Analysis: Microsoft Unveils 'Social' Kin Phones - PCWorld
When Microsoft talks, people listen. Microsoft's overwhelming dominance in the desktop computing market ensures that its every move will be closely watched, widely discussed, and broadly accepted. Even if a Microsoft product is inferior to competing offerings, many people will buy it simply because "everyone uses Microsoft" and thus one may expect the herd to follow wherever Microsoft goes. Nowhere has this been more true than in the smartphone market, where Microsoft's traditionally lame and bumbling attempts to cram a bloated Windows operating system into handheld devices have resulted in a market awash with poorly-conceived, frustrating-to-use Windows Mobile "smartphones."
Meanwhile, real innovators like Apple with its iPhone, Google with its Android operating system, and Palm with its WebOS have continued to refine and redefine the smartphone mobile computing experience. Palm designed its WebOS from the ground-up to hook into Web-based or cloud services such as Facebook and Google's Gmail. Such an approach makes a lot of sense given the strengths and limitations of a smartphone device. A smartphone's small size means you can always carry it with you. Plugging it into your online contacts and data is both useful and convenient. However the small device also constrains your ability to enter text information and limits the amount of on-device memory storage. Online services allow you to overcome those limitations. For example you can snap photos with your smartphone and upload them to an online host. Perhaps most significantly, if your Web-connected smartphone is lost, stolen or destroyed, you can restore all your data to a new smartphone just by entering in your username and password.
Microsoft is mainly a desktop software company and has long resisted the move toward competing Web-based or cloud computing technologies. But even giant Microsoft with its enormous market power cannot strangle progress forever. The writing is on the wall. The introduction of the new cloud-connected Microsoft Kin phones is a significant acknowledgment that a new chapter in computing history has begun. Microsoft is now embracing the cloud in a big way. The era of ubiquitous computing has officially arrived. The Cloud is now mainstream, and the ramifications will be far-reaching. The cloud-connected smartphone has emerged as the dominant computing platform.
Whether or not the Kin phones are superior or inferior to the iPhone or any other smartphone is irrelevant. Microsoft has consistently proven that it doesn't need to be the best. Heck, Microsoft has already sold millions of Windows Mobile phones that aren't even very good. As long as the Microsoft product works at all, it is guaranteed to see widespread adoption.
The Kin phones have a stripped-down, bare bones operating system. Many analysts seem to be disparaging this strategy, but to me it demonstrates that Microsoft has finally learned its lesson that feature bloat and poor user interface detract from the smartphone experience. It's far wiser to add new features as you go and design around the newest technology. Trying to maintain and upgrade a broad and obsolete portfolio of features has been the perennial mistake of the Windows Mobile team. That mistake has now been rectified. Microsoft now has the ability to respond to market changes instead of trying to dictate market conditions.
Microsoft has upped the ante and it will be interesting to see how the other market players respond.
For updated information on the Microsoft Kin smartphones, check this PC World link.
