Windows Phone 7 Issues Could Mirror Kin's

It's time for the Kin autopsy.Days after Microsoft discontinued its social-networking phone, much of the blogosphere is alight with competing theories over what killed the project, and what its demise means for the company's overall fortunes in the mobile space. Is Kin's death evidence of larger dysfunction within Microsoft? How exactly does someone blow the equivalent of a medium-size country's defense budget on a device that sold so poorly? And how many units did Kin sell, anyway?Over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber is claiming a "well-placed little birdie" told him that Microsoft sold 503 Kin phones before the plug was unceremoniously pulled. As pointed out on sites like Pocketnow.com, though, there are 8,810 "monthly active users" of the Kin Facebook application, for which you need either the Kin One or Kin Two. However--as yet someone else helpfully suggested--at least a portion of those users could be Microsoft employees, meaning the number of actual devices sold at retail and subsequently present in the wild could be far, far less.Imagine spending $150 million to make a summer blockbuster, and you sell only $200.50 in tickets. You can understand why a number of Microsoft employees, at least according to Mini-Microsoft, are reportedly walking around this week feeling embarrassed. In any case, Kin is dead--but nonetheless continues to overshadow Windows Phone 7, scheduled to debut near the end of this year.Personally, I think Windows Phone 7 faces a challenge (or a problem, if you want to frame it more negatively) similar to the one that killed the Kin phones. Kin died because it was overpriced, and lacking in a number of features that appealed to its target demographic; limited in its abilities, it was marooned and left to shrivel in a harsh environment--one where, for roughly the same price as Verizon's prohibitive monthly plan, you could get an actual smartphone on which you could run actual third-party applications.With Windows Phone 7, Microsoft seems very determined to push the smartphone operating system's platform alongside other company products. Its "Office" hub, perhaps understandably, revolves around programs such as SharePoint; the "Games" hub will center on Xbox; "Music" is all about Zune. That's all to the good, but Microsoft could be trying to ram through a vision of Windows Phone 7 so tied to other company products that it neglects to focus on other vital areas--namely, creating a robust ecosystem of third-party apps.Sure, enterprise users will appreciate being able to open documents on their new device (if their administrator doesn't stick them with using Windows Mobile 6.5), and an Xbox-enabled smartphone could be a potential competitor to other handheld gaming systems--but as both the iPhone and Google Android devices are demonstrating, apps are perhaps the single most crucial selling point when it comes to smartphones.But Microsoft doesn't seem to be generating a lot of momentum from the developer community for Windows Phone 7 apps. They've been pushing business-centric developers to create programs, and rumors suggest they've approached gaming developers about porting the more popular iPhone games onto the platform--but I haven't been hearing a lot of chatter from the developers themselves about building Windows Phone 7 products. And with four or five months until the smartphones launch, that presents a potentially substantial problem.Lack of applications for Windows Mobile 6.5 was a major symptom of that operating system's problems. Kin died at least partially because it stuck to a limited amount of features, and offered no path for a third-party developer with a particularly cool idea to port their product onto the device. In the spirit of avoiding those previous systems' fates, I feel that Microsoft needs to focus less on "Let's see how many of our products we can possibly squeeze onto this smartphone," and more on, "How can we build the versatile, robust mobile ecosystem that we need?"



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