Kin was never going to be successful, it was a bad idea from the start. I fail to understand how that got the green light when they cancelled Courier, which looked fantastic.

God, because it would be so bad for Microsoft, and indeed the entire technology industry ecosystem if they canned him.

*crosses fingers*

Since it’s a teenager-focused device, not capable of games and not a true smart phone, the day the data plan requirement was announced pretty much every tech blog declared the Kin dead on arrival. Which was evidently correct.

For years, Robert X Crigley has been saying that MS intentionally looses money at times to manage it’s revenue performance vis a vis analyst projections. It could be that this is an example of this technique (better than whatever Dell was doing that got itself fined), or this could be a very real loss that was set up by a culture that had for years been launching projects that were designed to be loosers.

Even if you don’t want to flash a different ROM onto the phone, you can still install pretty much any software you feel like installing on the stock ROM, from any source. Even on AT&T, which is pretty shocking, considering how they treat their Android devices.

Of course, the “install any software you want” part won’t apply to Windows Phone 7. I’m not sure what they’re thinking there. “Yeah, let’s get rid of our only competitive advantage! Great idea!”

*shrug*

When a company is gets big enough, the management structure takes on a life of its own, and becomes populated by weasels whose aim is to accumulate power at any cost. They have huge egos, but they don’t have the vision of the people who built the company. They don’t know how to run a business- they just know whose *ss to kiss, and they will destroy whatever is necessary to prevent a rival or an enemy from looking good.

It is clear that something odd was happening, since they killed it entirely too quickly to really see if it was going to succeed. Almost a billion dollars and untold human resources should not be flushed after a 48 day test period. There’s no way you can see if sales are sufficient in that span of time.