The Return of the Microsoft Kin 92
symbolset writes "In a surprising turn of events, Engadget is reporting that the Microsoft Kin One and Kin Two will have an encore in the market. Some years ago Microsoft purchased Danger, Inc, services provider for the legendary Sidekick line of phones, and set upon refreshing them for a new generation in 'Project Pink.' Several project restarts and one data loss incident later, the project had lost favor internally and relations with the launch carrier Verizon had gone sour. The product was launched anyway to dismal sales and yanked from the market in under two months. According to the article, the costly data plan was thought to be to blame for the poor sales, so cellular data services and features that require them have been removed."
Re:Plan B after WinPhone 7 bombed? (Score:3, Informative)
Not good [computerworld.com]
Read your link. It's mostly anecdotes about how hard it is to buy one of these phones because of how quickly they sold out despite ugly store displays without working examples.
Re:Let's hope they learned (Score:5, Informative)
IIRC Microsoft hired dweebs to update the databases who decided to save time and money by not doing backups first. Then middle management panicked and brought the databases back on-line despite the fact most were now empty. All of the permanent damage was done by the panic of middle management. By the time they found the scheduled backups and did a restore there was a dual-master database synch problem. The unique (row?) ids used for identifying records were now duplicated. Chaos ensued.
The first anniversary of purchase having passed there were almost no senior engineers left onboard. The senior engineers gave Roz Ho a chance and worked to their first year retention, but Kin development management was so screwed that they bailed despite their massive second year retention bonuses. You should have heard the disbelief around the campus when all these senior people bailed without lining up new jobs first. It was that bad. MSFT has only the most token version control, no modularity, absolutely clueless about basic design issues (unlike mp3 players, phone sounds need to overlay each other, etc.) , constantly thrashing from one half-functional never to be delivered Windows OS to another. Zune, Kin don't use actual MSFT OSes, they use heavily munged old forks, which you would think would be a sign to MSFT that everything about their phone OSes sux. but no.
Rozzie thought she could just dump Danger's in-progress new sidekick contract with T-mobile and put all the engineers on Kin, but of course that didn't work. Complete screw up, no due diligence, I'm sure everyone involved got promoted, that's how the world works.
anonymous for good reason
US data plans cost too much for this to work (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Really?? (Score:3, Informative)
You do know that WinMobile 6.5, which the Kin is based on, was one of the most open phone OS until Android appeared?