KIN is DEAD!

News · 30 Jun 2010 · MTW Editorial Team

Can’t say I didn’t call it…but it is now official: Microsoft’s KIN project is now officially dead. The KIN team will now be integrated into the Windows Phone 7 team. Just yesterday I posted that I found it strange that nothing was ever announced about the EU launch date…I wonder if the rumored update will ever see the light of the day now. On a brighter note; it will be interesting to see how KIN Studio will be integrated into Windows Phone 7.:

“We have made the decision to focus exclusively on Windows Phone 7 and we will not ship KIN in Europe this fall as planned. Additionally, we are integrating our KIN team with the Windows Phone 7 team, incorporating valuable ideas and technologies from KIN into future Windows Phone releases. We will continue to work with Verizon in the U.S. to sell current KIN phones.”

Is anybody sad? Personally I always thought that this project didn’t make any sense at all. I already posted about this on launch day in a post titled: KIN Review round-up: Microsoft should have canceled the project ?The KIN aka Project Pink was bound to be a failure from day one especially after all the delays and the reboot of Windows Mobile 7  -> Windows Phone 7 (Project Pink should have been killed when Windows Phone 7 started back in Q4 2008). There was no way this was going to work even if Verizon’s prices were lower. The handsets didn’t have any third-party applications, no Marketplace, no calendar (wtf?) etc…the only good thing that came out of this was the KIN Studio and this wasn’t worth the $500M+ cost of this messy project. Microsoft President of the Windows and Windows Live divisoin, Steven Sinofsky is now rumored to be heavily involved in the company’s mobile strategy and this is probably one of the best news coming out of Redmond this month. Microsoft problem has always been the tlack of integration between all of its services and products but things are finally changing and this will obviously take some time before the dust settles down. Windows Phone 7 is the first step in this directions (it’s the first MS product to integrate all of the company’s IPs into one seamless user experience : XBOX, Windows Phone, Office, SharePoint, Zune, Silverlight, windows Live etc..) and with the recently leaked Windows 8 info pointing at a more user friendly and cloud based OS (with and application market place etc) things are finally shaping up into a great story that Microsoft can finally ride with.

Source: CNET