Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by blumkvist 3888 days ago
Loyalty cannot be bought.

Or at least this is not how you buy it.

1 comments

I'm being absolutely serious.

Send me a 950 + Band 2, I will make it my primary phone and gadget, I will use the almighty shit out of it and publicly post about it frequently, the good and maybe a tiny bit of the bad if it's a true game stopper and needs to be fixed to further Windows Mobile adoption.

You buy loyalty by telling someone like me "We think our new phone is better than your Nexus 5 (which is considered the best Android phone ever produced), and we will prove it by showing you how well polished Windows 10 Mobile is (compared to Android 6) and that we brought our A game to hardware production by giving you a Lumia 950. This is how much we stand behind our product and our hard work." You buy loyalty by having the balls to step up and try to adopt the vocal users.

Now, otoh, if Apple approached me with a free iPhone 6S + a basic iWatch? I'd decline their offer. They have not impressed me with their new phone, watch, or iOS revision. I see no reason to switch, and since they have not shown any reason to switch I shall show them no loyalty in return.

Microsoft, otoh, has actually impressed me with what they've done, and they may be worth showing loyalty to. I just want them to prove it.

This is the problem for me. Why would I want to abandon Android when I have never had the ability to use their product as a daily driver? There is a massive difference between playing with a phone for 5-10 minutes and using it daily for weeks. I think the 950 looks amazing, but not enough so to ditch everything I enjoy about Android and fork over a massive amount of money.
Its pretty much this for me as well. Microsoft wants me, and everyone who I influence, as a customer? Selling me on their devices by giving me my first hit for free is a good way of doing that.
Whatever positive you will have to say about devices will be tainted by the fact that you got them for free.
Not if the agreement upfront is "I can say what I want, when I want, on any schedule I choose, on any medium or mediums I choose, to whoever I want. The good, the bad, and the ugly."

I have nothing on the line here, I don't do product reviews for a living and if Microsoft never sends me another thing ever again because they didn't like what I had to say about their products, then they have more to lose than me (mainly because their product has flaws and they'd be essentially stating the flaws aren't worth fixing, which is 100% of the problem Apple dug itself into a hole with over the past 2 years).