RIP Microsoft Kin

http://mashable.com/2010/06/30/rip-microsoft-kin/

by rbanffy • 16 years ago

46 75 16 years ago

rbanffy11• 16 years ago

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?

johns2• 16 years ago

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.

rbanffy11• 16 years ago

The problem is that the shot and its planning sure inflated the loss of the whole mess.

You work for a company. There is no reason to keep your project, or your division, running longer than its useful life.

duncanj2• 16 years ago

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.

davepeck2• 16 years ago

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.

rbanffy11• 16 years ago

> 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.

gruseom• 16 years ago

It sounds like you've observed some of what's going on at MS more closely than most of us here. Care to elaborate?

TomOfTTB• 16 years ago

What's funny (sad) is whoever maintains the official Kin twitter account was unaware as of an hour before the news broke: http://www.twitter.com/kin/status/17438337303

I bet thats going to be one interesting event in San Antonio tomorrow

avar• 16 years ago

I'm sure somebody made a wonderful PowerPoint presentation for it.

Zak• 16 years ago

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.

contextfree4• 16 years ago

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.

marknutter2• 16 years ago

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.

rbanffy11• 16 years ago

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...

marknutter2• 16 years ago

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.

jf2• 16 years ago

Speaking for myself, I try to do the best I can with the resources I've been given.

kmfrk2• 16 years ago

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.

elblanco2• 16 years ago

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?

naner• 16 years ago

I know. What's next, enterprise microblogging in Office?

zing

whyenot• 16 years ago

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.

contextfree4• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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

kmfrk2• 16 years ago

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.

callmeed• 16 years ago

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

narrator• 16 years ago

You can put it right next to your Apple Pippin.

nickelplate2• 16 years ago

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

famfam• 16 years ago

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

hga4• 16 years ago

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.

evansolomon2• 16 years ago

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.

nickelplate2• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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.

evansolomon2• 16 years ago

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?

makeramen2• 16 years ago

It's all about how you do it.

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.

mikedouglas• 16 years ago

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.

stcredzero3• 16 years ago

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.

SandB0x• 16 years ago

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.

rbanffy11• 16 years ago

I think the Kin proves beyond any doubt that Microsoft can fail on its own without any external help.

rbanffy11• 16 years ago

I think this is the difference between failing silently like everyone does from time to time and going-down-in-flames failing.

The Kin's short history is a long series of WTF moments from the market without any echo from Microsoft.

jsz0• 16 years ago

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.

contextfree4• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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.

andrewcaito• 16 years ago

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.

hga4• 16 years ago

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.

jf2• 16 years ago

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.

sabj• 16 years ago

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.

rbranson• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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.

spoiledtechie• 16 years ago

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.

aspiringsensei• 16 years ago

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.

thought_alarm• 16 years ago

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.

samratjp• 16 years ago

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.

treblig• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

". 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.

gamble• 16 years ago

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.

pasbesoin• 16 years ago

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.

RIP Microsoft Kin

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