Microsoft Kin

» see kin.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

microsoft acquired danger inc. in 2008 for around five hundred million dollars. danger had built the t-mobile sidekick, the side-scrolling, full-keyboard cult phone with its own cloud sync. the plan was that danger's people would build a new microsoft phone for teenagers under the codename project pink.

then the windows phone team won the internal fight. project pink was forced to rebuild on windows ce instead of the os danger had been working on. the original team mostly left. by the time the kin one and kin two finally shipped on may 14, 2010, the launch was a year and a half later than planned, the rest of the world had iphones, and the kin still did not have an app store, a calendar, or instant messenger support.

verizon priced them on smartphone data plans, but they were not smartphones. they were closer to facebook-feed phones with a really good camera. teenagers, the supposed market, did not buy them. on june 30, 2010, after 48 days on shelves, microsoft pulled the plug. verizon sent unsold inventory back. the kin.com cloud service that synced contacts and feeds shut down in january 2011.

i was 26 in 2010. the kin was a verizon-only product in the united states and never reached turkey. i read about it from a distance, in tech press, the same week everyone else discovered it had ended. it lives on as the favorite microsoft hardware story to tell new engineers at the bar.

~ the record ~

~ killed by ~

internal microsoft politics. the windows phone team did not want a competing in-house phone os. the kin team got forced onto windows ce and lost a year and a half rebuilding the platform. by the time the device shipped, it was already obsolete next to the iphone 3gs and the first android phones.

~ what went right ~

the industrial design was actually loved. the kin one's pebble shape and the kin two's wedge are still cited by phone hardware nerds as nice objects. the cameras were better than most contemporary smartphones. the kin studio cloud, mirroring everything you posted to a web view, was ahead of its time.

~ what went wrong ~

everything else. the operating system was wrong, and the store did not exist. for thirty dollars a month, the same as an iphone 3gs data plan, you got a feature phone with no apps. teenagers had iphones from their parents by then. the kin had nothing to offer them.

~ the lineage ~

the kin is a footnote in a longer microsoft story. microsoft bought danger for the sidekick team, broke that team up over project pink, killed kin in 48 days, then bought nokia's phone business for 7.2 billion dollars in 2014 and wrote that down to zero in 2016. windows phone itself was effectively dead by 2017. the entire mobile arc from sidekick acquisition to windows phone shutdown is a single ten-year story of paying for talent and not letting them build anything.

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