On the Kin
The Microsoft Kin set what has to be a new record for the shortest lifetime ever of a Microsoft platform at just 48 days, leaving pundits with barely substance to create jokes about its existence. It will hopefully go down in history as the nadir of Microsoft’s lost years, emblematic of a time when the company was too busy shuffling around its internal resources to release an actual product that just happened to be decent. After seeing the stillborn release of the Kin, it’s a wonder Microsoft pulled itself together enough to get Windows 7 out the door without destroying itself with reshuffling management and product leads and product foci. At this point one must chalk that up to a fluke.
This failure is the culmination of a long stream of failures for Microsoft in the mobile market, beginning with the first so-called “smartphones”: products that nobody actually liked, but which didn’t have any better alternatives. Microsoft mistook the acquiescence of the users of these phones for real approval and proceeded to not do anything with their position beyond releasing slightly slower and slightly more stable versions of their operating systems, under the horrendous belief that a “Start” button was a good idea on a 320×240 screen.
And then Apple showed up and ate their lunch.
Microsoft proceeded to do what Microsoft does, acquire innovation instead of developing it, and bought Danger, the creators of the Sidekick platform, which was innovative for its time. It had an app store, worked pretty well at a fairly limited set of functions, was focused on the consumer market and stayed out of the RIM dominated business market.
Microsoft then sat on this purchase while they worked on their so-called project Pink. They also worked on Windows Mobile 6.5, and had another team working on Windows 7. Because inside Microsoft focusing all your effort on one product isn’t good enough. You need at least 3 mobile platforms competing for resources.
Fast-forward a year or two and Microsoft, already hopelessly behind Apple, has supposedly completely scrapped the mature consumer focused platform that Danger had created and grafted Windows into the whole mess, creating a horrific chimera of a platform. They were unable to learn their lessons from the previous decade of stalled smartphone development and hoped that somehow this time would be different.
While they were busy doing this, all the talent the acquired from the purchase of Danger left and then they lost everyone’s data during a botched SAN upgrade. Wow.
Microsoft then announced the release of the Kin, a phone that was obviously rushed out the door just to get something out to market, billed as a product for teens and young adults, with glossy Microsoft-style marketing, utterly without merit, and confused about what teens and young adults really want in a device (hint: they want an iPhone).
So this product gets released into the market and it’s great except for two things: 1) The hardware is immature and 2) The software is immature. Neither are a best effort, they’re both just kind of there. And everyone in the industry wonders what the fuck Microsoft was doing all those years, other than shoving project managers around and losing everyone’s data.
So this phone gets released and it costs as much as an iPhone, and it’s plans cost as much as an iPhone, but unfortunately it’s not an iPhone and once Microsoft and the market actually figure this out, they just kind of forget about the “Kin” as a platform in it’s entirety, despite beginning to brand other products with the “Kin” moniker, such as the “Kinect”, nee “Project Natal” . This is Microsoft marketing at its best.
Now, 48 days after launch, and coinciding with the end of the current fiscal quarter, Microsoft is taking a Mulligan on the Kin, a product that was obviously doomed from the beginning. They’re pulling the Kin team together to work on the promising Windows Phone 7, a product that has apparently not yet been ruined by internal politics. With 6 months or so until the initial launch, Microsoft has plenty of time to befowl it by playing musical chairs with managers. By the end of this whole debacle, the current product lead on Microsoft Sharepoint could be heading development of their mobile platform.
Meanwhile, Microsoft’s goal isn’t even to get to where Apple and Android were two years ago. The current product manager is looking at this as a 5 year long project. Which must surely fill their carrier partners with confidence.
Predictions for how this whole mess plays out: Windows 7 doesn’t hit its 4th quarter ship date, we’re looking at mid 2011 while the remnants of the Kin project get up to speed on the codebase. Microsoft once again misses the usability mark as more and more Windows project managers have their say even though Windows UI elements have been a demonstrably bad idea in Smartphones for over a decade now. Microsoft settles for lowest common denominator hardware as they always have, in order to keep the pricepoint low enough that the whole mess will still push a few units after Microsoft gets their licensing fee. And finally, when the whole thing proves to be a failure, and they shuffle through a few more project leads, they blame the whole thing on the consumer just not understanding their concept when they came in two years late, after the whole world passed them by.