Originally discussed here. My oh my, what a black eye.
For starters:
-There's a rumor floating around that only 500 were sold. As much as I would have laughs at a phone with that kind of marketing only selling 500 units, that seems a bit low. Maybe in one market they only sold 500, maybe they only sold 500 in the first week, but more jitterbugs have been sold than that. Just in 'walk in, my contract is up, I need a new phone' traffic, Verizon should have been able to sell more than 500.
-By way of Gizmodo, a whole lot of rumors of internal strife:
In May 2009, [Windows Phone engineering head Terry] Myerson, decided to kill [Kin] because it was competing with his own baby, WP7. Since WP7 was not ready (still today is by far ready!) the exec told him KIN would continue. As retaliation, he killed the support of his team to KIN project. Guess what? KIN team had to take over a lot of base code postponing all the value added apps+services. Now you get why there is lack of apps on KIN. Who will win in medium/long term? Mr Myerson obviously, that's why I decide to leave.
The previous poster conveniently neglects the fact that Kin's original plans were unrealistic - they were going to release a WP7 based device before WP7 was complete. It ignores the fact that the core WP7 team needed to focus on shipping a WP7 phone and that supporting a different additional hardware platform runs counter to that...
Had KIN management had any accountability, they would have built on top of the WP7 platform instead of grabbing several hundred people to do a one-off and then whining about the lack of support for an off platform device...
Of course, the fact that for the 1st two years the Kin plan was NOT to provide a competing application platform seems to have gone unnoticed in your little post.
The beauty of Kin is indeed the online services, which should translate well to WP7 when the time comes. Everything else is a flaming turd. This is one of those cases where MCB should have gotten all of its wood behind one arrow. Instead, management spent millions on Danger and defocused the core teams on sideshow oddities such as Kin….
This actually isn't that uncommon in big companies and working for a pretty large organization myself, I can kind of see how that would happen. After all, I don't think any single person would look at both the KIN and Super Duper Windows Phone 7 or whatever the hell it's called as being things that should coexist in the same space considering the we build it/they come approach of the competition.
-Bad marketing. I consider myself relatively engaged in tech. As I had said earlier, despite plenty of exposure to the product, I had no idea who it was geared for. That's really not a good thing.
If you want some laughs over the whole thing, click here. It's a memorial site to the KIN. For more laughs, the now prophetic words of Walt Mosspuppet - The Only Technology Journalist In the World.