin, why tarnish your brand for a clearly inferior product when you have the latest and greatest revolutionary phone OS coming out 4 months later?

Interally, the phone definitely did not take 2 years to develop as much of the basis of the underlying software was taking from MSFT's acquisition of Danger. Microsoft purchased Danger mostly for intellectual property reasons though, but part of the contract with Verizon forced them to actually release a product.

I know a few people with the Kin here in Microsoft and to be honest the phone isn't that bad. The software and cloud uploading and UI is defintiely different from the piece of shit Windows Mobile 6/6.1/6.5 is currently.