[nickelplate]

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]

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.

[makeramen]

I disagree completely.

With the always-connected social features they want on the phone, there is really no alternative plan pricing.

Their failure was in capturing market, or more precisely, the lack thereof. There was simply no market for a half-smartphone like the kin, that wasn't really good at being a simple "dumbphone", and not even as "smart" as a last generation iphone which costs about the same.

With the iPhone 3GS going for $99, and a handy selection of decent featurephones available for free depending on carrier sales, anyone with half a brain would know there is no market for something like the kin. At least not now of all times.

[zmmmmm]

> With the always-connected social features they want on the phone, there is really no alternative plan pricing.

Always-connected doesn't necessarily mean huge amounts of bandwidth. They could have built this thing as a social media device that was doing simple messaging and heavily restricted / optimized features for photo & video. I think there would be a space in the market for such a thing for teens, but MS clearly badly missed it. And if they have pissed off their carrier partners in the process then it is even worse because they desperately need their support if WP7 is going to be a success.

[stcredzero]

Yes. This should've been marketed as something that kids could buy when their parents refused to buy them an iPhone. Either the device would have to be free or the connectivity. A lot of social features could've been implemented on top of SMS or something else dirt cheap using UDP packets. Make something that can talk to a free featurephone over Bluetooth, so you don't compete with something free. Instead you make something free even better.

[illumin8]

And the MS management should have known this had failure written all over it. Most of the people I know in the office have teenage kids that want an iPhone more than anything in the world, and their parents are not going to buy it for them. Why would any sane business plan include "we're going to market this to teenagers who'll have to beg their parents for the money to buy it"?

[paul9290]

What teenage is going to be able to pay $70 a month? Their parents who are living off unemployment? If there are teenagers and parents fitting such bills they are doing so via a reburfished iphone for $50 and then paying the $70. Though AT&T for 200MB and 450minutes now costs $55 a month.

They launched this too early; wait til voice/data prices drop even further to reach this demo. Though to me it's still not an iPhone or an Android and all the cool kids will have one of those.

[contextfree]

Hard to know if this is the carrier's fault, or Microsoft's for making a phone that consumes enough bandwidth etc. that carriers need to charge high rates to recoup their costs, without providing enough value to the end customer to justify the rates from his/her perspective.

[stcredzero]

If Microsoft made something that just did messaging and social tools based on messaging until it hit a WiFi spot, they could've gotten their intended market. Make something that can dial your phone over Bluetooth or dial it Google Voice style by sending a recognition code based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography to a central server. Charge the carrier cost for the SMS messaging used as infrastructure and make money on ads.

[evansolomon]

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?