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?
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.
> 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.
I talked to someone who was at Motorola when the Kin was out for hardware bid. They repeatedly asked what the strategy was, why was a separate O/S needed, and eventually turned it down.
I believe Panasonic eventually got the bid, but pretty much stole Motorola's design according to my friend.
I've worked on a few projects that seemed extremely stupid at the developer level, but were financially successful (despite being stupid).
Microsoft has a lot of weight so maybe they thought they would have some leverage for a certain demographic. Though they would have had to sell a _lot_ of Kin's to break even on their investment (if rumors around Redmond are true).
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.
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.
I think it's pretty obvious that Kin is ignorant of the current landscape but Windows Phone 7 is at least cognizant of it. The chances for success are still slim, but they're at least a little better.
You know what I'd rather have than a Win Phone 7? Something I'd pay money for. A decent mobile office app for my Android. That's the kind of thing MS should be focusing on now. They've missed the boat with the platform, time to pivot and start building the applications.
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.
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.
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?