They spent $1.2 billion on Palm, only to kill the whole project after it had been on the market in 48 days?! I had no doubt that HP would bungle that acquisition, but I didn't think they'd do it so spectacularly.
Kin brought some decent tech to the scene but was heavily hampered by Verizon requiring a full cost data plan for a phone that was aimed at teens. Also was an abject failure of the Danger acquisition by Microsoft, so lets see how Google/Motorola does.
Danger was a bit of a different scenario; the Sidekicks[1] and Kin were actually made by Sharp and Motorola, and Microsoft dumped Danger's OS for a WinCE derivative (not to mention the rumblings of being kneecapped by the WP7 team and such). Motorola does their own hardware, they already use Android exclusively, already had a working relationship with Google (Droid, Xoom), and Google doesn't seem intent on totally absorbing Moto like MS did Danger.
[1] Or Hiptops, depending on if you're in Magenta territory or not
I don't see how having WinCE as the OS hurt Kin's chances in the market after it shipped? I am with you on the kneecapping from the WP team though.
>Motorola does their own hardware, they already use Android exclusively, already had a working relationship with Google (Droid, Xoom), and Google doesn't seem intent on totally absorbing Moto like MS did Danger.
That's a really hard tightrope walk for Google. The last one to try this model of both making hardware and licensing the OS was Apple during the nineties and we all know how that ended.
They need to make money from Motorola (currently it's at breakeven) to justify the purchase price for shareholders, but without pissing off the other OEMs like Samsung/HTC. I am not saying it can't be done, but it's very very hard.
> I don't see how having WinCE as the OS hurt Kin's chances in the market after it shipped?
They already had an OS they were developing on, and insider reports were that scrapping it and rebuilding on top of WinCE just to satisfy the Windows everywhere mandate cost them a year of development.
WinCE might not have hurt it after it shipped, but shipping in a much different market than the one they would have hit a year earlier certainly did.
Switching to a winCE based OS delayed the release by at least a year, which definitely hurt their chances in the market. Not to mention that it probably made whatever internal pressures from phone 7 much worse as well, since the phone 7 project was not nearly as far along when kin might have originally shipped. Huge, classic Microsoft mistake to rewrite the OS based on windows tech.
Yeah, seems like ego got in the way of doing what's best for the product. Microsoft just couldn't live with themselves if they ever shipped a product that wasn't entirely "Invented Here."
VZW originally planned to provide more attractive data plans and provide full marketing support, but Microsoft was so late getting the Kin to market that VZW essentially threw their hands in the air and dropped those plans.
